“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.” – Hannah Dreier, The New York Times
What happens when children, forced apart from their parents, are pushed into an immigration system that fails them in every way possible?
They end up as exploited child workers in the most punishing jobs in the U.S.
A bombshell investigative piece from The New York Times — “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. — has uncovered a shadow economy in the U.S.
Migrant children as young as 12-years old are working illegal and dangerous jobs, employed by manufacturing companies willfully looking away — and brands as popular as Ben & Jerry’s, PepsiCo, and General Mills are profiting off of this child labor.
So let’s call it what it is: enabling the exploitation of minor children who are placed in the care of sponsors vetted by the U.S. government. The shocking reality is that these children are doing some of the most dangerous jobs — and paying for it with life-threatening injuries. At least a dozen of these exploited children have died on the job.1
How did we end up here?
Family separation is at the core of our U.S. immigration policy. This is to deter immigration at the border — but this praxis fundamentally denies the lived experience of families seeking their legal and human right to asylum.
Facing food insecurity, violence, persecution, and desperation, many parents choose to send their children into the U.S. alone, hoping to reunite one day. For many of these families, this cruel choice is their only option for survival. What comes next isn’t any better.
The federal government is responsible for vetting potential sponsors who will take custody of the child and ensuring each child is in a safe home and protected from exploitation. In fact, that is the guise under which children are held in government custody for an average of one month each before being united with their sponsors.2 Tragically, so many of these children have fallen through the cracks of this irreparably broken system.
According to case workers interviewed by The New York Times, about two-thirds of all unaccompanied children work full-time.3 In the past decade, only 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied children have been litigated. The Department of Health and Human Services provides a hotline for children to call, but the agency itself doesn’t have authority to remove children from homes. It is rare for law enforcement to intervene in these cases.
No one is there to protect these children when they call for help.4
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At RAICES, we’re committed to distilling complex immigration news and sharing it with our allies and advocates who understand the high stakes in our fight for families.
References:
- Hannah Dreier, “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” New York Times, February 25, 2023.
- ACF Press Office, “FACT SHEET: Unaccompanied Children (UC) Program,” HHS, January 27, 2023.
- Hannah Dreier, “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” New York Times, February 25, 2023.
- Hannah Dreier, “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” New York Times, February 25, 2023.
This post was originally published on RAICES.