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Coming in record numbers, they rank in harmful jobs that violate hard work laws for children, adding factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.
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By Hannah Dreier
Photographs by Kirsten Luce
Hannah Dreier traveled to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia for this report and interviewed more than a hundred migrant staff children in 20 estados. hannah. dreier@nytimes @hannahdreier
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Cristian works in the structure of going to school. He is 14 years old.
Carolina packs Cheerios in a factory. She is 15 years old.
Wander starts working until the day before dawn. He is thirteen years old.
It was almost in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but inside the factory, everything was clear. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios in front of an organization of young workers. One of them was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the U. S. alone. last year to live with a relative I had never met.
Every 10 seconds or so, he filled a sealed plastic bag with cereal on a yellow card that passed. It can be a harmful job, with pulleys and fast gears ripping off a woman’s hands and tearing her scalp.
The factory filled with underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the southern border on their own and were now leaning past hours on harmful machinery, in violation of hard labor laws for children. At nearby factories, other young people were setting up giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packaging bags from Lucky Charms and Cheetos, all working for processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which shipped those products across the country.
“Sometimes I’m tired and feel sick,” Carolina said after a shift in November. Her abdomen hurt and she didn’t know if it was because of lack of sleep, tension from the incessant roar of machines, or the worries she had for herself. and his circle of relatives in Guatemala. ” But I’m getting used to it. “
These staff are part of an exploitative new economy: Migrant children, who came to the United States without their parents in record numbers, are placed in some of the country’s most grueling jobs, according to a New York Times investigation. This shadow workforce extends to each and every industry in each and every state, flouting the hard work of children legislation that has been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage staff at slaughterhouses in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing wooden planks on night shifts in South Dakota.
Mostly from Central America, young people are driven by economic desperation compounded by the pandemic. This workforce has been developing slowly for about a decade, but has skyrocketed since 2021, when systems aimed at young people collapsed.
The Times spoke to more than a hundred child migrant workers in 20 states who described jobs that exhausted them and feared they would be trapped in cases they might never have imagined. social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.
City after city, young people scrub late dishes at night. They operate milking machines in Vermont and deliver food in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava stone walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. .
In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English language learning systems say it’s now not unusual for nearly all of their students to rush to take long shifts after their grades have ended.
“They shouldn’t be running 12 hours a day, but here it’s going down,” said Valeria Lindsay, a language teacher at Homestead High School near Miami. In the past three years, she said, nearly every eighth-grader in her English language program of about a hundred students also had an adult workload.
Immigrant children work hard in clandestine operations and global corporations, the Times found. In Angeles, young people sew “Made in America” labels on J’s shirts. Crew. They make muffins sold at Walmart and Target, they process the milk used in Ben ice cream.
The number of unaccompanied minors who entered the U. S. The U. S. population peaked at 130,000 last year, 3 times more than five years earlier, and this summer is expected to bring another wave.
These are not young people who have infiltrated the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is guilty of making sure sponsors protect them from trafficking or exploitation.
But as more children have arrived, the Biden White House has stepped up demands to temporarily remove children from shelters and release them to adults. Social staff say they rush through verification sponsors.
While H. H. S. verifies all minors by calling them a month after they began living with their sponsors, knowledge received through the Times showed that over the past two years, the company has failed to succeed in more than 85,000 children. Overall, the company soon lost contact with a third of migrant children.
A spokesman for H. H. S. La said the company was seeking to release the children quickly, for the sake of their well-being, but without compromising safety. productive interest of the child,” spokeswoman Kamara Jones said.
Far from home, many of these young people are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash to their families while in debt to their sponsors for smuggling, rent, and living expenses.
“It’s a good deal for some of those sponsors,” said Annette Passalacqua, who quit her job as a social worker in Central Florida last year. to investigate those cases that it has largely failed to report. Instead, he simply explained to the young people that they were entitled to lunches and overtime.
Sponsors are required to send young immigrants to school, and some academics juggle categories and heavy workloads. Other young people arrive and notice that they have been deceived by their sponsors and will be enrolled in school.
The federal government contracts with child coverage agencies to track the minors who are most at risk. But social staff at those agencies said HHS has consistently ignored the obvious symptoms of labor exploitation, a characterization questioned by the agency.
In interviews with more than 60 social workers, Maximum independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied immigrant youth ended up working full-time.
A Hearthside representative said the company relies on a hiring firm to hire staff for its Grand Rapids plants, but said it doesn’t require the company to determine ages through a national formula that verifies Social Security numbers. Identity documents to download the work.
