[ Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous
jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that
make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the
Loom.]
[[link removed]]

ALONE AND EXPLOITED, MIGRANT CHILDREN WORK BRUTAL JOBS ACROSS THE
U.S.  
[[link removed]]


 

Hannah Dreier
February 25, 2023
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs
that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make
products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom. _

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..., Photo by Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

 

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.”

 

[A blue-and-white factory exterior labeled “Hearthside Food
Solutions.” In the foreground are several cars in a parking lot and
a chain-link fence.]

Hearthside 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
[[link removed]] 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.

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

[A line of unaccompanied migrant children waiting to board a white
bus.]

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
[[link removed]] 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’

 

[A teenage boy in jeans and a T-shirt, work boots, a tool belt and a
sun hat carrying a piece of wood on a construction site.]

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
[[link removed]];
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
[[link removed]] 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.

 

[Children packed tightly inside a detention area, lying down on mats
and under foil blankets.]

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’

 

[A crowd of adults and teenagers walking in a parking lot, with palm
trees in the background.]

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

[A list of expenses written in a spiral notebook.]

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.

 

[A person in a dark hoodie, bathed in yellow-green light, faces away
from the camera and toward a double window in a wood-paneled wall.]

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

[Children write at school desks.]

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

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.

 

[A young factory worker, in dark clothes and sneakers, is perched
above equipment filled with a bright orange food.]

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
[[link removed]] 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.

 

[Three young boys from Latin America.]

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

[Workers in the dark outside a plant with an illuminated sign saying
“JBS Main Entrance.”]

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
[[link removed]],
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’

[A teenage boy wearing torn jeans, a black puffer jacket and a
backward baseball cap stands in the doorway of a blue room next to a
girl in a red hoodie and leggings.]

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.

_Hannah Dreier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the
investigations team.  She traveled to Alabama, Florida, Georgia,
Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia for this story and
spoke to more than 100 migrant child workers in 20
states. hannah.dreier@nytimes @hannahdreier
[[link removed]]_

_Research was contributed by Andrew Fischer, Seamus Hughes, Michael
H. Keller and Julie Tate._

EDITOR’S NOTE: In considering whether to fully identify some
children in this article, Times journalists weighed many factors. In
each case, the reporter obtained the permission of the child’s
sponsor and parents, many of whom hoped the story would help others
understand the realities of life for migrant children in the United
States.

 

* Immigrants
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* child labor
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]