Dems Outraged Over Lawful ICE Raid, Silent on Child Labor at Illegal Weed Farm
“10 juveniles were found at this marijuana facility – all illegal aliens, 8 of them unaccompanied. It’s now under investigation for child labor violations.”
Democrats were so enraged by the Trump administration’s March deportations of illegal immigrants — many of whom were believed to be members of the violent transnational gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua — that they found themselves in the unenviable position of defending Kilmar Abrego Garcia: an accused wife beater, likely MS-13 member, and alleged human trafficker.
Overnight, the due process rights of “Maryland dad” Abrego Garcia became the party’s cause célèbre. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) even traveled to El Salvador to fight for his release.
When the Department of Homeland Security released video footage showing Abrego Garcia being stopped by a Tennessee state trooper in late November 2022 — driving an SUV packed with people, lending serious weight to the human trafficking allegations — Democrats simply pivoted. The facts no longer mattered; it was all about defending his “due process rights.”
So when Democrats learned that ICE agents had conducted a lawful immigration raid at Glass House Farms — an illegal cannabis grower near Camarillo, California — they went into a collective meltdown. Protestors tried to block military vehicles as they arrived at the site. They tried to jam the poles of their Mexican flags into the vehicle’s tires and smash their windows. They threw rocks and one demonstrator is caught on video firing a pistol at law enforcement agents. I wrote about the protest this morning here.
But it didn’t stop there. Grandstanding Democratic politicians and pundits have spent the last 24 hours filling the airwaves with condemnations of the raids.
On Friday, a DHS spokesman told Fox News that “nine unaccompanied minors in the U.S. illegally were rescued.”
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott reported that “10 juveniles were found at this marijuana facility – all illegal aliens, 8 of them unaccompanied.” He added that the farm is “now under investigation for child labor violations.”
Here’s some breaking news: 10 juveniles were found at this marijuana facility – all illegal aliens, 8 of them unaccompanied. It’s now under investigation for child labor violations.
This is Newsom’s California. https://t.co/Z1XoRMtBSN
— CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott (@CBPCommissioner) July 11, 2025
This is a big deal. In addition to finding dozens of illegal immigrants working at Glass House Farms, agents found 10 children, most of whom were unaccompanied.
This puts Democrats, once again, in the position of defending the indefensible: this time, illegal child labor.
In the video below, Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA) calls the ICE raid “horrific.” She says, “It shouldn’t be this way. It’s vulgar. It’s un-American. This is not what we are about here.”
Most of us think it’s “vulgar” and “un-American” for children to be in this country without their parents, and to be working.
The Libs of TikTok, who posted this clip, summed it up perfectly: “Democrats are now the party of unaccompanied illegal alien child labor at weed farms.”
Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA) calls ICE "horrific" and "un-American" for conducting a lawful raid at a marijuana farm that was illegally exploiting children for labor.
Democrats are now the party of unaccompanied illegal alien child labor at weed farms. pic.twitter.com/30OJha0HCJ
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 11, 2025
Democrats are still promoting slavery. Of children no less.
Shameful.
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) July 11, 2025
Rep. Brownley’s rhetoric ignores the grim reality exposed by ICE’s Camarillo raid: 10 juveniles, including 8 unaccompanied minors, were found at a cannabis facility in clear violation of federal child labor laws under H.R. 3997, the Protecting Children Act. This bill, signed into…
— DOGEai (@dogeai_gov) July 11, 2025
In the post below, Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) tried to score some political points. He wrote: “How many MS-13 gang members are waking up at 3 a.m. to pick strawberries? O’yeah, zero! Trump said he’d go after “bad hombres,” but he’s targeting the immigrant farm workers who feed America. Either he lied — or he can’t tell the difference.”
Unfortunately for Gomez, he was immediately slapped down by President Trump’s Rapid Response team: “This was not a strawberry farm and you know it. It was a marijuana facility, where unaccompanied minors were found— yet you continue to defend it. TDS has broken your brain, Jimmy.”
This was not a strawberry farm and you know it.
It was a marijuana facility, where unaccompanied minors were found— yet you continue to defend it.
TDS has broken your brain, Jimmy. https://t.co/Euqy252dcD
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 11, 2025
TDS has indeed broken Gomez’s brain. In fact, it’s broken the entire Democratic Party.
In their zeal to oppose everything Trump stands for, Democrats have been forced into some very politically compromising positions. Their defense of a likely gang member and an illegal cannabis farm that hires not only illegal immigrants, but employs child labor, are only the latest examples. And considering the majority of the electorate supports the deportation of all illegal immigrants, neither will play well at the ballot box.
Additionally, Democrats have vehemently opposed DOGE’s efforts to expose waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, and ID requirements at the ballot box. They refuse to admit there are only two genders. They support allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports. They’ve embraced DEI and refuse to let it go. These positions are not reasonable; they are simply insane.
And I have to ask: Are they reaching the end-stages of TDS?
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
They like to blame the exploitative employment of illegals on Republicans but this looks like Democrats all the way down.
White Karens are all good with brown slave labor of minor illegals. If they aren’t for raping children, they are all good with the plantation.
