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Remember the residents’ poor cats and dogs in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the tiny town infested by Biden’s imported Haitians? Most of the imported Haitians got jobs at a single local food processing plant. Well, guess what? I bet you never saw this coming: Last week, local ABC affiliate WTAB ran a story headlined, “Fourth Street Barbecue in Charleroi to lay off more than 250 workers, set to close late October.”

You can’t make this stuff up. The Haitians, who were credibly accused of hoovering up neighborhood pets and city park geese, worked at a barbecue processing plant. I mean, come on.

In the short documentary above, the narrator described the Biden-era scam. “Staffing agencies” provided employers with non-citizens who the Autopen had granted “temporary protected status.” The staffers collected 25% of the wages. The non-citizens were “placed” with willing businesses that paid undermarket wages and demanded extreme work conditions. It was win-win-win.

Now, nine months after Trump closed the border, the gravy train has shuddered to a halt. The employers feasted on the illegal largesse dished out by Biden cronies and outright criminals (one staffing company owner was arrested this year for ordering a hit on a competing staffing company owner). Now the “staffing” companies and even some of the employers are going out of business, leaving the displaced workers milling around the empty lobby in confusion.

The big employer in Charleroi was 4th Street Barbecue, which even bought up houses in the town where the Haitians could live, thereby also getting paid by the federal government for providing them with “temporary housing.” The whole thing was a top-to-bottom taxpayer-funded scam of covid proportions.

But suddenly and unexpectedly, now that the federal money barbecue has ended, 4th Street is going bankrupt.

WTAB’s on-scene reporter explained, “Many of the employees, I’m told, are Haitian immigrants who are here living and working under Biden’s Temporary Protected Status.” Shockingly, the reporter explained, “the closure came six days after 4th Street Barbecue was sued for defaulting on loans of $80 million dollars.”

As a commercial litigation lawyer who’s seen my share of defaulted business loans, that $80 million figure leaped off the page like a wild goose trying to flee from a hungry voodoo priest. That’s a lot of debt in a single loan for a company the size of Fourth Street Barbecue (1,000 employees) with only two locations in tiny Charleroi. It’s possible, but it’s weird. I’d like to know whether that loan was federally subsidized.

Even if it was above-board and not yet another facet of the scheme, that would be even stranger: why would a ten-year-old company doing well enough to legitimately borrow that much suddenly wink out of business?

Could it have something to do with staffing a quarter of the entire company with Haitians who can’t read or speak English, or even drive a car (staffing companies provided buses to pick them up for work every day)? Workers who will soon become deportable illegal immigrants after their TPS expires? Fourth Street fired nearly all the local American workers to hire the Haitians. I doubt they want to go back there.

According to alert local immigration lawyer Joe Murphy, a bigger problem arises from the fact that the Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status expires in a few months (February 2026). Nobody expects Trump’s officials to extend the program. Even if the workers were not promptly deported in February, Fourth Street still couldn’t legally employ them.

“From the perspective of the company itself,” lawyer Murphy generously allowed, “closing is not a bad move.”

Thus, as of Halloween, when the company closes for good, a horde of Haitians in temporary subsidized housing will immediately become unemployed and unhoused— up to 800 families worth, according to Murphy. The Haitians dominate the tiny town, whose pre-immigration population hovered around 4,000 residents.

Even though DHS is currently paying illegals to leave, and even covering their costs and throwing some cash at them, the Haitians probably won’t self-deport. Consider this remarkably frank interview excerpt from a City Journal article, one year ago:

City Journal: Some people in Charleroi have expressed concerns that many recent Haitian
migrants are not interested in assimilating. What is your perspective on that?
Rene: Some Haitians are acting bad or weird. Some Haitians that came here were from the
countryside. There is a lot of things about living in the city they're not too familiar with. It's a big
cultural change.
I can say that I'm a little educated but most of the other Haitians aren't, especially the ones that
came from Chile or Brazil and had to walk through 13 or 14 South American countries to come
here. They're all "country" and don't trust white people because they say white people are racist
and don't like them. They don't want to talk to white people. I've seen people work at Fourth
Street for two years and still not speak English or understand the traffic signs and traffic laws.
Many Haitians fail their driver's test here. Some of them blame racism for why they keep failing
their driving test. So they go to Florida to get their driver's license. Maybe it's easier to get in
Florida than here.
I'm not mad at Americans. I'm frustrated with myself, my people, my government, and our
politicians.

The catastrophe is likely to fall squarely on the state. Pennsylvania’s governor Josh Shapiro has shrilly condemned President Trump’s remarks about the Haitians, calling Trump’s comments “xenophobic,” “absolutely false,” and “really dangerous.” Shapiro claims the Haitians “contribute positively” by opening businesses, bringing skills, and filling needed jobs. Let’s see how he tackles Charleroi’s sudden Haitian implosion.

For your listening pleasure, and as a reminder of how far we’ve come in such a short time, here’s the viral “They’re Eating the Cats” mashup.