USA: Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. : Kirsten Luce / NY Times / Sree Gururaja
The New York Times of 26 February carried a hard hitting, informative and well-researched article, “ Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs across the US" (Click here to read the original - short text summary below).
The article shocked me at first. It seemed shameful that in one of the richest countries in the world, children as young as 12 years old were working in jobs, some linked to well known companies. I then realized that the federal laws in the US are not necessarily compliant with international conventions, including those relating to children. Is this alarming situation a new phenomenon? Is the surge of such children related to the pandemic? Or a breakdown of institutions ? I was reminded of Niall Ferguson's predictionsin his book,”The Great Degeneration” ( 2012) and this another instance of the decay of law, institutions and of civic society, the pillars of modern post WWII society? What does this mean as this ‘degeneration’ is happening globally ? Food for thought as it certainly portends a bleak future for children everywhere.
Rug Mark, Free Trade, sanctions against products made by children, the famous banning of chocolates on Valentine’s day , the Reebok-Nike partnerships with UNICEF during FIFA World Cup added momentum UNICEF - ILO joint advocacy in developing countries for implementation of ILO Conventions 138 (minimum age) and 182 (hazardous work). Governments consistently gave justifications for slow and tardy implementation, some real and others more as excuses for lack of political will. On our part, UNICEF and ILO promoted establishment of regulatory mechanisms to check violations and supported innovative community based interventions with civil society partnerships in several countries with the goal of eliminating child labour.
The article shocked me at first. It seemed shameful that in one of the richest countries in the world, children as young as 12 years old were working in jobs, some linked to well known companies. I then realized that the federal laws in the US are not necessarily compliant with international conventions, including those relating to children. Is this alarming situation a new phenomenon? Is the surge of such children related to the pandemic? Or a breakdown of institutions ? I was reminded of Niall Ferguson's predictionsin his book,”The Great Degeneration” ( 2012) and this another instance of the decay of law, institutions and of civic society, the pillars of modern post WWII society? What does this mean as this ‘degeneration’ is happening globally ? Food for thought as it certainly portends a bleak future for children everywhere.
Rug Mark, Free Trade, sanctions against products made by children, the famous banning of chocolates on Valentine’s day , the Reebok-Nike partnerships with UNICEF during FIFA World Cup added momentum UNICEF - ILO joint advocacy in developing countries for implementation of ILO Conventions 138 (minimum age) and 182 (hazardous work). Governments consistently gave justifications for slow and tardy implementation, some real and others more as excuses for lack of political will. On our part, UNICEF and ILO promoted establishment of regulatory mechanisms to check violations and supported innovative community based interventions with civil society partnerships in several countries with the goal of eliminating child labour.
Can we be sure that Governments and UNICEF will give priority to the elimination of child labour (SDG 8.7) and protect the rights of ALL children.”?
Sree
...
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Cristian works a construction job instead of going to school. He is 14.
Carolina packages Cheerios at night in a factory. She is 15.
Wander starts looking for day-labor jobs before sunrise. He is 13.
It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.
About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.
The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos — all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.
“Sometimes I get tired and feel sick,” Carolina said after a shift in November. Her stomach often hurt, and she was unsure if that was because of the lack of sleep, the stress from the incessant roar of the machines, or the worries she had for herself and her family in Guatemala. “But I’m getting used to it.”
ImageHearthside Food Solutions, one of the United States’ largest food contractors, makes and packages products for well-known snack and cereal brands.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.
The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. The Times examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.
In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia.
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Oscar Lopez, a ninth grader, works overnight at a sawmill in South Dakota. On this day, he skipped school to sleep after a 14-hour shift.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English-language learner programs say it is now common for nearly all their students to rush off to long shifts after their classes end.
“They should not be working 12-hour days, but it’s happening here,” said Valeria Lindsay, a language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, she said, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload.
Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found. In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States climbed to a high of 130,000 last year — three times what it was five years earlier — and this summer is expected to bring another wave.
These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation.
But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors.
While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.
An H.H.S. spokeswoman said the agency wanted to release children swiftly, for the sake of their well-being, but had not compromised safety. “There are numerous places along the process to continually ensure that a placement is in the best interest of the child,” said the spokeswoman, Kamara Jones.
Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses.
“It’s getting to be a business for some of these sponsors,” said Annette Passalacqua, who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida last year. Ms. Passalacqua said she saw so many children put to work, and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases, that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead, she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks and overtime.
Sponsors are required to send migrant children to school, and some students juggle classes and heavy workloads. Other children arrive to find that they have been misled by their sponsors and will not be enrolled in school.
The federal government hires child welfare agencies to track some minors who are deemed to be at high risk. But caseworkers at those agencies said that H.H.S. regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, a characterization the agency disputed.
In interviews with more than 60 caseworkers, most independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time.
A representative for Hearthside said the company relied on a staffing agency to supply some workers for its plants in Grand Rapids, but conceded that it had not required the agency to verify ages through a national system that checks Social Security numbers. Unaccompanied migrant children often obtain false identification to secure work.
“We are immediately implementing additional controls to reinforce all agencies’ strict compliance with our longstanding requirement that all workers must be 18 or over,” the company said in a statement.
At Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolina’s ninth-grade social studies teacher, Rick Angstman, has seen the toll that long shifts take on his students. One, who was working nights at a commercial laundry, began passing out in class from fatigue and was hospitalized twice, he said. Unable to stop working, she dropped out of school.
“She disappeared into oblivion,” Mr. Angstman said. “It’s the new child labor. You’re taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.”
On the Night Shift
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Children being processed by the U.S. Border Patrol in Roma, Texas. In the past two years alone, 250,000 unaccompanied minors have come into the country.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
When Carolina left Guatemala, she had no real understanding of what she was heading toward, just a sense that she could not stay in her village any longer. There was not much electricity or water, and after the pandemic began, not much food.
The only people who seemed to be getting by were the families living off remittances from relatives in the United States. Carolina lived alone with her grandmother, whose health began failing. When neighbors started talking about heading north, she decided to join. She was 14.
“I just kept walking,” she said.
Carolina reached the U.S. border exhausted, weighing 84 pounds. Agents sent her to an H.H.S. shelter in Arizona, where a caseworker contacted her aunt, Marcelina Ramirez. Ms. Ramirez was at first reluctant: She had already sponsored two other relatives and had three children of her own. They were living on $600 a week, and she didn’t know Carolina.
When Carolina arrived in Grand Rapids last year, Ms. Ramirez told her she would go to school every morning and suggested that she pick up evening shifts at Hearthside. She knew Carolina needed to send money back to her grandmother. She also believed it was good for young people to work. Child labor is the norm in rural Guatemala, and she herself had started working around the second grade.
One of the nation’s largest contract manufacturers, Hearthside makes and packages food for companies like Frito-Lay, General Mills and Quaker Oats. “It would be hard to find a cookie or cracker aisle in any leading grocer that does not contain multiple products from Hearthside production facilities,” a Grand Rapids-area plant manager told a trade magazine in 2019.
General Mills, whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley, said it recognized “the seriousness of this situation” and was reviewing The Times’s findings. PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats, declined to comment.
Three people who until last year worked at one of the biggest employment agencies in Grand Rapids, Forge Industrial Staffing, said Hearthside supervisors were sometimes made aware that they were getting young-looking workers whose identities had been flagged as false.
“Hearthside didn’t care,” said Nubia Malacara, a former Forge employee who said she had also worked at Hearthside as a minor.
In a statement, Hearthside said, “We do care deeply about this issue and are concerned about the mischaracterization of Hearthside.” A spokesman for Forge said it complied with state and federal laws and “would never knowingly employ individuals under 18.”
Kevin Tomas said he sought work through Forge after he arrived in Grand Rapids at age 13 with his 7-year-old brother. At first, he was sent to a local manufacturer that made auto parts for Ford and General Motors. But his shift ended at 6:30 in the morning, so he could not stay awake in school, and he struggled to lift the heavy boxes.
