What is most trou­bling is that almost all of the hard­ship and suf­fer­ing inflict­ed on these chil­dren is legal, so long as they are above the age of 12.

On May 14, Human Rights Watch issued Tobac­co’s Hid­den Chil­dren —a stun­ning report on child labor in the tobac­co fields of North Car­oli­na, Ken­tucky, Ten­nessee and Vir­ginia. Inter­view­ing kids in the fields who ranged in age from 7 to 17, the orga­ni­za­tion’s researchers com­piled their dis­mal sto­ries of back­break­ing work, inad­e­quate water and toi­let facil­i­ties, and worst of all, the chron­ic ill­ness brought on by poi­son­ing from nico­tine and pesticides.

More than 50 years ago, CBS cor­re­spon­dent Edward R. Mur­row revealed to Amer­i­ca the awful con­di­tions suf­fered by migrant farm labor­ers in ​“Har­vest of Shame,” an angry doc­u­men­tary that would become a clas­sic. While con­di­tions have improved for some of the fam­i­lies whose work pro­vides our cor­nu­copia of afford­able food, there remains a spe­cial group of work­ers that our polit­i­cal sys­tem refus­es to pro­tect: the chil­dren who pick tobacco.

Crouched under tall, wet tobac­co plants in the scorch­ing heat, the teenaged work­ers soon find out that sum­mer­time means con­stant nau­sea and vom­it­ing, intense headaches, skin rash­es and irri­tat­ed eyes. It is hard to breathe, eat or even sleep, despite their exhaus­tion. Heat stroke is an every­day risk. Med­ical researchers believe that the long-term dan­gers include blad­der can­cer and heart dis­ease, as well as dam­age to devel­op­ing ado­les­cent ner­vous sys­tems from the neu­ro­tox­ins in the pes­ti­cides so heav­i­ly used by tobac­co growers.

As Gabriel Thomp­son dis­cov­ered last year when he went under­cov­er into North Car­oli­na’s tobac­co fields for The Nation mag­a­zine and The Inves­tiga­tive Fund, most chil­dren start work­ing in the fields to help par­ents who are earn­ing the min­i­mum wage and bare­ly putting food on the table (yet anoth­er rea­son why the min­i­mum must be raised). They start this work at age 12 with­out any real prepa­ra­tion and not under­stand­ing the haz­ards they will face.

As for­mer Labor Sec­re­tary Hil­da Solis once observed, the kids work­ing tobac­co are bad­ly exploit­ed and pos­si­bly crip­pled for life. That is why most coun­tries — includ­ing places like Rus­sia and Kaza­khstan — pro­hib­it chil­dren under 18 from work­ing in tobac­co fields. But not the Unit­ed States, although the State Depart­ment recent­ly spent almost $3 mil­lion to cur­tail child tobac­co labor in Malawi.

Why does the U.S. gov­ern­ment still per­mit this out­dat­ed out­rage? In the spring of 2010, Human Rights Watch released an ear­li­er report on child labor in Amer­i­can agri­cul­ture, which includ­ed inter­views with ado­les­cent tobac­co work­ers. Solis pub­licly praised the report and made a promise: ​“We sim­ply can­not — and this admin­is­tra­tion will not — stand by while young­sters work­ing on farms are robbed of their child­hood.” The fol­low­ing year, her depart­ment issued a series of new pro­posed reg­u­la­tions to pro­tect chil­dren from the worst farm jobs, such as work­ing in grain silos, han­dling pes­ti­cides, or dri­ving trac­tors with­out seat belts or roll bars, which results in the most deaths. And the new rules banned hir­ing chil­dren to work in tobacco.

Nat­u­ral­ly the agribusi­ness lob­by object­ed, mobi­liz­ing all its forces from the Amer­i­can Farm Bureau and Mon­san­to to the beef, pork and poul­try pro­duc­ers to stop the child-pro­tec­tion rules from tak­ing effect. They mount­ed a men­da­cious cam­paign claim­ing that fam­i­ly farms — specif­i­cal­ly exempt­ed from most of the rules — would be ruined. And those lies were eager­ly par­rot­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive media out­lets and fig­ures like Sarah Palin — a dim loud­mouth who urges com­pas­sion for her own off­spring but could­n’t care less about farm­work­er kids. Repub­li­cans in Con­gress respond­ed by threat­en­ing to cut the Labor Depart­men­t’s budget.

Such self­ish and self-serv­ing behav­ior was to be expect­ed from the tea par­ty right, fronting for cor­po­rate inter­ests as usu­al — although there was once a time when Repub­li­can politi­cians cared about children.

Far more dis­ap­point­ing was the response of the White House, which prompt­ly sur­ren­dered to the lob­by­ing pres­sure and over­ruled the Labor Depart­ment. In the spring of 2012, the depart­ment issued a press release that undid all the promis­es made by Solis — and promised instead that the reg­u­la­tions would not be pur­sued ​“for the dura­tion of the Oba­ma administration.”

Endors­ing the big lies of the agribusi­ness lob­by, the depart­ment — which admit­ted that the orders had come from the White House — said that the rules had been with­drawn to prove the admin­is­tra­tion’s ​“com­mit­ment to fam­i­ly farms and respect­ing the rur­al way of life.” And if that means poi­son­ing chil­dren, pre­sum­ably the White House respects such rur­al cus­toms just as sincerely.

Is it too late to rec­ti­fy this grotesque injus­tice? Per­haps Michelle Oba­ma, an admirable advo­cate for endan­gered chil­dren in Nige­ria, should look at the kids toil­ing on Amer­i­ca’s farms, whose faces appear in the Human Rights Watch report and in the video that first aired in a superb report by Fusion TV’s Rayn­er Ramirez. The First Lady just might imag­ine her own daugh­ters in their place. At the very least, those young vic­tims will need a hash­tag, too, before they final­ly get what they deserve from her husband.

This piece is reprint­ed with per­mis­sion from Alter­Net.