Journalist Who Investigated the Migrant Child Crisis Weighs in on Becerra’s Record

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I was like, "I knew Hannah when she was a baby reporter." Hey, that is Tommy. Everything I knew. Oh god, that's not true. [MUSIC] Hey, everyone. From KQED in San Francisco, this is Political Breakdown. I'm Marisa Lagos. Today on the Breakdown, if you're a California voter, you've probably heard something about 85,000 missing migrant children. It's all related to Democratic Frontrunner for Governor Javier Bacera. The Sarah served as Health and Human Services Secretary under former President Joe Biden. And during that time, there was a huge influx of unaccompanied children pouring into the US. In 2022, the New York Times published an extensive investigation into what was happening with those children after they arrived here. Reporter Hannah Dreyer found that the federal government was not keeping tabs on these minors after they were released to adult sponsors. And that the majority desperate for money to send home and pay off those sponsors were working illegally, punishing and often dangerous jobs. Dreyer went to pull a surprise for that reporting, which has now been cited in heavily funded attack ads by Bacera's opponents. And she joins me now to talk about her investigation. Hannah Dreyer, welcome to Political Breakdown. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I'm so thrilled to have you here. And I want to have you first take us back to 2022, 2021, when you were reporting this story. What was just the political climate and what was happening around immigration at the time? So you have to remember that back during the first years of the Biden administration, there are these huge numbers of kids who were crossing the border without their parents. And they were sort of stacking up in shelters and in these sort of jail-like facilities. And there was wall-to-wall, keyboard news coverage of this. And it was all about how there was a crisis and the Biden administration was being overwhelmed. And so what ended up happening was the administration moved those kids out of shelters really quickly to adults who were taking them in. And a lot of those adults ended up putting those kids to work. So when I was doing this reporting, I found children working the overnight shift at slaughterhouses, 12-year-olds working on roofs. I found kids with chemical burns, kids who'd had their limbs mangled in industrial machines. And all of that was sort of happening in the context of this crisis at the border. And I mean, we're talking about, I think, 250,000 kids within a two-year period crossed. As you just said, what you found was absolutely heartbreaking. I wonder though if there's like one particular kid you profiled, do you want to just tell us a little bit more about? Yeah, I mean, I remember one kid whose name was Marcos Cooke's who came through right in that period. And he was released to a distant relative who he didn't really know when he was 13. And immediately was put to work at a chicken plant in Virginia. And he would work all night. And then in the morning, he would go directly to middle school. And one night he was working this shift and his arm was caught in a conveyor belt. And he was pulled across the factory. I met him shortly after that. His arm was just hanging at his side. And he said he was desperate to find some way to get back to work because he had all this debt to pay off. And he really wanted to be able to learn English and maybe stay in school and help his family and find a different kind of place. Wow. So to be clear, these are not kids who were sneaking across the border. These were kids who presented themselves, the government knew who they were. And they are being essentially connected with sponsors by the government, right? So who are these sponsors? Like, is it family members? Could it be anybody? Is it kind of like foster care? Yeah, that's such a good point. These aren't like hidden kids working in the shadows. They're not really undocumented the way we tend to think of that. They were here basically legally and they were working on getting legal status. So there's a whole special process that happens with children. It's not like when an adult presents themselves at the border. With these kids, there's a long-standing law that allows them to come in and then health and human services is responsible for taking them in, putting them into shelters and then finding a safe, responsible adult who they can go and live with. It's very different from normal immigration because the government is really supposed to ensure that they're not exploited, not trafficked once they come here. Okay, so this investigation has been brought up quite a bit in this governor's race. Javier Bacera, who's now the Democratic front runner in the race, was HHS Secretary at the time. And he's been attacked by opponents for essentially losing tens of thousands of kids. And he's brushed off the criticism as essentially "trump lies." But last week he was asked very directly by your colleague and our friend Laura Rosenhall about this and here's how he responded. What employers did after they left our care, after they left our jurisdiction, where the exploitation of children who may have occurred was not on my watch. While those kids were with us, they didn't get exploited. While those kids were with us, they were cared for. And we're very proud of what we did. So when you hear that response, like, is it fair to place any responsibility at Bacera's feet for what happened to these kids for what your investigation uncovered? I mean, I think it was really a chain of failures. It's not just HHS. Like