“We are immediately implementing additional controls for strict compliance by all agencies with our long-standing requirement that all staff must be 18 years of age or older,” the company said in a statement.
At Union High School in Grand Rapids, Rick Angstman, a ninth-grade social studies instructor from Carolina, saw the negative effects of long shifts on his students. to fatigue and hospitalized twice, he said. Unable to avoid working, he dropped out of school.
“It disappeared into oblivion,” Angstman said. This is the new child labour. You take young people from the field and put them in captivity almost under contract.
When Carolina left Guatemala, she had no idea where she was headed, just the feeling that she might not stay in her village anymore. There’s not a lot of electricity or water, and after the pandemic started, not much food either.
The only other people who seemed to make it were families living off remittances in the United States. Carolina lived alone with her grandmother, whose physical condition was beginning to decline. When neighbors started talking about going north, she signed them up. 14 years old.
“I kept walking,” he said.
Carolina arrived exhausted at the U. S. border, weighing 84 pounds. Officials sent her to an H. H. S. shelter. in Arizona, where a social worker contacted her aunt, Marcelina Ramirez. Ramírez was reluctant in the face of everything: she had already sponsored two other parents and had 3 children of her own. They lived on $600 a week and I didn’t know Carolina.
When Carolina arrived in Grand Rapids last year, Ramirez told her she would go to school every morning and advised her to do night shifts in Hearthside. He knew that Carolina had to send cash to her grandmother. He also believed it was good for young people. to work. Child labor is the norm in rural Guatemala and she herself had started running around the year.
One of the nation’s largest contract brands, Hearthside manufactures and packages food for corporations such as Frito-Lay, General Mills and Quaker Oats. of the Hearthside production facility,” a Grand Rapids-area plant manager told an industry magazine in 2019.
General Mills, whose brands come with Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley, said it identified “the gravity of this situation” and reviewed the Times’ findings. PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats, declined to comment.
Three other people who worked until last year at one of Grand Rapids’ largest employment agencies, Forge Industrial Staffing, said Hearthside supervisors were told they were receiving young-looking staff whose identities had been flagged as false.
“Hearthside didn’t care,” said Nubia Malacara, a former Forge worker who said she also worked at Hearthside as a minor.
In a statement, Hearthside said, “We are deeply concerned about this factor and are involved in the mischaracterization of Hearthside. “A spokesman for Forge said it complies with state and federal law and “will never knowingly employ anyone under the age of 18. “
Kevin Tomas said he sought out paintings through Forge after arriving in Grand Rapids at age thirteen with his 7-year-old brother. At first, he sent a local manufacturer that made portions of cars for Ford and General Motors. But his shift ended at 6:30 a. m. , so he couldn’t stay awake at school and had trouble lifting heavy boxes.
“It’s not that we want to paint those works. It’s that we want our families,” Kevin said.
At the age of 15, Kevin had a task in Hearthside, stacking 50-pound boxes of cereal on the same shift as Carolina.
The expansion of migrant hard child labor in the United States in recent years is the result of a chain of deliberate ignorance. Companies forget about young faces in their department stores and back factories. It hurts young people more than it will help them. And H. H. S. se behaves as if young immigrants who mix without being noticed in the country do very well.
“As a government, we turned a blind eye to their trafficking,” said Doug Gilmer, head of the Homeland Security Investigations Bureau in Birmingham, Alabama, a federal firm that handles immigration cases.
Mr. Gilmer wept as he recalled finding 13-year-old boys running in meat factories; 12-year-olds racing with Hyundai and Kia suppliers, as documented last year in a Reuters investigation; and young people who have been in school running in advertising bakeries.
“We found him here because we’re here for him,” Mr. Gilmer. “It’s going down everywhere. “
Young people have crossed the southern border alone for decades, and since 2008, the U. S. has been a major contributor. The U. S. government has allowed non-Mexican minors to live with sponsors while they go through an immigration process, which can take several years. The policy, codified in anti-human trafficking legislation, aims to avoid harming young people who would otherwise be turned away and left alone in a Mexican border town.
When Kelsey Keswani first worked as a subcontractor for H. H. S. in Arizona to link unaccompanied migrant youth with sponsors in 2010, the adults were almost the parents of the youths, who had paid smugglers to bring them from Central America, he said.
But around 2014, the number of young people arriving began to increase and their scenario changed. In recent years, “almost all young people have debts to pay and are under a lot of pressure about it,” Keswani said.
