Earlier this month NBC News had a follow up report about teen migrants working as clearner in a slaughterhouse run by a company called Packers Sanitation Services Inc. Here’s how the story initially appeared on April 12:

When the Labor Department discovered over 100 migrant children cleaning Midwest slaughterhouses in February, their employer, Packers Sanitation Services Inc., paid a $1.5 million fine, agreed to stop employing children, and, according to PSSI and employees who spoke to NBC News, quickly fired all workers found to be underage.

But a 16-year-old whom NBC News is calling Pedro said he’s still cleaning blood and animal parts off the kill floor of a Kansas slaughterhouse up to seven nights a week, a job illegal for anyone younger than 18 under U.S. labor law. Pedro spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity. Although the job is hard, dangerous and tiring, he fears losing his paycheck would put him and his family in Guatemala in an impossible situation. Pedro said he used a false identity to get the job…

Although many children work difficult jobs in Guatemala, including on sugar plantations, it is illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to clean meatpacking plants in the U.S.

It’s both dangerous and illegal for a 16-year-old to be doing this job. And yet, when the company asked NBC News to identify “Pedro” so they could fire him, they refused.

PSSI asked NBC News to reveal Pedro’s identity so that he could be immediately fired, but NBC News is withholding his name to let him share his story without fear of losing the job he says he needs. PSSI said it would redouble its efforts to find him.

“As we have said repeatedly, we have a long-standing zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18 and don’t want a single minor working for our company — period,” a PSSI spokeswoman said.

So is it a good thing or a bad thing that Pedro has this job? NBC seems to be on both sides of this at once. If it’s okay for Pedro to lie and hold down this dangerous job, is it okay for other underage teens to do the same?

Fortunately, the conundrum of protecting the underage slaughterhouse worker from being fired was solved by the company who managed to identify Pedro and discovered he’s actually 21-years-old. NBC has since retracted its original story and replaced it with a new one.

A Guatemalan migrant who claimed he worked as a minor cleaning a slaughterhouse in Kansas by night while attending high school during the day is actually 21, NBC News has learned…

Days after the reports aired, PSSI sent NBC News a videotaped interview the company conducted with Pedro in which he said he is not a minor. NBC News also asked Pedro to reconfirm his age, and he said it was “hard for me to explain.” NBC News and Noticias Telemundo then traveled to Guatemala and obtained official documentation showing he is 21.

Since Pedro was an adult when he sought the job at the slaughterhouse, his hiring was legal. So why did anyone believe he was 16? The answer to that question is also revealing.

Presenting as a minor at the border made it easier for Pedro to enter the country under current U.S. immigration policies. The U.S. government issued him documentation based on that false information.

In the PSSI interview, when asked why he presented false information at the border, Pedro explained his situation.

“It’s because over there in Guatemala we have a lot of need and we don’t have a lot of money and for that reason.”

In short, Pedro is an adult economic migrant who gave authorities his brother’s birth certificate so that he could gain entrance to the US as a minor. He spent three months in a shelter for children and then was placed in a US high school. And then he lied again when he told NBC his sob story of being a high school student working nights at the slaughterhouse.

There really is an interesting story here about how migrants lie to get what they want and how both the US government and a major news outlet can be fooled thanks to a lack of proper documentation. I’m quite certain Pedro isn’t the only adult claiming to be a teenager to gain entrance to the country in the past year. How many more like him are out there? Who knows. It seems like the kind of thing a major news organization might look into but of course it’s not the sort of migrant story that NBC News was interested in telling. In fact they’re only telling us now because they got caught getting it wrong.

Finally, there was a video report that went along with this but it appears that NBC has deleted it everywhere it was posted. Even the full nightly news broadcast which was uploaded to YouTube has been deleted.