“It’s not that we want to be working these jobs. It’s that we have to help our families,” Kevin said.
By the time he was 15, Kevin had found a job at Hearthside, stacking 50-pound cases of cereal on the same shift as Carolina.
‘So Many Red Flags’
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Cristian, 14, has been working in construction in North Miami for two years instead of going to school. Federal law bars minors from a long list of such jobs.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.
“As the government, we’ve turned a blind eye to their trafficking,” said Doug Gilmer, the head of the Birmingham, Ala., office of Homeland Security Investigations, a federal agency that often becomes involved with immigration cases.
Mr. Gilmer teared up as he recalled finding 13-year-olds working in meat plants; 12-year-olds working at suppliers for Hyundai and Kia, as documented last year by a Reuters investigation; and children who should have been in middle school working at commercial bakeries.
“We’re encountering it here because we’re looking for it here,” Mr. Gilmer said. “It’s happening everywhere.”
Children have crossed the Southern border on their own for decades, and since 2008, the United States has allowed non-Mexican minors to live with sponsors while they go through immigration proceedings, which can take several years. The policy, codified in anti-trafficking legislation, is intended to prevent harm to children who would otherwise be turned away and left alone in a Mexican border town.
When Kelsey Keswani first worked as an H.H.S. contractor in Arizona to connect unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors in 2010, the adults were almost always the children’s parents, who had paid smugglers to bring them up from Central America, she said.
But around 2014, the number of arriving children began to climb, and their circumstances were different. In recent years, “the kids almost all have a debt to pay off, and they’re super stressed about it,” Ms. Keswani said.
She began to see more failures in the vetting process. “There were so many cases where sponsors had sponsored multiple kids, and it wasn’t getting caught. So many red flags with debt. So many reports of trafficking.”
Now, just a third of migrant children are going to their parents. A majority are sent to other relatives, acquaintances or even strangers, a Times analysis of federal data showed. Nearly half are coming from Guatemala, where poverty is fueling a wave of migration. Parents know that they would be turned away at the border or quickly deported, so they send their children in hopes that remittances will come back.
In the last two years alone, more than 250,000 children have entered the United States by themselves.
The shifting dynamics in Central America helped create a political crisis early in Mr. Biden’s presidency, when children started crossing the border faster than H.H.S. could process them. With no room left in shelters, the children stayed in jail-like facilities run by Customs and Border Protection and, later, in tent cities. The images of children sleeping on gym mats under foil blankets attracted intense media attention.
The Biden administration pledged to move children through the shelter system more quickly. “We don’t want to continue to see a child languish in our care if there is a responsible sponsor,” Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services, told Congress in 2021.
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A detention site in the Rio Grande Valley in March 2021. The Biden administration has faced pressure to move unaccompanied children through the system quickly.Credit...Pool photo by Dario Lopez-Mills
His agency began paring back protections that had been in place for years, including some background checks and reviews of children’s files, according to memos reviewed by The Times and interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
“Twenty percent of kids have to be released every week or you get dinged,” said Ms. Keswani, who stopped working with H.H.S. last month.
Concerns piled up in summer 2021 at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children. In a memo that July, 11 managers said they were worried that labor trafficking was increasing and complained to their bosses that the office had become “one that rewards individuals for making quick releases, and not one that rewards individuals for preventing unsafe releases.”
Staff members said in interviews that Mr. Becerra continued to push for faster results, often asking why they could not discharge children with machine-like efficiency.
“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” Mr. Becerra said at a staff meeting last summer, according to a recording obtained by The Times.
The H.H.S. spokeswoman, Ms. Jones, said that Mr. Becerra had urged his staff to “step it up.” “Like any good leader, he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again — especially when it comes to the well-being and safety of children,” she said.
During a call last March, Mr. Becerra told Cindy Huang, the O.R.R. director, that if she could not increase the number of discharges, he would find someone who could, according to five people familiar with the call. She resigned a month later.
He recently made a similar threat to her successor during a meeting with senior leadership, according to several people who were present.
‘It Was All Lies’
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Migrant children were among the day laborers who gathered on a school day in Homestead, Fla., to find roofing, landscaping or other work.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
While many migrant children are sent to the United States by their parents, others are persuaded to come by adults who plan to profit from their labor.
Nery Cutzal was 13 when he met his sponsor over Facebook Messenger. Once Nery arrived in Florida, he discovered that he owed more than $4,000 and had to find his own place to live. His sponsor sent him threatening text messages and kept a running list of new debts: $140 for filling out H.H.S. paperwork; $240 for clothes from Walmart; $45 for a taco dinner.
“Don’t mess with me,” the sponsor wrote. “You don’t mean anything to me.”
Nery began working until 3 a.m. most nights at a trendy Mexican restaurant near Palm Beach to make the payments. “He said I would be able to go to school and he would take care of me, but it was all lies,” Nery said.
His father, Leonel Cutzal, said the family had become destitute after a series of bad harvests and had no choice but to send their oldest son north from Guatemala.
“Even when he shares $50, it’s a huge help,” Mr. Cutzal said. “Otherwise, there are times we don’t eat.” Mr. Cutzal had not understood how much Nery would be made to work, he said. “I think he passed through some hard moments being up there so young.”
Nery eventually contacted law enforcement, and his sponsor was found guilty last year of smuggling a child into the United States for financial gain. That outcome is rare: In the past decade, federal prosecutors have brought only about 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied minors, according to a Times review of court databases.
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A handwritten ledger, in Spanish, of Nery Cutzal’s debts to his sponsor, including money for tacos and clothes. The child owed more than $4,000, plus interest. Court information has been redacted for privacy.
Unlike the foster care system, in which all children get case management, H.H.S. provides this service to about a third of children who pass through its care, and usually for just four months. Tens of thousands of other children are sent to their sponsors with little but the phone number for a national hotline. From there, they are often on their own: There is no formal follow-up from any federal or local agencies to ensure that sponsors are not putting children to work illegally.
In Pennsylvania, one case worker told The Times he went to check on a child released to a man who had applied to sponsor 20 other minors. The boy had vanished. In Texas, another case worker said she had encountered a man who had been targeting poor families in Guatemala, promising to help them get rich if they sent their children across the border. He had sponsored 13 children.
“If you’ve been in this field for any amount of time, you know that there’s what the sponsors agree to, and what they’re actually doing,” said Bernal Cruz Munoz, a caseworker supervisor in Oregon.
Calling the hotline is not a sure way to get support, either. Juanito Ferrer called for help after he was brought to Manassas, Va., at age 15 by an acquaintance who forced him to paint houses during the day and guard an apartment complex at night. His sponsor took his paychecks and watched him on security cameras as he slept on the basement floor.
Juanito said that when he called the hotline in 2019, the person on the other end just took a report. “I thought they’d send the police or someone to check, but they never did that,” he said. “I thought they would come and inspect the house, at least.” He eventually escaped.
Asked about the hotline, H.H.S. said operators passed reports onto law enforcement and other local agencies because the agency did not have the authority to remove children from homes.
The Times analyzed government data to identify places with high concentrations of children who had been released to people outside their immediate families — a sign that they might have been expected to work. In northwest Grand Rapids, for instance, 93 percent of children have been released to adults who are not their parents.
H.H.S. does not track these clusters, but the trends are so pronounced that officials sometimes notice hot spots anyway.
Scott Lloyd, who led the resettlement office in the Trump administration, said he realized in 2018 that the number of unaccompanied Guatemalan boys being released to sponsors in South Florida seemed to be growing.
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Jose Vasquez, 13, photographed at the church he attends in Grand Rapids, Mich. He works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at an egg farm outside the city.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
“I always wondered what was happening there,” he said.