Well, Trump and his big business supporters are all good with their brown illegal slave laborers in the hospitality business and mega farms, so they aren’t enforcing our immigration laws in those sections of the economy which benefit them.
You need to go back to molesting children and leave the conversation to the adults.
Shut up, you retard.
Go away.
If so, then why would PRESIDENT Trump be so driven to deport them?
Could it be that he is ACTUALLY more concerned with the state of America and its people than Dems ever could, or want, to be?
Oh, this is the first I’ve heard that the weed farm was illegal!
Them Dems just don’t know when to stop digging, do they?
I don’t understand the claim it was an ‘illegal’ operation at least according to CA law. The farms were both operated by Glass House and every other news article/tv hit has reported them as a lawfully, licenced business under CA law. Obviously Federal statutes still classify marijuana as a controlled substance but the feds have generally backed off domestic enforcement of licensed growers in States with pro cannabis laws for some time.
IT wasn’t a DEA raid, and I’ve heard about some wanting to move marijuana to Schedule 2 or 3, but I don’t know if it has happened yet. If not, then yes,it isan illegal farm. I guess the focus is on fentanyl and meth.
My point is:
1. Feds stopped caring about licensed domestic cannabis production in cannabis friendly States about a decade and half ago.
2. These two farms were operated by licensed growers in very cannabis friendly CA.
Calling the farms ‘illegal’ under the circumstances and the context of the deliberate lack of Federal enforcement seems …odd at best. Personally I don’t care about the issue but if we ain’t gonna enforce the law then Congress should get it off the books, otherwise the Executive should be raiding all these farms every day to lock their ass up for violating federal law.
According to federal law, all marijuana farms are illegal.
Yeah, I think the headline is not correct. It is a legal weed farm, the illegal part are the workers.
Can’t these juvenile, transnational-gang minions get baby sitting gigs?
Doing jobs white Americans won’t do.
Very soon someone is going to get killed and the dems will be moist over the possibility of exploiting that persons death for their own political benefit.
Then we should ensure that the killer is a prominent Democrat.
dems are not only se x traffickers
but …oh thats right
they are already known to be pedo loving drug dealing violent prone fiends
Dramacrat: “who will clean our homes? Our hotels and office buildings? Harvest our marijuana”?
It gets better.
The owner is a Newsom donor. Wonder if that has anything to do with Gavin’s outrage.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/newsom-donors-cannabis-farm-under-federal-investigation-child-labor-violations
Well, well, well.
I picked cherries in Michigan as a kid. No screening for hiring, just show up. For each bucket you fill, they punch your card. You get paid by punches in your card. The only rule was once you start a tree, you have to finish it. No just low hanging fruit. So there’s child labor that seemed wholesome to me at the time.
I have a lot of family in rural/exurban Ohio. Those that are of a certain age all did the exact same thing; worked summer jobs on the farm, many picking a variety of berries. I suspect there wasn’t a lot of paperwork completed back in the day. BUT, everyone knew everyone. Today, those jobs aren’t available to teens because illegal aliens are doing the work at an even lower rate that kids would do it now.
Yes, my generation worked as kids and teens to pick fruit during the summer; mostly strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Husky boys could work bucking bales during hay harvest.
However, in this state, they actually made it illegal to hire kids on farms because of the alleged threat from pesticides.
Poof, no laborers
That’s too bad. Since the 1930s (but mostly in the last 25-years) the Dept of Labor has continued to add to the exhaustive list of farm jobs workers under the age of 18 cannot do. Anything to do with applying or even handling ‘Pesticides/herbicides’ is now forbidden. But, under the current federal rules, berry picking is still allowable even at non-organic farms (there might be a minimum allowable time since the last application) and following the fed rules, that’s what many states still allow.
As a kid in south-central Minnesota one of the better-paying short-term gigs was to de-tassle corn for the seed-growers. If you were tall enough to reach the top of the corn without damaging the plants and snap off the tassles, you could be hired. I was a small kid, so I didn’t get hired until I was 15. They paid cash, and there was usually a party by a lake afterwards with hot dogs and soda pop. They hired us kids from the parking lot of the local high school and trucked us to the various fields.
It was incredibly hot, nasty work since the corn tassles were prickly, and you had to wear long pants and shirts despite the heat to keep from being cut by the (amazingly sharp) corn leaves. I did that for a couple of years since it was one of the few jobs available for a dumb kid out there. Like TargaGTS says, everybody knew everybody, so it was no mystery as to who was doing the hiring or who was doing the work.
I’m guessing that work is now done either by machine or by illegals.
Are you just cherry picking an example? Pshaw–try mucking stalls at a horse farm and wheelbarrowing that honey to a fertilizer pile for a buck an hour.
The whole “but, but, who will pick our crops?” Is a red herring.
As is the whole “but, but, food costs will soar!”.
The whole “Illegal immigrants only take jobs Americans won’t do!” Is also a piece of…. misdirection. What is actually true is that Americans won’t do those jobs unless they’re paid well for it. I recall reading about a Perdue Chicken processing plant a decade ago that lost half their workers after a govt raid. Rather than shut down they started offering higher salaries – and miraculously were able to hire enuf (Legal) workers.
