When Carolina entered the United States, she imagined the opportunities that the United States were to bring. Instead, she found herself stuffing plastic bags, moving quickly enough so the pounding machinery would not nick her fingers. Living with a family member she had never met, she stated, “sometimes I get tired and feel sick, but I’m getting used to it.” But Carolina isn’t alone. Rather, these factories are filled with child migrant workers who live under the care of government “vetted sponsors” through the unaccompanied minor system.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) vets sponsors to send unaccompanied children to live with. Once a UAC is in United States custody, they can be sent to relatives or other vetted sponsors while they wait for immigration proceedings. Yet, when a watchdog probed into the system of vetting these sponsors, they found that there were serious systemic failings with assessing the viability of sponsors. These findings correspond with a 152% increase in illegal child labor since 2018, highlighting a trend that suggests that these unaccompanied minors are at risk of child exploitation and human trafficking. In order to protect these vulnerable children, many of whom migrate to the United States alone, the Office of Refugee Resettlement must re-evaluate and adapt their vetting procedures and hold leadership responsible to ensure these children are not being exploited by their sponsors.
This article focuses on how the system fails this vulnerable group in cases where sponsors are not properly vetted before release. There are many successful cases, however, in which UACs are properly sponsored. This article aims to take a comprehensive approach to the issue, one that transcends political administrations, and identify changes necessary to protect UACs.
The Unaccompanied Children (UAC) System
The UAC system allows migrant children to be paired with a government vetted sponsor to live lawfully in the United States as immigration proceedings continue. For many families, sending their children to the United States alone is an opportunity to escape high crime rates and poverty, even if under the care of a sponsor or relative they hardly know. It’s then no surprise the number of unaccompanied minors that were released by ORR to sponsors skyrocketed to over 100,000 over the last four years, a massive jump from around 16,000 in 2020.
While in many cases, these unaccompanied minors are successfully paired with sponsors that are credible, many being family members, there is a worrisome fraction that are susceptible to abuse in a system that is not fit to protect them. By placing these children in the hands of irresponsible, improperly vetted sponsors, it makes them vulnerable to illegal work, human trafficking, and exploitation. Children as young as 12 and 13 are forced to work in factories, and, while the exact number is disputed and exaggerated by many sources, thousands of children go missing or become unresponsive under this system. The vetting and sponsorship system becomes a formality, and these migrant children are put at serious risk because of lackluster frameworks.
Holes in the System
In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Service’s (HSS) Office of the Inspector General found that 16% of children’s case files lacked documentation on what checks were conducted and 19% of children’s case files who were released to sponsors with pending documentation were never updated. When questioned by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the ORR Director was unable to properly answer questions about the 85,000 children that HSS had lost contact with over the last year. Between lack of transparency and lack of accountability, the very people who have the authority to directly protect these children put them at risk. An inability to properly communicate issues, and clear undesire to directly assess them, places the system at a disadvantage.
Additionally, as applications flood the ORR, it makes genuine efforts to ensure credible sponsors more difficult. In many of these cases, it appears that information was not properly dealt with. Rather, unaccompanied children were carelessly sent to unfinished profiles that lacked documentation. Reports in 2021 from the Office of the Inspector General suggest that 35% of the files had “legibility concerns” from documents provided by the sponsors. When understaffed offices deal with a third of their documentation being near illegible, it becomes clear how these migrant children can be collateral damage in what becomes a lazy job. When combining how during the vetting process information is overlooked, and after there is no accountability or transparency, it paints a clearer picture of the situation. Those in power are unable to properly screen or follow up on their promises, with the lives and health of the children becoming a secondary issue that they provide no insight on how to remedy.
Additionally concerning, however, is the perverse incentive of many sponsors to take on children and use debt to leverage power. In many of these cases where UACs are working essentially illegal jobs, sponsors leverage their position to enforce a debt system, where the children “owe” their sponsors monetary compensation for allowing them to be in the United States. For these individuals, many of whom are bad actors and not legitimate sponsors, they target the unaccompanied minor system as a way to exploit child labor for financial gain.
Adjusting the System
With bad actors throughout all steps of the system, it can be difficult to construct meaningful changes and policies to reflect the interests of unaccompanied minors. However, it is critical to hold those in charge accountable, while providing clearer and more comprehensive frameworks throughout the process to protect this vulnerable group from exploitation and human trafficking.
Prioritizing proper vetting of sponsors is critical to ensuring the safety of unaccompanied minors before they are able to be exploited. This includes instituting a more comprehensive follow-up system. Currently, sponsors are subject to interviews, background checks, forms, and fingerprinting to become a viable sponsor. However, as demonstrated above, many times proper documentation can slip through the cracks. It is important to conduct extensive interviews on candidates, including asking their reasons for applying to become a sponsor. Additionally, proper oversight of documentation and filing must be done. In many cases, sponsors will fill out multiple forms claiming that a UAC is their family member. When layered together, these sponsors allege to have unreasonable numbers of family members migrating. Some even use the same address under different names. It is important for the ORR to hire adequate amounts of people to search through these documents, ensure that all information is received before an unaccompanied minor is released, and follow-up with their cases in a timely manner. The follow-up procedure must be documented alongside the profile, whether it be by phone or in-person, and the Office should require that all unaccompanied minors are met with in-person upon a month, six months, and a year of release. Having the bandwidth to do this may be difficult, requiring the hiring of professionals who are able to satisfactorily ensure the work is done. However, these steps are critical to properly vet sponsors before UACs are released to them.
To combat the issue of transparency and accountability for the ORR, there must be guidelines in place, including reporting from the ORR of proper numbers and frequent checks on the Office to uphold their responsibilities. Allowing the Director of the ORR to be unresponsive to the thousands of children that may go missing under their office is unacceptable. Rather, real, coercive measures should be implemented to ensure that there is incentive for the ORR to act responsibly and credibly. This can include frequent House or Senate hearings about their work, mandating reporting, and checks from other HSS Offices. Ultimately, the ORR must be held accountable for their work and be transparent about the number of unaccompanied children that may be mistreated within their system in order to reform it.
Conclusion
When unaccompanied minors show up to the United States, they come in the most vulnerable forms: exhausted, starved, and alone. In order to protect these children, it is critical that the government, and the systems that vet their sponsors, take accountability and adequately carry out their responsibilities. When children, like Carolina, are subject to harsh working conditions in the United States, it can exacerbate the already heavy mental toll. Ultimately, it is on the onus of the United States government to increase transparency and accountability, and provide more strict frameworks in the vetting system to protect these children against the very exploitation they came to the United States to escape.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “South Texas Border – U.S. Customs and Border Protection provide assistance to unaccompanied alien children after they have crossed the border into the United States,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made