Editorial: Child labor scandal is a work of shame – San Antonio Express-News

Spurred by social and medical catastrophes — cartel violence, government instability, lack of economic opportunity and COVID-19 — unaccompanied minors entered this country in record numbers last year. At 130,000, it was triple what it had been five years before.

According to a shocking story in the New York Times, most of the children are from Central America, and they end up in brutal jobs with 12-hour days — as roofers in Tennessee, manufacturers in Michigan, slaughterhouse workers in Delaware.

Some of the employers are local operations that exploit under-the-table deals, but many are global corporations, including Walmart, Target and General Motors.

How did we reach this point?

With the number of migrant children arriving here climbing steadily for almost a decade, the Biden administration promised to create a more efficient system of placing the children with “responsible sponsors,” but in an effort to expedite the process, Health and Human Services cut back reviews that protected the children.

The result was disastrous; HHS managers expressed fears that labor trafficking was increasing, complaining that individuals were rewarded for “making quick releases” rather than preventing “unsafe releases.”

“As the government, we've turned a blind eye to the trafficking,” said Doug Gilmer, the head of the Birmingham, Ala. office for Homeland Security Investigations, a federal agency that often becomes involved with immigration cases.

Amid these shocking revelations, the Biden administration has created an interagency task force on child labor, with plans to investigate industries where violations are most likely to occur.

Packers Sanitation Services, a food safety company, recently paid a $1.5 million fine for employing 102 children, many of them migrants as young as 12, in dangerous meatpacking facilities.

“At a time when they were saying there are labor shortages, they were finding kids that would do the work,” Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy for the National Consumers League, told National Public Radio. “I think they felt that if they could get kids, they would take them.”

These children did not sneak into the country, skirting authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal officials know their whereabouts. Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will protect them from trafficking or exploitation.

Rick Angstman, a ninth grade social studies teacher at Union High School in Grand Rapids, Mich., has seen the brutalization. One of his students, Carolina, kept passing out from her long night shifts at a commercial laundry. She dropped out after two hospitalizations.

“She disappeared into oblivion,” Angstman told the New York Times. “It's the new child labor. You're taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.”

Imagine the gross injustice. They are kids, and like all children, they should be doing what children do — running, playing, laughing. But, no, they are trapped in the grinding world of child labor, hammered for the benefit of others.

Imagine the gross injustice. These children arrived in a land proud of its democracy, its hunger for and guarantee of freedom. Who could blame them for wondering if they had landed in the wrong place?

Will the children ever transcend the exploitation? Even if they leave this brutal, horrific world of child labor, will it ever leave them? Will they be scarred for life?

It is almost unimaginable this is happening in this country in the 21st century.

Without protections, the sponsorship process is a minefield. The system must be strengthened. Efficiency must not be allowed to overrule safety and humanity.

Accountability is the key. And with regard to employers, they will not be held accountable without stiff penalties. The fine levied against Packers Sanitation Services is a start, but federal investigators must remain diligent. Our children, whether or not they arrived here from other countries, are too vital for our future to allow this travesty to continue.