But his attention was diverted by the chaos around the Trump administration’s child separation policy, and he never looked into it. The trend he saw has only accelerated: For example, in the past three years, more than 200 children have been released to distant relatives or unrelated adults around Immokalee, Fla., an agricultural hub with a long history of labor exploitation.
In a statement, H.H.S. said it had updated its case management system to better flag instances when multiple children were being released to the same person or address.
Many sponsors see themselves as benevolent, doing a friend or neighbor a favor by agreeing to help a child get out of a government shelter, even if they do not intend to offer any support. Children often understand that they will have to work, but do not grasp the unrelenting grind that awaits them.
“I didn’t get how expensive everything was,” said 13-year-old Jose Vasquez, who works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister. “I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay rent?”
Occupational Hazards
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Carolina Yoc, back right, worked on math problems after a night shift at a Grand Rapids food plant. The 13-year-old girl sitting next to her said she also worked nights at a factory.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
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One fall morning at Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolina listened to Mr. Angstman lecture on the journalist Jacob Riis and the Progressive Era movement that helped create federal child labor laws. He explained that the changes were meant to keep young people out of jobs that could harm their health or safety, and showed the class a photo of a small boy making cigars.
“Riis reported that members of this family worked 17 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told the students. “The cramped space reeked of toxic fumes.” Students seemed unmoved. Some struggled to stay awake.
Teachers at the school estimated that 200 of their immigrant students were working full time while trying to keep up with their classes. The greatest share of Mr. Angstman’s students worked at one of the four Hearthside plants in the city.
The company, which has 39 factories in the United States, has been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 34 violations since 2019, including for unsafe conveyor belts at the plant where Carolina found her job. At least 11 workers suffered amputations in that time. In 2015, a machine caught the hairnet of an Ohio worker and ripped off part of her scalp.
The history of accidents “shows a corporate culture that lacks urgency to keep workers safe,” an OSHA official wrote after the most recent violation for an amputation.
Underage workers in Grand Rapids said that spicy dust from immense batches of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos made their lungs sting, and that moving heavy pallets of cereal all night made their backs ache. They worried about their hands getting caught in conveyor belts, which federal law classifies as so hazardous that no child Carolina’s age is permitted to work with them.
Hearthside said in a statement that it was committed to complying with laws governing worker protections. “We strongly dispute the safety allegations made and are proud of our safety-first culture,” the statement read.
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A selfie taken by a 17-year-old at a Hearthside facility in Grand Rapids. She said older men at the factory sometimes harassed her.
Federal law bars minors from a long list of dangerous jobs, including roofing, meat processing and commercial baking. Except on farms, children younger than 16 are not supposed to work for more than three hours or after 7 p.m. on school days.
But these jobs — which are grueling and poorly paid, and thus chronically short-staffed — are exactly where many migrant children are ending up. Adolescents are twice as likely as adults to be seriously injured at work, yet recently arrived preteens and teenagers are running industrial dough mixers, driving massive earthmovers and burning their hands on hot tar as they lay down roofing shingles, The Times found.
Unaccompanied minors have had their legs torn off in factories and their spines shattered on construction sites, but most of these injuries go uncounted. The Labor Department tracks the deaths of foreign-born child workers but no longer makes them public. Reviewing state and federal safety records and public reports, The Times found a dozen cases of young migrant workers killed since 2017, the last year the Labor Department reported any.
The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles.
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From left: Oscar Nambo Dominguez, 16, was crushed last year under an earthmover near Atlanta. Edwin Ajacalon, 14, was hit by a car while delivering food on a bike in Brooklyn. Juan Mauricio Ortiz, 15, died on his first day of work for an Alabama roofing company when he fell about 50 feet.
In 2021, Karla Campbell, a Nashville labor lawyer, helped a woman figure out how to transport the body of her 14-year-old grandson, who had been killed on a landscaping job, back to his village in Guatemala. It was the second child labor death she had handled that year.
“I’ve been working on these cases for 15 years, and the addition of children is new,” Ms. Campbell said.
In dairy production, the injury rate is twice the national average across all industries. Paco Calvo arrived in Middlebury, Vt., when he was 14 and has been working 12-hour days on dairy farms in the four years since. He said he crushed his hand in an industrial milking machine in the first months of doing this work.
“Pretty much everyone gets hurt when they first start,” he said.
Targeting the Middlemen
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Young workers exited an overnight cleaning shift last October at a JBS pork plant in Worthington, Minn. Their employer, a sanitation company, was later fined for violating child labor laws.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Charlene Irizarry, the human resources manager at Farm Fresh Foods, an Alabama meat plant that struggles to retain staff, recently realized she was interviewing a 12-year-old for a job slicing chicken breasts into nuggets in a section of the factory kept at 40 degrees.
Ms. Irizarry regularly sees job applicants who use heavy makeup or medical masks to try to hide their youth, she said. “Sometimes their legs don’t touch the floor.”
Other times, an adult will apply for a job in the morning, and then a child using the same name will show up for orientation that afternoon. She and her staff have begun separating other young applicants from the adults who bring them in, so they will admit their real ages.
Ms. Irizarry said the plant had already been fined for one child labor violation, and she was trying to avoid another. But she wondered what the children might face if she turned them away.
“I worry about why they’re so desperate for these jobs,” she said.
In interviews with underage migrant workers, The Times found child labor in the American supply chains of many major brands and retailers. Several, including Ford, General Motors, J. Crew and Walmart, as well as their suppliers, said they took the allegations seriously and would investigate. Target and Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment. Fruit of the Loom said it had ended its contract with the supplier.
One company, Ben & Jerry’s, said it worked with labor groups to ensure a minimum set of working conditions at its dairy suppliers. Cheryl Pinto, the company’s head of values-led sourcing, said that if migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace.
The Labor Department is supposed to find and punish child labor violations, but inspectors in a dozen states said their understaffed offices could barely respond to complaints, much less open original investigations. When the department has responded to tips on migrant children, it has focused on the outside contractors and staffing agencies that usually employ them, not the corporations where they perform the work.
In Worthington, Minn., it had long been an open secret that migrant children released by H.H.S. were cleaning a slaughterhouse run by JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. The town has received more unaccompanied migrant children per capita than almost anywhere in the country.
Outside the JBS pork plant last fall, The Times spoke with baby-faced workers who chased and teased one another as they came off their shifts in the morning. Many had scratched their assumed names off company badges to hide evidence that they were working under false identities. Some said they had suffered chemical burns from the corrosive cleaners they used.
Not long afterward, labor inspectors responding to a tip found 22 Spanish-speaking children working for the company hired to clean the JBS plant in Worthington, and dozens more in the same job at meat-processing plants around the United States.
But the Labor Department can generally only issue fines. The cleaning company paid a $1.5 million penalty, while JBS said it had been unaware that children were scouring the Worthington factory each night. JBS fired the cleaning contractor.
Many of the children who were working there have found new jobs at other plants, The Times found.
“I still have to pay back my debt, so I still have to work,” said Mauricio Ramirez, 17, who has found a meat processing job in the next town over.
‘Not What I Imagined’
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Cristian Lopez, 16, pictured with his 12-year-old sister, Jennifer, works at a Hearthside facility in Grand Rapids. Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
It has been a little more than a year since Carolina left Guatemala, and she has started to make some friends. She and another girl who works at Hearthside have necklaces that fit together, each strung with half a heart. When she has time, she posts selfies online decorated with smiley faces and flowers.
Mostly, though, she keeps to herself. Her teachers do not know many details about her journey to the border. When the topic came up at school recently, Carolina began sobbing and would not say why.
After a week of 17-hour days, she sat at home one night with her aunt and considered her life in the United States. The long nights. The stress about money. “I didn’t have expectations about what life would be like here,” she said, “but it’s not what I imagined.”
She was holding a debit card given to her by a staffing agency, which paid her Hearthside salary this way so she did not have to cash checks. Carolina turned it over and over in her palm as her aunt looked on.
“I know you get sad,” Ms. Ramirez said.
