As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings [nytimes.com]

^{When Antonio Diaz Mendez arrived in the U.S. from Guatemala at age 14, he was already deep in debt and largely on his own.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times}

By Hannah Dreier, The New York Times, April 17, 2023

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.

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