them while they re working in these incredibly dangerous jobs chris. pssi have said they were fully cooperative with the labor department and not been investigated or questioned by the feds. i know they re cleaning, but there s a lot of incredibly dangerous equipment in slaughter houses. that s number one, and obvious, and then what s happening are these kids simply don t exist as far as anyone knows. or do they work all night or go to school during the day. they re going to school, chris. in fact, as far back as 2016, school officials were telling labor department investigators it was common knowledge inside a nebraska middle school that the kids falling asleep in class were cleaning the slaughter house overnight. labor investigators say it took them a long time. they needed cooperation to get inside and do this raid that they did when they finally found children last fall. just to paint a picture of what this is like, the labor investigators said it was so loud in there because o
it was not just an isolated incident. we learned last fall that the labor department found nearly two dozen children working at a slaughter house in nebraska, cleaning up blood and animal parts in the middle of the night. some children as young as 13, the labor department expanded that investigation into the company pssi, and found that this occurred for 102 children, and 13 sites across eight states. now we re learning that dhs and investigators from the fbi are involved. they are looking into how these children got there in the first place. they re migrant children. most of them from central america. they re looking at whether or not they got to not just pssi, but companies across the country. meat packing countries. they say these children could have ended up nationwide working in slaughter houses in the dead of night just like this, and they want to know how they got there. they think it might be part of the scheme where smugglers get false i.d.s for kids and exploit
homeland security correspondent, julia ainsley, julia, what more have you learned? well, we ve learned that now the labor department and hhs, health and human services, which oversees the unaccompanied children who cross the border will be working together now. that s in large part because most of the children we re talking about are unaccompanied children, migrants who crossed the border and are going to places where they re not properly taken care of or finding their ways through some circumstances boo these slaughter houses in the case we reported and new york times reported in hundreds of companies across the country where they re doing jobs they re not supposed to be doing under child labor laws, often times to repay a debt to smugglers that brought them here, and now we re going to see a larger crackdown. in addition to the inter-agency effort where they re going to really sharpen their claws looking into these investigations, they re calling on congress to increase the fine
shut down one slaughter house, they re not just getting hired somewhere else down the road and continuing to be exploited. yeah, seems like we re just scratching the surface at this problem, julia, and i m curious, like, how young are these kids? how do they track them? do we know how many there are out there being used in the middle of the night, and what kinds of jobs are they doing beyond working in a slaughter house? well, in our case, the company we featured, they found children between the ages of 13 to 17, people we met, who met those children said there s no way that a 13-year-old could look like an 18-year-old or the 30-year-old that they presented on their identification. but of course in the block buster new reporting from hannah dryer at new york times over the weekend, she talked to 100 children, more than that across the country, working in jobs like these. she found them suing label into