In the spring of 2021, Linda Brandmiller was working at a stadium in San Antonio that had been converted into an emergency shelter for migrant children. Thousands of children slept on cots as the Biden administration grappled with a record number of children crossing into the United States without their parents.
Brandmiller’s job was to investigate sponsors, and she had been trained to look for possible traffic. In her first week, two cases came to light: a man told her that she was sponsoring three boys for employment in her construction company. Another, who lived in Florida, was trying to sponsor two children who would have to work to pay the cost of bringing them north.
She immediately contacted supervisors who work with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency responsible for these children. “This is urgent,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The New York Times.
But within a few days, she realized that one of the children was going to be released to the man in Florida. He wrote another email, this time requesting the “immediate attention” of a supervisor and adding that the government had already sent a 14-year-old boy to the same sponsor.
Brandmiller also emailed the shelter manager. A few days later, during his lunch break, his access to the building was revoked. She said that she was never told why she had been fired from her.
In the last two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come to the United States alone. Thousands of children ended up in drudgery across the country: working nights in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories, all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed. After the article was published in February, the White House announced policy changes and crackdowns on companies that hire children.
But all along there were signs of the explosive growth of this workforce and warnings that the Biden administration ignored or ignored, the Times found.
Time and again, veteran government employees and outside contractors told the Department of Health and Human Services, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that the children appeared to be at risk. The Department of Labor issued press releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House officials were shown evidence of exploitation, such as groups of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.
As the administration scrambled to clear shelters that were overloaded beyond capacity, the children were released, with little support, to patrons who expected them to take on grueling and dangerous jobs.
In interviews with the Times, officials expressed concern for migrant children but blamed others for failing to protect them.
HHS officials said the department sufficiently investigated the sponsors but was unable to control what happened to the children after they were released. Monitoring of workplaces, they said, was a function of the Department of Labor.
Labor Department officials said inspectors had increased their focus on child labor and shared details about the workers with HHS, but said it was not a welfare agency.
And White House officials said that while the two departments had passed on information about migrant child labor, the reports were not marked as urgent and did not clarify the scope of the problem. Robyn M. Patterson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration was now increasing scrutiny of employers and reviewing background investigations on sponsors.
“It is unacceptable for companies to use child labor, and this administration will continue to work to strengthen the system for investigating these violations and holding violators accountable,” the statement read.
But the White House declined to comment on why the administration had not previously reacted to repeated signs that immigrant children were being widely exploited.
“If I saw it, they might have noticed it,” said Brandmiller, who is also an immigration attorney. “There were so many opportunities to connect those dots but no one did.” An HHS spokesman said the agency was not aware of Brandmiller’s concerns. The company that ran the emergency shelter declined to comment.
Brandmiller said she was still worried about the 14-year-old boy, Antonio Diaz Mendez.
Antonio lives in Florida City, Florida, away from his family in Guatemala. In an interview last summer, he sat on the musty porch of a house full of other immigrant children. He said he was working long shifts in a refrigerated warehouse, packing vegetables for distribution across the country, and that he hadn’t seen his sponsor in months.
She missed her grandmother and sometimes went days without speaking to anyone. He wanted to go to school, but he felt trapped because he needed to earn money to pay his debts, support himself, and help his siblings.
