In Part Two of its investigative series on human trafficking across the southern border, Project Veritas exposes how teenage illegal migrants are forced to quit school and go to work in order to pay off their debts to the cartels. One of the migrants described how he had to pay a trafficker for a Social Security number so he could work in the United States.
The IRS during the Obama years allowed illegal aliens to engage in Social Security fraud so they could pay their taxes.
“It’s in everybody’s interest to have them [illegal immigrants] pay the taxes they owe,” said then-IRS Director John Koskinen during a Senate Finance Committee hearing in April of 2016.
In a shocking investigative report in October of 2015, Indiana’s WTHR Eyewitness News revealed that the Obama IRS actually encouraged illegal aliens to file taxes with mismatched Social Security numbers that didn’t legally belong to them.
The IRS website instructs tax preparers that undocumented workers can and should include on their tax returns any income they’ve earned using a Social Security number — even though the IRS admits non-resident aliens are not legally eligible to receive a Social Security number in the first place!
The five-month investigation found that while the IRS “claims to be taking identity theft seriously, the reality–in many cases–is very different”:
• The IRS accepts millions of tax returns–and issues tax refunds–even when taxpayer documents show clear warning signs of identity theft
• Confidential IRS policies instruct IRS employees not to tell taxpayers when someone else uses their Social Security number to earn income
• The IRS allows illegal immigrants to “borrow” Social Security numbers that do not legally belong to them
• The IRS is discontinuing a program to notify taxpayers when their Social Security number is used by someone else to gain employment
Unable to snag an interview with any IRS officials at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., WTHR’s investigative journalist Bob Segall turned to the the official Internal Revenue Manual (IRM), the massive 21,000-page long policy bible for IRS employees, and made some jaw-dropping discoveries.
Some of the manual is “official use only” meaning it’s kept secret from the public. But through internal sources at the IRS, 13 Investigates obtained confidential sections involving employment-related identity theft.
One of the confidential chapters warns IRS employees “Do not disclose to the taxpayer that … their SSN was reported on an ITIN return” and used by someone else to get a job. It instructs IRS workers not to mark the victim’s file with a special identity theft code, explaining “Employment related identity theft is not a tax administration issue because the SSN owner’s Master File tax account is not affected.”
In multiple sections, the IRS manual also suggests employment-related identity theft is of little concern, referring to an undocumented worker who use someone else’s Social Security number as a “borrower” who is simply “working under a ‘borrowed’ SSN.”
Seven years later, those same policies appear to be still in force.
Project Veritas released a new video on Wednesday featuring several young migrants talking about their hardscrabble lives in the United States.
Frander, 20-year-old male who came to the United States illegally four years ago, said he had to pay $150 to get a social security card so he could work. In order to get the card, he said he had to fill out “a small piece of paper that you get to be able to apply for jobs.”
“You just call the person, and he comes to your home and brings it [fake social security card],” Frander explained in Spanish. Frander said he has never lived with his sponsor because the man didn’t have a house at the time. His sponsor is currently serving time in jail in Florida for child abuse.
A Project Veritas journalist also interviewed a 15-year-old girl in Houston who quit school to work ten hours a day in a restaurant kitchen because she owes money to the cartel.
“When I got here [to the United States], I began studying, and then working. I went to school for six months. From a year ago, I began working…I go in [to work] at 4:00 pm and get out at 2:00 am,” the teen said, speaking in Spanish to the Veritas reporter.
When asked if she wanted to go to work, the girl replied, “no.”
According to Texas State law, 14 and 15 year-olds cannot work more than eight hours in one day, or more than 48 hours a week. They may not work past 10:00 pm on a night preceding a school day, or past 12:00 am on a night that is not followed by a school day. During the school year, they are only permitted to work between the hours of 7:00 am and 7:00 pm
A 17-year old boy who has been in the U.S. for only a month, told the Veritas reporter that he works “wherever they take you,” meaning to the cartels/traffickers.
“This is a terrible thing, and then you look at some of these children who are teenagers, who’ve never been to school, can’t read, can’t write. It’s a very wicked thing to take advantage of these children,” she added.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, called the regime’s open border policies “cruel and exploitative.”
“It’s creating conditions really of slavery again in our country,” she told O’Keefe.
Tara Lee Rodas, the HHS whistleblower who approached Project Veritas to expose the trafficking she witnessed while assisting the HHS in processing unaccompanied migrant children at its Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California, said she was horrified by what has been taking place.
She said in Part One that the Biden Regime’s focus on moving the children as quickly as possible out of holding facilities at the border has put vulnerable children into the hands of criminals, rather than into safe homes.
“I think most people believe, and I originally thought, that sponsors were families because HHS says, ‘we’re reuniting children with their families.’ In fact, that’s not the case,” Rodas told O’Keefe.
“I don’t understand why anybody would want to move a child quickly, as opposed to vetting that the place that the child is going is safe,” she said.
In Part One, Rodas told O’Keefe that she expressed her concerns about the potential child-trafficking with a federal government bureaucrats, and they responded by kicking her off the site.
“I said: ‘We’re getting ready to send another child [to Austin, Texas],’ and they said, ‘Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.’”
O’Keefe revealed the identity of the person who allegedly said that as HHS attorney Katherine Bond.
In a comment to Project Veritas, Bond said that she “didn’t recall making the statement,” and if he wanted further information about ORR policy, he should reach their public information officer.