Let’s just look at the numbers for (say) farm workers.
According to the USDA for every $100 it costs a farmer to produce his crop $10 is labor salaries. So… 90% of his cost stays the same. If he doubles wages that’s only a 10% increase in his production costs.
But it gets even better – the money the farmer gets only accounts for about $0.15 of every dollar it costs you to purchase his product at the supermarket. So… doubling those salaries increases the amount the supermarket must charge for his product by…. less than $0,02 per $1.00.
That’s less of a “price increase” than a single year of inflation would cause – even under a Trump admin – under the Biden admin it would have been a few months.
Granted these are average crop numbers – some specialty crops are more labor intensive – but the worst case is that the labour cost is around three times higher for those particular crops. Whaaa…, whaaaa… my strawberries now cost me (say) $3,20 a pint instead of $3.00. Is that really a problem?
But is it good weed? Asking for a friend.
What exactly are these child labor violations that are being investigated? I thought the minimum age for most agricultural work was 12. Are these kids under that?!
12-year olds are allowed to harvest a Schedule III drug? That seems sketch, if true.
Marijuana is still Schedule I. It may change in the future
I don’t see why it should matter what the crop is. The child labor laws wouldn’t be connected to the drug laws. If they say 12-year-olds can pick tomatoes, then it stands to reason that they can also pick marijuana or poppies. Any crime involved would be a drug offense, not a child labor offense.
I believe that cannabis farms are categorized as inherently ‘dangerous’ which precludes minor children b/c they have restrictions on what work they are allowed to perform. There’s a sliding scale based on age of minor child as to particular types of tasks they can perform and limits on the number of hours they can work as well as what hours of the day can work.
Family owned farms where family members are working have less restrictions than a minor child as an employee of a separate commercial entity.
Why would a marijuana farm be any more dangerous than a potato farm?
Short answer …b/c the govt says so.
Longer answer… Go to OSHA website and see for yourself all the ‘justification’.
I ain’t taking a position for or against the ruling that it is inherently dangerous. I’m just pointing out the current legal and regulatory framework.
All sorts of odd rules about what age a worker can do what in one setting but not another. Often a task not allowed to be performed by minor children in a non agricultural industry can be done by that same worker in an agricultural setting. Even then there’s still weird things like being age 16 to use a ladder over 20ft high. Age guideline thresholds for minor employees working with cattle or hogs….but if the same minor is in an ‘apprenticeship’ program then it’s ok.
Bottom line it is govt rulemaking so it seems bonkers and inconsistent to most of us.
The child labor laws are sure as hell connected to the gun laws. And that’s a damn constitutional right, not a federal crime!
A Biden-appointee District Court Judge just entered another sweeping injunction against the Trump Administration deportation efforts. It’s predictably insane.
https://x.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1943844542983418212
The judge’s name is Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1943442279722553594
So he’s doing away with the border exception to the fourth amendment? Because I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court long ago said that the Border Patrol, as opposed to any other LE force, is allowed to use race as grounds for reasonable suspicion within the border zone.
In fairness I believe it was geographically limited to LA.County but it is completely at odds with existing precedent. ICE doesn’t need a warrant or probable cause or really even ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ to detain, search, question and arrest within the 100 mile border search exemption zone. They are expressly allowed to use ‘race’ as a factor if that predominantly matches the population group they are seeking. IMO the TRO gonna get shut down quickly and reaffirm the ‘border search exemption zone’ b/c to do otherwise would as a.practical matter cripple ICE effectiveness, especially given the number of sanctuary policy jurisdictions where local LEO are prohibited from assisting ICE.
Yes, that’s what I thought.
Slight correction to my post, the order applies to the 7 Counties comprising the Federal District. Either way SCOTUS is gonna have to toss this order and if not….then interior enforcement in the border area is, as a practical matter over, at least as currently constituted. The only practical alternative would be a dang East German style wall to stop all entry (legal/illegal, private/commercial) in order to prevent any new arrivals. Same for any sort of work, student or tourist visa being granted to foreign nationals from non western Nations who might be induced to try and stay in the USA illegally. Have to up the penalties for overstayed visa. Enforcement would shift to employer work sites supplemented by K-12 schools, hospitals, courts, job placement centers, churches, State ‘welfare’ offices. Gotta use the tools to hand and if the border search exemption zone is removed then other, less polite, more disruptive tools would have to be used out of necessity.
>>And I have to ask: Are they reaching the end-stages of TDS?
Does anyone know what that looks like? Has it been documented? Is there a recovery, or does it end in institutionalization?
Seriously. Are there examples we can look to of TDS recovery? And most importantly what things led to the recovery?
I think the best example was filmed as The Frances Farmer Story.
In ref: illegal alien roundups.
It’d be nice if the left just told us which democratically-enacted laws they find distasteful and refuse to enforce.. while yammering about “saving democracy” and “no one is above the law.”
What OTHER democratically-enacted laws to they reject?
Why doesn’t the GOP ASK THIS QUESTION? From the House Floor?