He started to see more errors in the verification process. “There were so many cases where sponsors had sponsored children and no one detected them. So many red flags with debts. So many traffic reports.
Today, a third of young migrants pass to their parents. Most are sent to other relatives, acquaintances or even strangers, a Times investigation of federal knowledge showed. Almost a portion comes from Guatemala, where poverty is fueling a wave of migration. Parents know they would be returned at the border or temporarily deported, so they send their young people in hopes that remittances will return.
In the past two years alone, more than 250,000 young people have entered the United States alone.
The conversion dynamic in Central America contributed to a political crisis in early Biden, when young people began crossing the border faster than HHS could treat them. With no more space in the shelters, the youths were held in prison-like facilities run by Customs and Border Protection and, later, in tent towns. Images of young people sleeping on gymnastics mats under aluminum blankets have attracted media attention.
Biden’s management pledged to move young people through the quickest shelter formula. 2021.
His firm has begun rolling back protections that have been in place for years, some background checks and reviews of children’s records, according to memos reviewed through The Times and interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
“20% of kids want to be released every week they bite you,” said Keswani, who stopped working with HHS last month.
Concerns piled up in the summer of 2021 at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, H. H. S. Division of Unaccompanied Migrant Children. In a July memo, 11 managers said they feared hard-work traffic was expanding and complained to their bosses that the workplace had “a workplace that rewards Americans for making quick releases, not one that rewards Americans for avoiding harmful releases. “
Staff members said in interviews that Mr. Becerra continued to push for faster results, asking why they couldn’t unload young people with machine-like efficiency.
“If Henry Ford had noticed this in his factories, he would never have noticed and he would be rich. That’s not how you make an assembly line,” Becerra told a staff meeting last summer, according to a recording received through The Times.
H. H. S. La spokeswoman Ms. Jones stated that Mr. Becerra had suggested she “escalate things. “Like any smart leader, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, especially when it comes to the well-being and protection of children,” he said.
In a call last March, Becerra told Cindy Huang of the O. R. R. Director that if she couldn’t rack up the number of rejections, he would locate who could, according to five other people familiar with the call. She resigned a month later.
He recently made a similar risk for his successor in a meeting with senior management, according to other people who were present.
While many young migrants are sent to the United States through their parents, others are persuaded to come through adults who plan to benefit from their work.
Nery Cutzal was thirteen when he met his godfather on Facebook Messenger. Once he arrived in Florida, Nery discovered he owed more than $4,000 and needed to locate his own home. His sponsor sent him threatening text messages and kept a list not unusual. of new debts: $140 to fill H. H. S. Red bureaucracy; $240 for Walmart clothing; $45 for a taco dinner.
“Don’t mess with me,” the sponsor wrote. You are nothing to me. “
Nery started running until 3 a. m. almost every night at a trendy Mexican restaurant near Palm Beach to make payments. Nery said.
His father, Leonel Cutzal, said the circle of relatives had been left destitute after a series of poor harvests and they still had no choice to send their eldest son to northern Guatemala.
“Even when you store $50, it’s a big help,” Mr. Cutzal. Otherwise, there are times when we don’t eat. “Cutzal didn’t realize how hard Nery would have to work, he said. He’s been through tough times being there so young. “
Nery eventually contacted law enforcement and his godfather was convicted last year of smuggling a child into the U. S. U. S. for profit. This result is rare: Over the past decade, federal prosecutors have filed only about 3 dozen cases involving forced hard labor of unaccompanied minors, according to a review of court databases via the Times.
Unlike the foster care system, in which all youth are handled on a case-by-case basis, H. H. S. It provides this service to about one-third of the youth who pass through its care, and regularly for only 4 months. Tens of thousands more young people are referred to their sponsors with a national helpline phone number. From there, they’re on their own: There’s no formal follow-up by federal or local agencies to make sure sponsors don’t put children to work illegally.
In Pennsylvania, a social worker told the Times he went to see a child given to a guy he had deployed to sponsor 20 other minors. The boy disappeared. In Texas, another social worker said she met a man who focused on poor families in Guatemala, promising to help them get rich if they sent their children across the border. He had sponsored thirteen children.
“If you’ve been in this business for a while, you know what sponsors agree and what they do,” said Bernal Cruz Muñoz, social personnel manager in Oregon.
Calling the hotline is also not a safe way to get help. Juanito Ferrer called for help after an acquaintance brought him to Manassas, Virginia, at age 15, who forced him to paint houses during the day and guard an apartment complex at night. His godfather took his paychecks and watched him on security cameras as he slept in the basement.