Carolina looked down. She wanted to continue going to school to learn English, but she woke up most mornings with a clenched stomach and kept staying home sick. Some of her ninth grade classmates had already dropped out. The 16-year-old boy she sat next to in math class, Cristian Lopez, had left school to work overtime at Hearthside.
Cristian lived a few minutes away, in a bare two-room apartment he shared with his uncle and 12-year-old sister, Jennifer.
His sister did not go to school either, and they had spent the day bickering in their room. Now night had fallen and they were eating Froot Loops for dinner. The heat was off, so they wore winter jackets. In an interview from Guatemala, their mother, Isabel Lopez, cried as she explained that she had tried to join her children in the United States last year but was turned back at the border.
Cristian had given his uncle some of the money he earned making Chewy bars, but his uncle believed it was not enough. He had said he would like Jennifer to start working at the factory as well, and offered to take her to apply himself.
Cristian said he had recently called the H.H.S. hotline. He hoped the government would send someone to check on him and his sister, but he had not heard back. He did not think he would call again.
Research was contributed by Andrew Fischer, Seamus Hughes, Michael H. Keller and Julie Tate.
...
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Cristian works a construction job instead of going to school. He is 14.
Carolina packages Cheerios at night in a factory. She is 15.
Wander starts looking for day-labor jobs before sunrise. He is 13.
It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.
About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.
The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos — all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.
“Sometimes I get tired and feel sick,” Carolina said after a shift in November. Her stomach often hurt, and she was unsure if that was because of the lack of sleep, the stress from the incessant roar of the machines, or the worries she had for herself and her family in Guatemala. “But I’m getting used to it.”
ImageHearthside Food Solutions, one of the United States’ largest food contractors, makes and packages products for well-known snack and cereal brands.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.
The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. The Times examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.
In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia.
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Oscar Lopez, a ninth grader, works overnight at a sawmill in South Dakota. On this day, he skipped school to sleep after a 14-hour shift.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English-language learner programs say it is now common for nearly all their students to rush off to long shifts after their classes end.
“They should not be working 12-hour days, but it’s happening here,” said Valeria Lindsay, a language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, she said, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload.
Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found. In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States climbed to a high of 130,000 last year — three times what it was five years earlier — and this summer is expected to bring another wave.
These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation.
But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors.
While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.
An H.H.S. spokeswoman said the agency wanted to release children swiftly, for the sake of their well-being, but had not compromised safety. “There are numerous places along the process to continually ensure that a placement is in the best interest of the child,” said the spokeswoman, Kamara Jones.
Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses.
“It’s getting to be a business for some of these sponsors,” said Annette Passalacqua, who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida last year. Ms. Passalacqua said she saw so many children put to work, and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases, that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead, she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks and overtime.
Sponsors are required to send migrant children to school, and some students juggle classes and heavy workloads. Other children arrive to find that they have been misled by their sponsors and will not be enrolled in school.
The federal government hires child welfare agencies to track some minors who are deemed to be at high risk. But caseworkers at those agencies said that H.H.S. regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, a characterization the agency disputed.
In interviews with more than 60 caseworkers, most independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time.
A representative for Hearthside said the company relied on a staffing agency to supply some workers for its plants in Grand Rapids, but conceded that it had not required the agency to verify ages through a national system that checks Social Security numbers. Unaccompanied migrant children often obtain false identification to secure work.
“We are immediately implementing additional controls to reinforce all agencies’ strict compliance with our longstanding requirement that all workers must be 18 or over,” the company said in a statement.
At Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolina’s ninth-grade social studies teacher, Rick Angstman, has seen the toll that long shifts take on his students. One, who was working nights at a commercial laundry, began passing out in class from fatigue and was hospitalized twice, he said. Unable to stop working, she dropped out of school.
“She disappeared into oblivion,” Mr. Angstman said. “It’s the new child labor. You’re taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.”
On the Night Shift
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Children being processed by the U.S. Border Patrol in Roma, Texas. In the past two years alone, 250,000 unaccompanied minors have come into the country.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
When Carolina left Guatemala, she had no real understanding of what she was heading toward, just a sense that she could not stay in her village any longer. There was not much electricity or water, and after the pandemic began, not much food.
The only people who seemed to be getting by were the families living off remittances from relatives in the United States. Carolina lived alone with her grandmother, whose health began failing. When neighbors started talking about heading north, she decided to join. She was 14.
“I just kept walking,” she said.
Carolina reached the U.S. border exhausted, weighing 84 pounds. Agents sent her to an H.H.S. shelter in Arizona, where a caseworker contacted her aunt, Marcelina Ramirez. Ms. Ramirez was at first reluctant: She had already sponsored two other relatives and had three children of her own. They were living on $600 a week, and she didn’t know Carolina.
When Carolina arrived in Grand Rapids last year, Ms. Ramirez told her she would go to school every morning and suggested that she pick up evening shifts at Hearthside. She knew Carolina needed to send money back to her grandmother. She also believed it was good for young people to work. Child labor is the norm in rural Guatemala, and she herself had started working around the second grade.
One of the nation’s largest contract manufacturers, Hearthside makes and packages food for companies like Frito-Lay, General Mills and Quaker Oats. “It would be hard to find a cookie or cracker aisle in any leading grocer that does not contain multiple products from Hearthside production facilities,” a Grand Rapids-area plant manager told a trade magazine in 2019.
General Mills, whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley, said it recognized “the seriousness of this situation” and was reviewing The Times’s findings. PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats, declined to comment.
Three people who until last year worked at one of the biggest employment agencies in Grand Rapids, Forge Industrial Staffing, said Hearthside supervisors were sometimes made aware that they were getting young-looking workers whose identities had been flagged as false.
“Hearthside didn’t care,” said Nubia Malacara, a former Forge employee who said she had also worked at Hearthside as a minor.
In a statement, Hearthside said, “We do care deeply about this issue and are concerned about the mischaracterization of Hearthside.” A spokesman for Forge said it complied with state and federal laws and “would never knowingly employ individuals under 18.”
Kevin Tomas said he sought work through Forge after he arrived in Grand Rapids at age 13 with his 7-year-old brother. At first, he was sent to a local manufacturer that made auto parts for Ford and General Motors. But his shift ended at 6:30 in the morning, so he could not stay awake in school, and he struggled to lift the heavy boxes.
“It’s not that we want to be working these jobs. It’s that we have to help our families,” Kevin said.
By the time he was 15, Kevin had found a job at Hearthside, stacking 50-pound cases of cereal on the same shift as Carolina.
‘So Many Red Flags’
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Cristian, 14, has been working in construction in North Miami for two years instead of going to school. Federal law bars minors from a long list of such jobs.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.
“As the government, we’ve turned a blind eye to their trafficking,” said Doug Gilmer, the head of the Birmingham, Ala., office of Homeland Security Investigations, a federal agency that often becomes involved with immigration cases.
Mr. Gilmer teared up as he recalled finding 13-year-olds working in meat plants; 12-year-olds working at suppliers for Hyundai and Kia, as documented last year by a Reuters investigation; and children who should have been in middle school working at commercial bakeries.
“We’re encountering it here because we’re looking for it here,” Mr. Gilmer said. “It’s happening everywhere.”
Children have crossed the Southern border on their own for decades, and since 2008, the United States has allowed non-Mexican minors to live with sponsors while they go through immigration proceedings, which can take several years. The policy, codified in anti-trafficking legislation, is intended to prevent harm to children who would otherwise be turned away and left alone in a Mexican border town.
When Kelsey Keswani first worked as an H.H.S. contractor in Arizona to connect unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors in 2010, the adults were almost always the children’s parents, who had paid smugglers to bring them up from Central America, she said.
But around 2014, the number of arriving children began to climb, and their circumstances were different. In recent years, “the kids almost all have a debt to pay off, and they’re super stressed about it,” Ms. Keswani said.
