On Friday, CNN’s KFile team reported that Dan Osborn, the Democratic-backed independent Senate candidate from Nebraska, recalled calling ICE on replacement workers hired after his union went on strike in 2021, despite heavily criticizing the agency throughout his campaign.

KFile’s Andrew Kaczynski joined CNN’s Boris Sanchez on-air, explaining, “Dan Osborn presents himself as a pro-labor populist who is sharply critical of some of [President Donald] Trump’s administration’s harsh immigration enforcement tactics. But, during a major labor strike that he led in 2021, Osborn said his union had turned to federal immigration authorities over allegations involving undocumented replacement workers.”

The uncovered video of Osborn from 2021 was shown next, depicting the candidate telling an interviewer about his union’s strike, “Kellogg’s is bringing in replacement workers. We have it on good authority that they’re replacing us with a good percentage of undocumented workers… We have been in contact with Homeland Security and ICE… I hope they do the right thing and investigate our claims.”

Kaczynski said that at the time, Osborn was the president of a local union for Omaha Kellogg’s cereal plant workers. Kellogg’s did not respond to KFile’s request for comment on the immigration status of the replacement workers in question.

In recent months, Osborn has “criticized the use of masked federal agents and called some of what he’s seeing ‘not humanly decent,'” reported KFile. “His campaign told CNN that he actually never personally contacted ICE or Homeland Security. Instead, the campaign said that he contacted the local sheriff and sought guidance on how those allegations involving undocumented replacement workers should be reported.”

The campaign went on to claim that individuals whom Osborn told about the sheriff’s advice contacted federal authorities on their own.

The campaign added:

There’s a reason we haven’t had real immigration reform in this country: mega-corporations who use Citizens United to fund career politicians in DC are benefiting from our broken immigration system by exploiting undocumented immigrants to create a cheap pool of labor, driving down wages to boost their own profits while undercutting American workers.

As Sanchez pointed out, “this also comes as Osborn is relying heavily on Democratic voters in the Senate race.”

Watch the full clip above via CNN.

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