GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Late one night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the sound of machines filled the air at a food plant. Inside, according to an investigation by the New York Times, was 15-year-old Carolina, an unaccompanied minor from Guatemala, who labored tirelessly on an assembly line where she sealed plastic bags of Cheerios cereal into a passing yellow carton.
Each movement was precise and mechanical, driven by a mix of desperation and determination, which the Times calls “dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.”
Carolina’s harrowing journey ends as an underage worker.
MORE NEWS: Community vs. Corporate: Ford Megasite Case Returns to Court
Carolina wasn’t the only underage worker at the plant whom the Times discovered, spending time in a place that is in violation of child labor laws. Carolina’s journey had been fraught with danger after she fled her home and ended up living with a relative who she had never met. She now endures grueling hours and stressful conditions. Saying she often gets tired and feels sick, Carolina has resigned herself to her fate saying that she’s getting used to it.
Carolina had arrived in the U.S. alone, part of the record influx of children crossing the southern border without their parents, driven by President Biden’s policies that critics argue have led to a surge in illegal immigration.
What is an “unaccompanied minor”?
According to U.S. law, an unaccompanied minor is a child who is under 18 years old, has no lawful immigration status in the United States, and has no parent or legal guardian in the country or one who is not available to provide care and custody.
The Times’ figures received from the U.S. Dept. of Human Health and Services includes data on more than 550,000 children who have come into the United States from other countries from January 2015 through May of 2023.
According to a report from Axios, the majority of unaccompanied migrant children who arrived in Michigan between those dates usually entered through the southern border from Central America (mostly Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) and settled near Grand Rapids or Detroit. In the most recent years, more of the children have been coming from Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan than the Central American countries.
Surge in refugee children to Michigan.
In the 2023 fiscal year alone, 2,437 refugee children ended up in Michigan, double the number from the year before.
MORE NEWS: Michigan Officer’s Final Act of Kindness: Helping a Veteran Cross the Finish Line
The America these children (and their parents) thought would offer them freedom and opportunity has delivered exploitation and hardship to many of them instead. With shelters in Detroit overwhelmed, stories of trauma and resilience have echoed through the halls of places like the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, where legal advocates are trying desperately to help these children navigate the complicated immigration system.
Christine Sauvé, co-chair of Detroit’s Immigration Task Force, spoke to Axios of the heartbreak she has witnessed daily. “These kids are incredibly resilient,” she said, “but the trauma they endure is unimaginable. We need more resources, more support, to give them a chance at a real future.”
Biden administration has no idea about condition and location of many of these migrant children.
It might be impossible to even give these children the support and future they need and deserve as it appears our federal government doesn’t even know where a large number of them are. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, in a report they published last year, they allege that the Biden administration has “lost” at least 85,000 unaccompanied minors after they came into the United States.
A Washington Post article was written to defend the Biden administration’s lack of oversight of the children after former President Trump pointed out Biden’s “lost children.” In the article, they say that although a case manager from the refugee’s office is supposed to check on the status of a unaccompanied minor within 37 days of their release to a sponsor, it’s not a legal requirement for them to do so – or for the child or sponsor to answer the call.
The Biden administration’s lack of compassion or concern for these children is truly staggering, as they take a “not my job” stance. Saying that they’re not “in custody” of the children at this point, Steve Wagner, the assistant secretary of the Administration for Child and Families at HHS, had told reporters in 2018, “If you call a friend and they don’t answer the phone, you don’t assume that they’ve been kidnapped.”
Biden’s recent executive order on border crossings has made the situation worse for the kids.
According to a recent article by Just the News, Biden’s Executive Order pertaining to the border is just making things worse for the migrant children, putting them even more in danger. Art Del Cueto, VP of the National Border Council, told the media outlet that there has been a massive increase in children coming over the border with their young siblings under age five. He said, “What it’s actually doing is it’s allowing the exemption of the unaccompanied juveniles to explode even more so on our southern border.”
He goes on to say that everyone coming across the border has made a deal with the drug cartels and human smugglers. He explained, “So when you’re seeing these 11-year-old kids come across, it’s not like they decided to get to the border and cross on their own. Somebody at some point made some type of arrangements with the drug cartels, the human smugglers.”
The federal government’s neglect of unaccompanied migrant children entering the country leaves them highly vulnerable to labor and sex trafficking. Without proper verification of their conditions, the extent of their exploitation will continue to remain unknown.