She began to see more failures in the vetting process. “There were so many cases where sponsors had sponsored multiple kids, and it wasn’t getting caught. So many red flags with debt. So many reports of trafficking.”
Now, just a third of migrant children are going to their parents. A majority are sent to other relatives, acquaintances or even strangers, a Times analysis of federal data showed. Nearly half are coming from Guatemala, where poverty is fueling a wave of migration. Parents know that they would be turned away at the border or quickly deported, so they send their children in hopes that remittances will come back.
In the last two years alone, more than 250,000 children have entered the United States by themselves.
The shifting dynamics in Central America helped create a political crisis early in Mr. Biden’s presidency, when children started crossing the border faster than H.H.S. could process them. With no room left in shelters, the children stayed in jail-like facilities run by Customs and Border Protection and, later, in tent cities. The images of children sleeping on gym mats under foil blankets attracted intense media attention.
The Biden administration pledged to move children through the shelter system more quickly. “We don’t want to continue to see a child languish in our care if there is a responsible sponsor,” Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services, told Congress in 2021.
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A detention site in the Rio Grande Valley in March 2021. The Biden administration has faced pressure to move unaccompanied children through the system quickly.Credit...Pool photo by Dario Lopez-Mills
His agency began paring back protections that had been in place for years, including some background checks and reviews of children’s files, according to memos reviewed by The Times and interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
“Twenty percent of kids have to be released every week or you get dinged,” said Ms. Keswani, who stopped working with H.H.S. last month.
Concerns piled up in summer 2021 at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children. In a memo that July, 11 managers said they were worried that labor trafficking was increasing and complained to their bosses that the office had become “one that rewards individuals for making quick releases, and not one that rewards individuals for preventing unsafe releases.”
Staff members said in interviews that Mr. Becerra continued to push for faster results, often asking why they could not discharge children with machine-like efficiency.
“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” Mr. Becerra said at a staff meeting last summer, according to a recording obtained by The Times.
The H.H.S. spokeswoman, Ms. Jones, said that Mr. Becerra had urged his staff to “step it up.” “Like any good leader, he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again — especially when it comes to the well-being and safety of children,” she said.
During a call last March, Mr. Becerra told Cindy Huang, the O.R.R. director, that if she could not increase the number of discharges, he would find someone who could, according to five people familiar with the call. She resigned a month later.
He recently made a similar threat to her successor during a meeting with senior leadership, according to several people who were present.
‘It Was All Lies’
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Migrant children were among the day laborers who gathered on a school day in Homestead, Fla., to find roofing, landscaping or other work.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
While many migrant children are sent to the United States by their parents, others are persuaded to come by adults who plan to profit from their labor.
Nery Cutzal was 13 when he met his sponsor over Facebook Messenger. Once Nery arrived in Florida, he discovered that he owed more than $4,000 and had to find his own place to live. His sponsor sent him threatening text messages and kept a running list of new debts: $140 for filling out H.H.S. paperwork; $240 for clothes from Walmart; $45 for a taco dinner.
“Don’t mess with me,” the sponsor wrote. “You don’t mean anything to me.”
Nery began working until 3 a.m. most nights at a trendy Mexican restaurant near Palm Beach to make the payments. “He said I would be able to go to school and he would take care of me, but it was all lies,” Nery said.
His father, Leonel Cutzal, said the family had become destitute after a series of bad harvests and had no choice but to send their oldest son north from Guatemala.
“Even when he shares $50, it’s a huge help,” Mr. Cutzal said. “Otherwise, there are times we don’t eat.” Mr. Cutzal had not understood how much Nery would be made to work, he said. “I think he passed through some hard moments being up there so young.”
Nery eventually contacted law enforcement, and his sponsor was found guilty last year of smuggling a child into the United States for financial gain. That outcome is rare: In the past decade, federal prosecutors have brought only about 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied minors, according to a Times review of court databases.
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A handwritten ledger, in Spanish, of Nery Cutzal’s debts to his sponsor, including money for tacos and clothes. The child owed more than $4,000, plus interest. Court information has been redacted for privacy.
Unlike the foster care system, in which all children get case management, H.H.S. provides this service to about a third of children who pass through its care, and usually for just four months. Tens of thousands of other children are sent to their sponsors with little but the phone number for a national hotline. From there, they are often on their own: There is no formal follow-up from any federal or local agencies to ensure that sponsors are not putting children to work illegally.
In Pennsylvania, one case worker told The Times he went to check on a child released to a man who had applied to sponsor 20 other minors. The boy had vanished. In Texas, another case worker said she had encountered a man who had been targeting poor families in Guatemala, promising to help them get rich if they sent their children across the border. He had sponsored 13 children.
“If you’ve been in this field for any amount of time, you know that there’s what the sponsors agree to, and what they’re actually doing,” said Bernal Cruz Munoz, a caseworker supervisor in Oregon.
Calling the hotline is not a sure way to get support, either. Juanito Ferrer called for help after he was brought to Manassas, Va., at age 15 by an acquaintance who forced him to paint houses during the day and guard an apartment complex at night. His sponsor took his paychecks and watched him on security cameras as he slept on the basement floor.
Juanito said that when he called the hotline in 2019, the person on the other end just took a report. “I thought they’d send the police or someone to check, but they never did that,” he said. “I thought they would come and inspect the house, at least.” He eventually escaped.
Asked about the hotline, H.H.S. said operators passed reports onto law enforcement and other local agencies because the agency did not have the authority to remove children from homes.
The Times analyzed government data to identify places with high concentrations of children who had been released to people outside their immediate families — a sign that they might have been expected to work. In northwest Grand Rapids, for instance, 93 percent of children have been released to adults who are not their parents.
H.H.S. does not track these clusters, but the trends are so pronounced that officials sometimes notice hot spots anyway.
Scott Lloyd, who led the resettlement office in the Trump administration, said he realized in 2018 that the number of unaccompanied Guatemalan boys being released to sponsors in South Florida seemed to be growing.
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Jose Vasquez, 13, photographed at the church he attends in Grand Rapids, Mich. He works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at an egg farm outside the city.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
“I always wondered what was happening there,” he said.
But his attention was diverted by the chaos around the Trump administration’s child separation policy, and he never looked into it. The trend he saw has only accelerated: For example, in the past three years, more than 200 children have been released to distant relatives or unrelated adults around Immokalee, Fla., an agricultural hub with a long history of labor exploitation.
In a statement, H.H.S. said it had updated its case management system to better flag instances when multiple children were being released to the same person or address.
Many sponsors see themselves as benevolent, doing a friend or neighbor a favor by agreeing to help a child get out of a government shelter, even if they do not intend to offer any support. Children often understand that they will have to work, but do not grasp the unrelenting grind that awaits them.
“I didn’t get how expensive everything was,” said 13-year-old Jose Vasquez, who works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister. “I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay rent?”
Occupational Hazards
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Carolina Yoc, back right, worked on math problems after a night shift at a Grand Rapids food plant. The 13-year-old girl sitting next to her said she also worked nights at a factory.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
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One fall morning at Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolina listened to Mr. Angstman lecture on the journalist Jacob Riis and the Progressive Era movement that helped create federal child labor laws. He explained that the changes were meant to keep young people out of jobs that could harm their health or safety, and showed the class a photo of a small boy making cigars.
“Riis reported that members of this family worked 17 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told the students. “The cramped space reeked of toxic fumes.” Students seemed unmoved. Some struggled to stay awake.
Teachers at the school estimated that 200 of their immigrant students were working full time while trying to keep up with their classes. The greatest share of Mr. Angstman’s students worked at one of the four Hearthside plants in the city.
The company, which has 39 factories in the United States, has been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 34 violations since 2019, including for unsafe conveyor belts at the plant where Carolina found her job. At least 11 workers suffered amputations in that time. In 2015, a machine caught the hairnet of an Ohio worker and ripped off part of her scalp.
