550,000 Minors Crossed the Border Alone from 2015 to 2023. More Than Two-Thirds Went to Non-Parental Sponsors
An often overlooked aspect of the immigration crisis along the U.S. southern border is the impact U.S. policy has on the lives of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors sent to illegally immigrate to and live in a foreign country alone. Two-thirds of these children end up in the home of an individual, or “sponsor” who is not their parent.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a “trove of data” to investigative journalists with The New York Times after the outlet filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request and a subsequent lawsuit seeking to understand where the more than 550,000 unaccompanied minors were sent once released into the U.S. between 2015 and 2023.
What they discovered was an insidious use of child labor and possible threats to their livelihood and safety. Children who arrive at the border seeking entry into the United States are particularly vulnerable, as they are often being sent alone to live with an individual who may or may not be a relative and work to earn wages that are then sent back to their families in their home country.
Children have previously been used by cartels in a scheme dubbed “child recycling” by authorities within the Department of Homeland Security in which human smugglers would “rent” children, even infants, to border crossers who would make false familial claims to gain expedited entry into the U.S. These false claims were made easier by a massive backlog for DNA test kits, which was previously reported by TPUSA. Once the children had served their purpose, they were smuggled back into Central America where they were “rented” to another individual.
Considering the widely available public knowledge that cartels abuse children for profit in various ways, journalists probed government agencies to provide information on how unaccompanied minors who are released into the U.S. are cared for.
“A decade ago, most unaccompanied migrant children were released to their parents,” a report on the federal data from The New York Times read. “But since 2017, that has changed: a majority of them now are going to non-parent sponsors. Those children are often expected to find work and help their families back home.”
“More children are crossing the border on their own than ever before, and thousands are ending up doing dangerous, illegal jobs,” Hannah Dreier, one of the journalists for The New York Times who compiled the data wrote on X.
The data revealed that 37,088 unaccompanied minors who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border were released to an “unrelated sponsor” between 2015 and 2023—a majority of these children, 24,253, were released between mid-January 2021 and May 25, 2023.
Already, there have been reports of unaccompanied minors who have been taken advantage of by non-familial sponsors or individuals related to or close to the sponsors.
“The Atlanta-Constitution uncovered a spike in migrant children being released to live with non-family members in Georgia. Some were sexually assaulted,” Dreier added to her post on X.
Earlier this year, a 43-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico kidnapped and sexually abused a 15-year-old girl who arrived at the southern border as an unaccompanied minor and was placed with a non-familial sponsor who was also an illegal immigrant. Her suspected kidnapper, Isauro Garcia Cruz, was in a relationship with the minor’s sponsor.
“The victim in this case is a 15-year-old unaccompanied female from Honduras. She was placed in a sponsor’s home in the City of Middletown [Ohio] by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS],” the Butler County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post announcing Cruz’s arrest. “Her sponsor is also an illegal immigrant and was the girlfriend of the suspect Garcia Cruz.”
The HHS reportedly checks in with unaccompanied minors who have been placed with a sponsor after crossing into the U.S. illegally by “calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors,” The New York Times found that over two years, the agency “could not reach more than 85,000 children.”
The Times recently released the entire raw dataset to the public, alongside the various reports that have been compiled by the outlet detailing the children’s plight, to “help others study and report on this work force.”