Juanito said that when he called the hotline in 2019, the user on the other end simply took a report. “I think they would end up with the police or to check, but they never did,” he said. Inspect the house, at least. He finally escaped.
When asked about the hotline, H. H. S. He said the operators passed reports to police and other local agencies because the company had the authority to remove young people from homes.
The Times analyzed government data to identify places with the highest concentrations of children who had been passed on to others outside their immediate circle of relatives, a sign that they were expected to work. In northwest Grand Rapids, for example, 93 percent of children were in the care of adults other than their parents.
H. H. S. ne doesn’t adhere to those groups, but the trends are so pronounced that managers are aware of the pain points anyway.
Scott Lloyd, who headed the Trump administration’s resettlement office, said he learned in 2018 that the number of unaccompanied Guatemalan children given to sponsors in South Florida appeared to be increasing.
“I’ve wondered what was going on there,” he said.
But his attention was diverted through the chaos around the Trump administration’s child separation policy, and he never looked at the issue. The trend he discovered has only accelerated: for example, in the past 3 years, more than two hundred young people have been placed with remote control. relatives or unrelated adults in Immokalee, Florida, an agricultural center with a long history of labor exploitation.
In a statement, H. H. S. said it has updated its case management formula to report more cases where multiple children move to the same user or address.
Many sponsors see themselves as loving, doing a favor to a friend or neighbor by agreeing to help a child leave a government shelter, even if they don’t intend to offer any support. Children perceive that they will have to work, but they do. Do not master the endless monotony that awaits them.
“I didn’t realize how expensive everything was,” said Jose Vasquez, 13, who works 12-hour days, six days a week, at an advertising egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister. “I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay the rent?”
One fall morning at Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolina, he listened to Mr. High School’s lecture. Distraught by journalist Jacob Riis and the Progressive Era movement that helped create federal laws about children’s hard work. He explained that the adjustments were aimed at preventing young people from having jobs that can harm their fitness or safety, and showed elegance a photo of a young boy making cigars.
“Riis reported that members of this circle of relatives ran 17 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told the academics. “The narrow area reeked of poisonous gases. ” The scholars seemed indifferent. Some struggled to stay awake.
The school’s teachers estimated that two hundred of its immigrant students worked full-time as they sought to keep up with their classes. Most of Mr. Angstman’s students worked in one of the city’s 4 Hearthside factories.
The company, which has 39 plants in the United States, has been cited through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 34 violations since 2019, adding harmful treadmills at the plant where Carolina discovered her work. At least 11 employees suffered amputations this period. In 2015, a device grabbed an Ohio employee’s hairnet and ripped off part of her scalp.
The story of the twist of fate “shows a corporate culture that lacks urgency to maintain staff safety,” an OSHA official wrote after the most recent amputation violation.
Miners in Grand Rapids said the highly spiced dust from the massive batches of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos caused their lungs to bite and that moving heavy pallets of grain overnight damaged their backs. that no child Caroline’s age can paint with them.
Hearthside said in a statement that it is committed to complying with legislation governing employee protection. “We strongly dispute the protection allegations made and are proud of our protection-focused culture,” he said.
Federal law excludes miners from a long list of hazardous jobs, such as roofing, meat processing and advertising baking. Except on farms, youth under the age of 16 are expected to work more than 3 hours or after 7 p. m. school days.
But those jobs, which are backbreaking and underpaid, and chronically understaffed, are precisely where many young immigrants end up. Teens are twice as likely as adults to be seriously injured on the job, yet preteens and newcomers use commercial mixers. , drive huge earthmoving machines and burn their hands with hot tar as they lay roof shingles, the Times found.
Unaccompanied minors have had their legs ripped off in factories and their spines damaged at sites in the structure, but most of those injuries go uncounted. The Labor Department tracks deaths of foreign-born child laborers but no longer makes them public. Federal safety records and public reports, the Times has exposed a dozen cases of young immigrants killed since 2017, the last year the Labor Department reported any.
The deaths come with a 14-year-old food delivery man who hit a car while riding his motorcycle at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old boy who was crushed by a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old boy who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying shingles.
In 2021, Karla Campbell, a hard-working attorney in Nashville, helped a woman figure out how to send the frame of her 14-year-old grandson, who died working in landscaping, to her village in Guatemala. It was time to work – related to the death of a child I had to deal with that year.
“I’ve been working on those cases for 15 years, and adding young people is something new,” Campbell said.