The history of accidents “shows a corporate culture that lacks urgency to keep workers safe,” an OSHA official wrote after the most recent violation for an amputation.
Underage workers in Grand Rapids said that spicy dust from immense batches of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos made their lungs sting, and that moving heavy pallets of cereal all night made their backs ache. They worried about their hands getting caught in conveyor belts, which federal law classifies as so hazardous that no child Carolina’s age is permitted to work with them.
Hearthside said in a statement that it was committed to complying with laws governing worker protections. “We strongly dispute the safety allegations made and are proud of our safety-first culture,” the statement read.
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A selfie taken by a 17-year-old at a Hearthside facility in Grand Rapids. She said older men at the factory sometimes harassed her.
Federal law bars minors from a long list of dangerous jobs, including roofing, meat processing and commercial baking. Except on farms, children younger than 16 are not supposed to work for more than three hours or after 7 p.m. on school days.
But these jobs — which are grueling and poorly paid, and thus chronically short-staffed — are exactly where many migrant children are ending up. Adolescents are twice as likely as adults to be seriously injured at work, yet recently arrived preteens and teenagers are running industrial dough mixers, driving massive earthmovers and burning their hands on hot tar as they lay down roofing shingles, The Times found.
Unaccompanied minors have had their legs torn off in factories and their spines shattered on construction sites, but most of these injuries go uncounted. The Labor Department tracks the deaths of foreign-born child workers but no longer makes them public. Reviewing state and federal safety records and public reports, The Times found a dozen cases of young migrant workers killed since 2017, the last year the Labor Department reported any.
The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles.
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From left: Oscar Nambo Dominguez, 16, was crushed last year under an earthmover near Atlanta. Edwin Ajacalon, 14, was hit by a car while delivering food on a bike in Brooklyn. Juan Mauricio Ortiz, 15, died on his first day of work for an Alabama roofing company when he fell about 50 feet.
In 2021, Karla Campbell, a Nashville labor lawyer, helped a woman figure out how to transport the body of her 14-year-old grandson, who had been killed on a landscaping job, back to his village in Guatemala. It was the second child labor death she had handled that year.
“I’ve been working on these cases for 15 years, and the addition of children is new,” Ms. Campbell said.
In dairy production, the injury rate is twice the national average across all industries. Paco Calvo arrived in Middlebury, Vt., when he was 14 and has been working 12-hour days on dairy farms in the four years since. He said he crushed his hand in an industrial milking machine in the first months of doing this work.
“Pretty much everyone gets hurt when they first start,” he said.
Targeting the Middlemen
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Young workers exited an overnight cleaning shift last October at a JBS pork plant in Worthington, Minn. Their employer, a sanitation company, was later fined for violating child labor laws.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Charlene Irizarry, the human resources manager at Farm Fresh Foods, an Alabama meat plant that struggles to retain staff, recently realized she was interviewing a 12-year-old for a job slicing chicken breasts into nuggets in a section of the factory kept at 40 degrees.
Ms. Irizarry regularly sees job applicants who use heavy makeup or medical masks to try to hide their youth, she said. “Sometimes their legs don’t touch the floor.”
Other times, an adult will apply for a job in the morning, and then a child using the same name will show up for orientation that afternoon. She and her staff have begun separating other young applicants from the adults who bring them in, so they will admit their real ages.
Ms. Irizarry said the plant had already been fined for one child labor violation, and she was trying to avoid another. But she wondered what the children might face if she turned them away.
“I worry about why they’re so desperate for these jobs,” she said.
In interviews with underage migrant workers, The Times found child labor in the American supply chains of many major brands and retailers. Several, including Ford, General Motors, J. Crew and Walmart, as well as their suppliers, said they took the allegations seriously and would investigate. Target and Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment. Fruit of the Loom said it had ended its contract with the supplier.
One company, Ben & Jerry’s, said it worked with labor groups to ensure a minimum set of working conditions at its dairy suppliers. Cheryl Pinto, the company’s head of values-led sourcing, said that if migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace.
The Labor Department is supposed to find and punish child labor violations, but inspectors in a dozen states said their understaffed offices could barely respond to complaints, much less open original investigations. When the department has responded to tips on migrant children, it has focused on the outside contractors and staffing agencies that usually employ them, not the corporations where they perform the work.
In Worthington, Minn., it had long been an open secret that migrant children released by H.H.S. were cleaning a slaughterhouse run by JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. The town has received more unaccompanied migrant children per capita than almost anywhere in the country.
Outside the JBS pork plant last fall, The Times spoke with baby-faced workers who chased and teased one another as they came off their shifts in the morning. Many had scratched their assumed names off company badges to hide evidence that they were working under false identities. Some said they had suffered chemical burns from the corrosive cleaners they used.
Not long afterward, labor inspectors responding to a tip found 22 Spanish-speaking children working for the company hired to clean the JBS plant in Worthington, and dozens more in the same job at meat-processing plants around the United States.
But the Labor Department can generally only issue fines. The cleaning company paid a $1.5 million penalty, while JBS said it had been unaware that children were scouring the Worthington factory each night. JBS fired the cleaning contractor.
Many of the children who were working there have found new jobs at other plants, The Times found.
“I still have to pay back my debt, so I still have to work,” said Mauricio Ramirez, 17, who has found a meat processing job in the next town over.
‘Not What I Imagined’
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Cristian Lopez, 16, pictured with his 12-year-old sister, Jennifer, works at a Hearthside facility in Grand Rapids. Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
It has been a little more than a year since Carolina left Guatemala, and she has started to make some friends. She and another girl who works at Hearthside have necklaces that fit together, each strung with half a heart. When she has time, she posts selfies online decorated with smiley faces and flowers.
Mostly, though, she keeps to herself. Her teachers do not know many details about her journey to the border. When the topic came up at school recently, Carolina began sobbing and would not say why.
After a week of 17-hour days, she sat at home one night with her aunt and considered her life in the United States. The long nights. The stress about money. “I didn’t have expectations about what life would be like here,” she said, “but it’s not what I imagined.”
She was holding a debit card given to her by a staffing agency, which paid her Hearthside salary this way so she did not have to cash checks. Carolina turned it over and over in her palm as her aunt looked on.
“I know you get sad,” Ms. Ramirez said.
Carolina looked down. She wanted to continue going to school to learn English, but she woke up most mornings with a clenched stomach and kept staying home sick. Some of her ninth grade classmates had already dropped out. The 16-year-old boy she sat next to in math class, Cristian Lopez, had left school to work overtime at Hearthside.
Cristian lived a few minutes away, in a bare two-room apartment he shared with his uncle and 12-year-old sister, Jennifer.
His sister did not go to school either, and they had spent the day bickering in their room. Now night had fallen and they were eating Froot Loops for dinner. The heat was off, so they wore winter jackets. In an interview from Guatemala, their mother, Isabel Lopez, cried as she explained that she had tried to join her children in the United States last year but was turned back at the border.
Cristian had given his uncle some of the money he earned making Chewy bars, but his uncle believed it was not enough. He had said he would like Jennifer to start working at the factory as well, and offered to take her to apply himself.
Cristian said he had recently called the H.H.S. hotline. He hoped the government would send someone to check on him and his sister, but he had not heard back. He did not think he would call again.
Research was contributed by Andrew Fischer, Seamus Hughes, Michael H. Keller and Julie Tate.
Thanks Sree. This article might be better titled, “Careful what you wish for.” Child labour laws in the US are reasonably good, but they are not designed for the problems facing unaccompanied migrant children. Allowing a US teenager to earn pocket money by working a few hours a week at McDonald's is very different from managing the rules by which undocumented and unaccompanied child migrants survive in the US while trying to send money home. The article correctly calls this “..a new economy of exploitation.”
