As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

The White House and federal agencies were repeatedly alerted to signs of children at risk. The warnings were ignored or missed.

By Hannah Dreier of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"In the spring of 2021, Linda Brandmiller was working at an arena in San Antonio that had been converted into an emergency shelter for migrant children. Thousands of boys were sleeping on cots as the Biden administration grappled with a record number of minors crossing into the United States without their parents.

Ms. Brandmiller’s job was to help vet sponsors, and she had been trained to look for possible trafficking. In her first week, two cases jumped out: One man told her he was sponsoring three boys to employ them at his construction company. Another, who lived in Florida, was trying to sponsor two children who would have to work off the cost of bringing them north.

She immediately contacted supervisors working with the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for these children. “This is urgent,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The New York Times.

But within days, she noticed that one of the children was set to be released to the man in Florida. She wrote another email, this time asking for a supervisor’s “immediate attention” and adding that the government had already sent a 14-year-old boy to the same sponsor.

Ms. Brandmiller also emailed the shelter’s manager. A few days later, her building access was revoked during her lunch break. She said she was never told why she had been fired."

"Soon after President Biden took office, the growing numbers of migrant children touched off tension between the new administration and longtime government staff members.

The president had promised to abide by a 2008 anti-trafficking law that requires the federal government to accept children traveling alone from most countries and allows them to stay in the United States during the yearslong process of applying for legal status.

But the law did not anticipate that a pandemic would ravage the economies of Central American countries. Parents in deepening poverty began sending their children to the United States to earn money — part of a phenomenon some immigration advocates call “voluntary family separation.”

In 2021, as images of children sleeping under foil blankets in overflow centers dominated the news, Susan E. Rice, the White House’s head of domestic policy, told staff members she was frustrated with the situation, according to five people who worked with her. Ms. Rice vented in a note she scribbled on a memo detailing the position of advocates, who believed a pandemic-era border closure was compelling parents to send unaccompanied children, sometimes called U.C.s."

"Longtime H.H.S. staff members complained that the changes endangered children. White House aides and administration officials grew exasperated, believing that these workers were clinging to protocols that kept children in shelters when it was better for them to be in a home with an adult."

 

"At least five Health and Human Services staff members filed complaints and said they were pushed out after raising concerns about child safety.

Jallyn Sualog was the most senior career member of the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children when Mr. Biden took office. She had helped build the program after the passage of the 2008 law and, as a lifelong Democrat, had celebrated Mr. Biden’s win.

But soon, she said, she began to hear reports that children were being released to adults who had lied about their identities, or who planned to exploit them.

She warned her bosses in a 2021 email, “If nothing continues to be done, there will be a catastrophic event.” She continued to email about situations she described as “critical” and “putting children at risk.”

Concerned that no one was listening, Ms. Sualog filed a complaint in the fall of 2021 with the H.H.S. Office of Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, and requested whistle-blower protection. She also took the unusual step of speaking with congressional staffers about her worries."

 

"In late 2021, she was moved out of her position. She filed a complaint with the federal office responsible for enforcing whistle-blower protection rules, arguing that she had been illegally retaliated against.

Last fall, the Office of the Inspector General released a report that discussed Ms. Sualog’s case and several demotions and dismissals at the agency that “may have risen to the level of whistle-blower chilling.”

Ms. Sualog settled with the agency, which agreed to pay her legal fees, and resigned last month."

"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 H.H.S. bosses saying the system had resulted in unsafe discharges. “We are pulling humanity out of ‘Health and Human Services,’” they wrote. 

Some of the most persistent warnings that children were being funneled into dangerous jobs came from outside the government. H.H.S. 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 H.H.S. 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. Mr. Haygood asked if H.H.S. would consider adding the neighborhood to a watchlist, so that prospective sponsors there would be more closely vetted.

An H.H.S. 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. Mr. Haygood expected the agency to add more safeguards for children released to the area, Little Village. Instead, H.H.S. decided they were not needed."

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

"An H.H.S. spokeswoman 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."

"An H.H.S. spokeswoman 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."

"In the summer of 2021, near the height of the crush at the border, H.H.S. managers wrote a memo detailing their worry about increasing reports that children were working alongside their sponsors"

"A White House spokeswoman denied that senior officials were told about the situation.

A few months later, Ms. Rice’s staff learned that H.H.S. could not reach a growing number of migrant children just a month after their release"

"Tyler Moran, Mr. Biden’s senior adviser for migration at the time, said she relied on H.H.S. to tell her how to weigh information"

 

"Staff members, she said, had not pointed to a broader child labor crisis."

 

"The Department of Labor was sending up signals of its own. In 2022, investigators began uncovering signs of migrant child labor inside industrial workplaces"

 

"more than 100 mostly Spanish-speaking children were working the overnight shift scouring meatpacking plants around the country."

 

"A spokeswoman for the Labor Department said that the White House had been aware of the rise in child labor because it was widely public. But Mr. Bates, the White House deputy press secretary, said officials there had not known of the increase in child labor until The Times’s February report."