In dairy production, the injury rate is twice the national average across all industries. Paco Calvo arrived in Middlebury, Vermont, at the age of 14 and worked 12 hours a day on dairy farms for the next 4 years. He said he smashed his hand into a commercial milking device the first few months of that work.
“Almost everyone gets hurt at first,” he said.
Charlene Irizarry, human resources manager for Farm Fresh Foods, an Alabama meat plant struggling to retain staff, recently learned that she interviewed a 12-year-old boy for a task cutting poultry breasts into nuggets in a 40-degree monitored segment of the plant. .
Irizarry sees task seekers using thick makeup or medical masks in an attempt to hide their youth, he said. “Sometimes their legs don’t touch the ground. “
Other times, an adult will request a task in the morning, and then a child with the same call will show up for guidance that afternoon. She and her staff have begun separating the other young applicants from the adults who bring them, so that they admit their true age.
Ms. Irizarry said the factory had already been fined for one child labour violation and was seeking to prevent another. But he wondered what the young people would face if he fired them.
“I worry about why they’re so desperate for those jobs,” he said.
In interviews with underage migrant workers, the Times exposed the hard work of children in U. S. supply chains. UU. de many major brands and retailers. Several in addition to Ford, General Motors, J. Crew and Walmart, as well as their suppliers, said the allegations seriously and would investigate. Target and Whole Foods responded to requests for comment. Fruit of the Loom said it had terminated its contract with the supplier.
A Ben Company
The Labor Department intends to locate and punish violations of children’s hard work, yet inspectors in a dozen states said their understaffed offices can respond mildly to complaints, let alone open initial investigations. When the ministry responded to data on migrant children, it focused on outside contractors and the recruitment agencies that employ them, not the corporations where they do the work.
In Worthington, Minnesota, it had long been an open secret that young immigrants released through HHS were cleaning up a slaughterhouse run by JBS, the world’s largest meat processor.
Outside JBS’s red meat plant last fall, the Times spoke to baby-faced staff chasing and taunting others as they left their morning shift. He had suffered chemical burns from the corrosive cleaners they used.
Soon after, hard work inspectors responding to a notice found 22 Spanish-speaking youths applying for the company hired to clean up the JBS plant in Worthington, and dozens more doing the same job at meat processing plants in the United States.
But the Ministry of Labor can only calculate fines. The cleaning company paid a $1. 5 million fine, while JBS said it didn’t know the kids walked through the Worthington plant every night. JBS fired the cleaning company.
Many of the young people who worked there discovered new jobs in other factories, the Times found.
“I have to pay my debt, so I have to work,” said Mauricio Ramirez, 17, who discovered a task processing meat in the nearby town.
It’s been just over a year since Carolina left Guatemala and started making friends. She and another woman who works at Hearthside have necklaces that are compatible with each other, they are put on with part of the heart. When he has time, he posts selfies online decorated with emoticons and flowers.
Most of the time, however, she is left alone. His teachers don’t know many important points about his edge. When the subject arrived at school recently, Carolina began to sob and did not say why.
After a week of 17 hours a day, he sat at home one night with his aunt and reflected on his life in the United States. The long afternoons. The tension of money. ” I had no expectations of what life would be like here,” he said, “but it’s not what I imagined. “
He held a debit card he had been given through an employment agency, which paid his salary in Hearthside that way so he wouldn’t have to cash checks. Carolina tossed and round in the palm of her hand under her aunt’s gaze.
“I know it sad,” Ms. Ramirez said.
Carolina looked down. He wanted to keep going to school to learn English, but he woke up almost every morning with a knot in his abdomen and was in poor health at home. Some of his ninth-graders had already dropped out of school. The old man he sat next to in math class, Cristian Lopez, had left school to devote himself to painting overtime in Hearthside.
Cristian lived minutes away in a bare two-room apartment he shared with his uncle and 12-year-old sister, Jennifer.
Her sister had also not been to school and they had spent the day arguing in her room. Night had already fallen and they were having Froot Loops for dinner. The heat was extinguished, so they wore winter jackets. In an interview in Guatemala, her mother, Isabel Lopez, cried when she said she tried to enroll her children in the United States last year but was turned away at the border.
Cristian had given his uncle some of the money he earned making chew bars, but his uncle’s idea was not enough. He said he would like Jennifer to also start working at the factory and showed up to take her to apply. .
Cristian said he recently called the H. H. S. hotline. He had hoped that the government would send to take care of him and his sister, but he had received no response. He didn’t think he would call again.
Studies conducted through Andrew Fischer, Seamus Hughes, Michael H. Keller and Julie Tate.
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