ReplyDeleteBack in the bad old days of the Trump Administration, we all were rightly outraged by photos and stories of migrant children separated from their families at the border and then held in giant detention camps while their parents were sent back across the border. Partly as a result, more and more child migrants arrive without family members, knowing that as children they will be granted entry, while adults will be held back in Mexico. As the article points out, some 250,000 unaccompanied children arrived in the past two years alone.
Desperate to avoid damaging images of children held in detention camps, the Biden Administration has pushed border authorities to minimise the time children can be detained - instead, moving them on quickly to ‘sponsors’. The sponsors may be distant relatives (or at least claim to be). The time pressure means that the vetting process is minimal, and sponsors may also end up being traffickers.
Even if the sponsor is a well-intentioned family member, they know that the prime reason the child has come to the US is to earn money to send to the family at home and so help in finding work, knowing full well that such work is illegal. Employers share an interest in wanting to find workers willing to work dirty dangerous jobs at night hours and so are willing to ‘keep a blind eye’ when teens show up with obviously forged certificates of age and identity. If caught, they can blame the contractors, and the contractors will simply blame the kids.
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ReplyDeleteThe investigation by the NYTimes follows on the heels of an investigation by the federal government of a major cleaning company contracted to clean meat packing plants in 8 states. The company employed over one hundred teenage migrant children to clean the plants at night using dangerous caustic chemicals to clean highly dangerous saws and other equipment. The result was a fine of $1.5 million for the company and a promise to better verify the ages of workers. The federal investigation also pointed to likely fines for many other companies.
The problem is that the companies can easily pay the fines and move on, perhaps with stricter rules on checking ages, but the children will almost certainly find other smaller employers willing to pay them ‘under the table’ and less likely to be visited by federal and state inspectors.
Some child advocates now ask, “What have these investigations accomplished?” The employers are happy to pay the fines and promise stricter enforcement of age limits. The kids lose higher salary jobs and will now have to take lower pay elsewhere. The government will be stricter in vetting sponsors and insisting on proof of full-time school attendance. The result will likely be that children will end up spending much longer in detention camps waiting for a vetted sponsor.
Did anything positive emerge for the children and their families at home? No - in the attempt to make a more humane approach to child migration, we have made the situation worse.
The solution, of course, lies in working out better rules for legal immigration, but the politics around immigration in the US have not made progress for many years and the stalemate in Congress means that little may change for the foreseeable future. One thing that could be done is to tighten rules over allowing unaccompanied minors to cross the border. This would have a negative effect on their possibilities to earn money and send it home, but at least we would not be keeping more kids with their families and weakening the ‘new economy of exploitation’.
These exploited teenage migrants are, I believe, coming from countries with incompetent, corrupt, and abusive governance - the source of so much, if not all ill. These countries have no doubt received huge amounts of aid over the past 50 years - but to no avail.
ReplyDeleteIs this a reason to rethink aid?
I remember David Haxton telling us at our induction he owes it to the part time job he had as a school student at a gasoline station ⛽️ for having made it to UNICEF. It rings fresh meaning to me today. It is good to be aspirational but realities stare you on your face.
ReplyDeleteSome amount of child labour will remain inevitable not only in a developing economy but also in the developed world. The question is can we make it less exploitative.
Can it at all be done with a human face keeping the best interests of the child as a priority?
Can it be combined rather with skills development in a safe and protective learning environment?
Can there be ways of rewarding the child for contributions made? It could be in the nature of a stipend or a scholarship.
A factory setting in my opinion is never the best environment for a child to learn skills for life so as to derive economic benefit as an outcome if that be what we have reduced child labour to.
In my opinion, it helps to be objective rather than being swayed by sensationalism in a matter of such magnitude. Much fresh thinking is needed to address child labour and solutions are not simple where it relates to deep rooted structural causes within society.
It is still very sad and depressing. Not only this situation, also kids who are running away from oppressed regeims such as those of taliban and are drowning and dying so close to freedom, like the most recent ship close to Italy where 60 people died most of them Afghans. My heart goes out to their families.
ReplyDeleteLast year my own young nephew asked me for money (US$ 10 to 20,000) so he can be smuggled with his young wife and 2 little kids to Europe. I refused and yelled at him so loud. I told him if you die in your country your old parents accept it as well of God and will know where your grave is and they will visit your grave for greiving. When one of those so called ship drowns you disappear from their lives completely. Good thing he listened. Desperation is awful and sadly we have a lot of desperate people! Gulbadan
ReplyDeleteBiden Administration Plans Crackdown on Migrant Child Labor
Sree
Thanks Sree. A government crackdown on migrant child labour was certain. What is not certain is that the results for migrant children will be positive. My guess is that it just means that more kids will end up spending long periods in detention camps.
ReplyDeleteI am sure that you have also seen this article in the NY Times newsletter.
ReplyDeleteSam
Let us see what UNICEF has to say:
ReplyDeleteEnding Child Labour through a Multisectoral Approach (Dec 2021) has little to say what exactly governments need to do, or why progress has stalled in spite of “UNICEF working through a multisectoral approach in 115 countries”
The Child labour and responsible business conduct – a guidance note for action (June 22) tells businesses how to meet SDG Target 8.7. In its foreword, the note celebrates the tenth anniversary of the ‘Child Rights and Business Principles’, but is also candid about the extent of child labour not having been reduced for the last 7 years. Perhaps guidance note has not been sent to, or not been read by, the businesses engaging children as labourers, including those mentioned in the NYTimes article.
The Child Protection Advocacy Brief: Child labour analyse child labour as both a cause and a consequence of poverty, but attempts to describe UNICEF’s integrated, innovative and evidence-based approach. This apparently incudes increasing data collection, bolstering the social service workforce and preventing violence, exploitation and abuse. Perhaps our retirement workforce in India can have a look and assess progress in ‘eight states that have developed a child labour plan of action, scaled up programmes, including a social and behaviour change strategy for seven districts spanning over 44 blocks in Bihar’
COVID-19 and child labour a time of crisis, a time to act deplores the decline of the world economy caused by covid-19, but has a very good but also very long list of ‘things that governments can do’, ranging from the enactment of social protection measures, access to credit, access to education, and promotion of changes in thinking. It doesn’t say what governments or societies should do hat give a damn about child labour.
As expected by its title, the Child Protection Systems Strengthening – Approaches, Benchmarks and Interventions is rather theoretical concoction full of frameworks.
Don’t get me wrong – All of the above documents are certainly good and useful in their own way, although some could do with less self-promotion and more practical advice. But for all the key question remains unanswered: how do you get governments really interested in eliminating child labour?
sorry Gautam.. I do not understand your statement: "In my opinion, it helps to be objective rather than being swayed by sensationalism in a matter of such magnitude.” What is it that you are referring to here? we need to expose the employers and greedy middlemen in society who exploit innocent children, who are often forced to work by their family situation… I have worked closely with UNICEF-ILO’s projects for removing children in the matchmaking industry and have horror stories to share in the late 1980s.. The then Minister of Labour and SocialWelfare (Tamilnadu) himself had worked in the match factories and was totally committed to availing of UNICEF-ILO assistance.let me tell you it was possible to get children out of the match making and firework industries…. family-based incentives were set and close monitoring of the children's school attendance. through the rural development department and the banks we secured substantive livelihood support to the families in Dharmapuri and Sivakasi. The then GOI Secretary, Rural Development (Mr Sankaran) was instrumental in enhancing such support approving additional provisions to those districts under the Integrated Rural Development Programme.
ReplyDeleteWhat you may label as ‘sensational ‘ was the burning bus incident - the fire in the bus carrying children , all below 10 years , from far-off villages to a match factory at 6.00 am in the morning,more than 30 children were burnt to death.The incident made national headlines. While there was general awareness about the high rates of child labour in those two drought districts of Tamilnadu,I believe it was that incident that triggered all agencies to act in an integrated manner and be accountable. For instance, I got involved as the focal person for UNICEF's cooperation with the Rural Development Ministry along with Gerry Pinto , the child labour focal point and Khin Sandy Lwin (spelling?) as Representative for South India.
