U.S. was warned of migrant child labor, but ‘didn’t want to hear It’

Even as veteran employees left, others kept sounding alarms. In January, shortly before the Times investigation was published, a group of workers sent another memo to their HHS bosses saying the system had resulted in unsafe discharges. “We are pulling humanity out of ‘Health and Human Services,'” they wrote.

Troubling trends

Some of the most persistent warnings that children were being funneled into dangerous jobs came from outside the government. HHS releases most children to sponsors without follow-up care, but it hires organizations to provide thousands of the most high-risk children with several months of support services.

Last spring, Matt Haygood, senior director of children's services at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, one of the largest of these organizations, sent an email with the subject line “Trafficking Concerns” to several HHS officials.

“We have identified some troubling trends in the Chicago metro area,” he wrote, including vans picking up children at odd hours, suggesting that they were being driven to factory jobs. Haygood asked if HHS would consider adding the neighborhood to a watchlist, so that prospective sponsors there would be more closely vetted.

An HHS staff member replied that more than 200 children, most of them Guatemalan, had recently been released to the neighborhood and confirmed that many of those cases had been marked as suspicious: Adults were sponsoring multiple children, and minors were working instead of attending school.

“There are certainly plenty of other concerning trafficking red flags,” the staff member wrote. Haygood expected the agency to add more safeguards for children released to the area, Little Village. Instead, HHS decided they were not needed.

In response to the Times, an HHS spokesperson said the department had already put protections in place for children being released to a few streets in the city and at the time saw expanding those measures as overreach.

At a small fast-food restaurant in Little Village one recent afternoon, Guatemalan teenagers played video games on their phones and flirted in Indigenous languages. Several said they worked full time overnight in factories, in violation of child labor laws. Few had enrolled in school.

One, Marvin Che, said he came to the United States last year, when he was 16, and had been working 12-hour overnight shifts alongside other migrant children packing products at the manufacturer Pactiv Evergreen, including Hefty plastic party cups. “We came alone, so we have to work hard,” Marvin said.

A spokesperson for Pactiv Evergreen said its company policy prohibited minors from working at manufacturing sites and it would make sure its staffing agencies were complying. A representative for Reynolds Consumer Products, which owns the Hefty brand, said Pactiv Evergreen no longer made its party cups.

Other social service organizations said they, too, had flagged clusters of suspicious cases, including in Nashville, Tennessee, and Dallas.

“We're waiting for the congressional hearing that's like, ‘How did this happen to all these kids?'” Haygood said. In the past two months, congressional leaders from both parties have questioned why so many migrant children ended up in exploitative jobs, and two oversight hearings are planned in the House on Tuesday.

An HHS spokesperson said the department was aware that some migrant children worked long hours because they are under intense pressure to earn money, but the agency's legal responsibility for children ends once they are released. Still, the department is working to provide a few months of case management to all unaccompanied migrant children, she said.

For now, most children released to sponsors have little support aside from an HHS hotline. According to internal documents obtained by the Times, reports of trafficking to that hotline increased by about 1,300% over the past five years.

In one call last year, a child living in Charlotte, North Carolina, said his sponsor had found him a job in a restaurant and told him “he needs to work to eat.” In another, a child said his sponsor had never enrolled him in school after he was released from an El Paso, Texas, shelter, and was forcing him to pay for rent and food.

The HHS spokesperson said the agency asks local law enforcement to check on children who might be in danger.

A hard life in Florida

Antonio arrived at the border shortly after turning 14, and spent several weeks at a shelter before moving to Florida. A former neighbor had agreed to be his sponsor, but Antonio, who had never spent a night away from his town, had not understood how isolated he would be in the United States.