After Labor Secretary Alex Acosta announcing his resignation on Friday in the wake of outrage over the deal he brokered for alleged child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump said the department’s number two, Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella, would now serve as the acting secretary.

Pizzella, a former member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and one of Trump’s many anti-labor appointees, had previously come under fire for his links to lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff and their work in the 1990s to foster worker abuses on the Northern Mariana Islands.

As the New York Times reported over a decade ago, the commonwealth hired Abramoff in 1995 to help keep out U.S. minimum wage and other labor protections, allowing for the island chain to foster an environment ripe for slave-like labor where clothes can be stamped with a made-in-the U.S.A. label.

Pizzella, as Mother Jones laid out in 2017, played a key role in the operation.

The influential group could then report back on their carefully-curated trips—visits that did not include the horrific conditions at sweatshops and garment manufacturers, where workers were brought from other countries, predominately Bangladesh, China, and the Philippines. Having been hoodwinked into believing they were coming to the U.S. mainland, the workers were subjected to abuses including forced abortions.