Sree
Very well stated, Sree! Sensationalism in philosophy is another word for phenomenalism. I know English is a difficult language with semantics.
ReplyDeleteWhen we talk of enforcing child labour laws, we usually consider children working in their own country. These children face exploitation not primarily because they are children, but because they are not US citizens. As such, they are 'easy pickings' for traffickers and unscrupulous employers. Moreover, as non-citizens, they do not get the benefits when they work that an American teenager would earn - Social Security, unemployment benefits and health benefits.
ReplyDeleteUnaccompanied children are generally given an expedited temporary entry to the US - an entry permit a family would wait months or years to obtain. This creates an incentive to arrive at the border without an accompanying adult. Placing the child with a sponsor is supposed to be a temporary solution so that the child can have a safe place to live, attend school, get health care, etc.- but not to find work - at least until the child reaches legal age and can apply for citizenship.
So the question is first whether unaccompanied children should be given a special right of entry not afforded to an accompanying adult. Then whether special rules on school attendance and so forth should apply to migrant children awaiting legal status as citizens.
Similar issues for migrant children face European countries and the UK. How to handle the special needs of unaccompanied migrant children? How to regulate their needs for schooling, health care, and most of all, their desire to earn money to send 'home' to their families.
I wonder whether IOM, UNICEF, ILO or other international bodies have offered guidance on these issues. If not, I think they should soon as the problems are growing.
In Germany, unaccompanied minors fall under the care of the youth welfare services, which is rather strict. Within 24 hours after entering the border (or otherwise found) they are assigned to a foster family or care home run by welfare services. Health care and education is free - school attendance is mandatory until education is completed.
ReplyDeleteIn reply to Detlef - The process for unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the border is similar to what you describe for Germany. They are assigned to the Office of Refugee Resettlement which will seek a sponsor to take responsibility for the child. With over 130,000 unaccompanied children arriving each year, the sponsor process is easily overwhelmed, resulting in the children staying in a border detention camp while the search for a sponsor and verification of their bona fides is underway. Keeping kids in detention camps is bad politics, so there is considerable pressure to move them on to sponsors with minimal vetting or subsequent monitoring. Once with a sponsor, school attendance is mandatory, but difficult to enforce. The sponsors are often family members and know that the child has come to earn money for the family back home - and only secondarily for school. So they often end up 'helping' the child find employment regardless of this being illegal.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Sree’s posting, discussions around the feature has generated varied responses and more I am sure will follow. There is no easy solution to ‘fixing’ child labour since the malady often lies embedded in deep structural causes within society. To name a few and in a developing country context, poverty, social norms condoning child labour, lack of decent work opportunities for adults and adolescents, migration and emergencies stand out in prominence. These factors are not only the cause but also a consequence of social inequities along with power dynamics within society.
ReplyDeleteUniversalism in approach to seek remedies does not work in most cases, no matter how aspirational we may be. There are varied and complex societal and economic realities specific to each country and region, further compounded by cultural factors, that come into play. Some cultural beliefs and social norms can be drivers of child labour, with cultural relativism standing as an excuse. The view that work is good for the character-building and skill development of children, for example, often lies at the core of beliefs in poorer communities, especially where alternatives are not available.
It is alarming to note, no doubt, that 1 in 10 child labourers worldwide is from India. (endchildlabour2021.org) According to data from Census 2011, the number of working children in India in the age group 5-14 years was 10.1 million (3.9% of the total child population), of which 5.6 million were boys and 4.5 million girls. However, the good news is that the incidence of child labour had decreased in India by 2.6 million between 2001 and 2011. The numbers would have further declined between 2011 and today. These can be traced to positive policy directions of the government and the political will to see it through.
Subsequent to the amendment in the Child Labour Act in 2016, the Indian Government has ratified ILO Convention 182 (Worst Forms of Child Labour) and Convention 138 (Minimum Age of Employment) thus binding with the legal obligation to ensure the effective abolition of child labour. The Ministry of Labour and Employment operated online portal allows government officials, law enforcement agencies and NGOs to share information and coordinate on child labour cases at the national, state, and local levels in an attempt to improve enforcement of child labour laws and the implementation of the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) scheme.
These are very positive developments no doubt but given the fact that 33 million child labourers still reside in India and India still ranks among the top ten listed countries where child labour is the highest, despite the overall numbers trending in the right direction, progress must not stop here. Programmes and policies which consider the voices of the communities where child labour occurs, and the root causes, can advance real and sustainable progress in the fight against child labour and India has the capacity to demonstrate that it can be done.
If one out of ten child laborers is Indian, India is doing remarkedly well and a lot better than the rest of the world. The population of India is about 17 percent of the world's total, but only 10 percent of the world's child laborers are Indian.
ReplyDeleteWell said. Yet in absolute terms - 33 million children in child labour - the figure is staggering, like everything else in absolute terms about India. The counter argument, no doubt, is that India has taken upon itself the responsibility of one fifth of the total population of the world. If India can do it, unaided, within an open and democratic political system where the will of the people should prevail, it will no doubt be one big step in development for mankind and one big miracle on planet earth. It's time for India to demonstrate that it can be done. I am optimistic!
ReplyDelete@Tom. It obviously is the prospect of getting a job (as a minor) that causes parents to send their children on the journey to the USA. Comparatively few unaccompanied minors arrive in the EU, as the prospect of finding a job as a minor in most of the EU is rather slim. Moreover, in much of the EU, unaccompanied minors are either taken care of in foster families (paid and supervised by the state), or in care homes. The authorities looking after them are the youth welfare services, having first and foremost the best interest of the children in mind.
ReplyDeleteIn my mind, a ‘refugee settlement office’ appears to treat them first and foremost as a refugee. Moreover, the ‘sponsor concept’ as practiced in the USA is most likely leading the minors to relatives already living in the USA, probably themselves living in precarious conditions and hard pressed to feed yet another mouth, and therefore sending the child to earn its own living.
This all is to say that to me is looks like that conditions, regulations and practices in the USA seem to invite parents in other countries to send their minor children across.
@Detlef Thanks. Yes, for certain the vast majority of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the US Mexico border have come in order to earn money to send home. The same is likely the case in Europe as well.
ReplyDeleteAccording to UNHCR 17,185 unaccompanied children arrived in EU countries in 2021. This is 71% of all children who arrived that year (24,100) and indicates that these unaccompanied or separated children (UASC) are the vast majority of those who come. The reasons they come are likely similar to the US - seeking employment, opportunity, the chance to send money home, and the hope eventually to bring other family members. It seems unlikely that all EU countries accommodate these children in existing care homes or with foster families. Many reports suggest that they often do not, and the kids end up exploited: working on farms, selling drugs, offering sex work, peddling items on the street, and finding off-book work in small businesses.
In the UK there a recent political storm blew up over the some 222 children ‘missing’ from the hotels where the government had temporarily lodged them. What happened? They simply ‘walked away’ from temporary detention and found employers or distant relatives. With 3,000 to 4,000 such children arriving each year, the number of ‘walk aways’ in the UK alone is likely enormous.
Over 130,000 unaccompanied children arrived last year at the US / Mexico border. Trying to accommodate that number of children each year is impossible in an already overloaded foster care system or existing juvenile detention homes. After years of campaigning against orphanages and juvenile detention centres we certainly do not want to start opening more such nightmarish institutions.
There is indeed a policy problem. It lies in the idea of giving unaccompanied children a priority over families in rules governing immigration. A child arriving with a parent or parent(s) has better chances of surviving the challenges of life in a new country than he or she would being placed with a distant relative or in an institution. There are small numbers of abused children who should be allowed entry as special cases, but the vast majority should only be allowed entry as part of a family. This would remove the incentive for families to send off their children on a dangerous journey into situations where they are likely to be exploited and abused.