Bacera says, it's true employers were exploiting these children. The labor department wasn't going and finding them. Schools often knew that they were working and for their own reasons, schools weren't alerting anyone. But HHS, Health and Human Services, which Bacera was running, that is the agency that was charged with making sure that these children were only released to safe homes. When a kid crosses the border, HHS can't just send them out to anyone. They have a congressionally mandated responsibility to vet the sponsors and make sure those sponsors are going to provide a place where the kid does not have to work. And that clearly did not happen. Yeah. Why do you think the number 85,000 keeps getting thrown around? So this number comes from one paragraph in a huge amount of reporting. Basically, Health and Human Services, like I said, is supposed to look into the families that are trying to take these kids in, make sure that they're going to be safe and responsible. And then after they release the kid, Health and Human Services is supposed to call within 30 days and make sure that the kid is doing okay. I think most people would say the first part of that, the vetting is much more important than the phone call. But we put in public records requests and were able to see that during those first years of the Biden administration, HHS was unable to get a hold of 85,000 children after they were released. And that has now turned into this talking point that those kids were lost. Yeah. I mean, as you look at this and think about your reporting, which is, again, I just have to say so heartbreaking to think about these young children, 12 years old working in these factories and really tough conditions and then expected to turn around and go to school the next day. Do you think it's fair for this to be a point in this governor's race, that it is being brought up, whether or not, Bacera is to blame entirely. Is it a fair sort of criticism for opponents to be bringing up? I mean, I would touch with a lot of people who worked for Bacera during this time and they absolutely want to see this brought up. They feel like they saw his management up close and personal and like what happened with the vetting of sponsors during this time was a total disaster. I don't think it's crazy that it's coming up now. I mean, Bacera was in charge of HHS during this crisis. As it surprised you, you're talking to me from Brooklyn. You obviously are not covering California politics or though, although that's how we met was back in Sacramento over a decade ago. Has it come as a surprise to you that this has become such a flashpoint? It's been so wild. I mean, we've been covering California politics and I'm from California. My family is all out there and they've been texting me for weeks. Like I'm hearing your voice in a talk ads and seeing your words on my TV and it's just been very surreal to have this suddenly come up again. But I mean, I do feel like it's very important. Yeah. Well, it's an incredibly important investigation. We're going to take a short break when we come back. We'll continue talking to the New York Times Hannah Dryer. You're listening to breakdown, and Marisa Lagos will be right back. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money. Star One Credit Union in your best interest. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Rinse. Rinse knows that mastering the perfect house party table spread takes time, but so does laundry. So rinse, takes your laundry, and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing to finally pursue your real passion. Getting delicate roses of Capacola alongside meandering ribbons of Hamon Serrano, transforming a humble plank of weathered barnwood into a show-stopping charcuterie spread? Welcome back to Political Breakdown, I'm Marisa Lagos. Today I am talking with New York Times reporter Hannah Dreyer about her investigation into the exploitation of migrant children and how it's being used as fodder by Javier Bacerra's opponents in the California race for governor. All right, well let's go back to the point in time where you were investigating this. And, you know, before the Biden administration came in, we really saw an influx starting I think around 2014 of children crossing the border without parents or guardians. And it really exploded by 2022 when you published this piece. What was driving this migration? Why would parents go to, you know, the point, like I can't even imagine like telling your young child like, you need to go alone and make this journey? That's such a good question. I mean, people might remember the big influx that happened in 2014. That was a very different kind of migration. Those kids tended to be older teenagers and they were mostly coming to reunite with parents who had left them behind. What we saw after the pandemic was that there were these huge pockets of poverty in Central America and the parents knew that they couldn't cross the border. They would be turned back. And so they started to send their kids, sometimes really, you know, 11 year olds, 12 year olds, young kids, across the border. And the idea was they were going to be sponsored by people who were maybe family friends, maybe strangers, distant relatives, and then send money back as remittances to help the rest of the family. So that is a huge shift. And I think it is largely because of the economic conditions in Central America. And because people knew that kids could get across the border and that there were these jobs that they could start doing. I mean, we also had this real labor crunch after the pandemic. And so it was sort of those two things that combined to generate this huge surge. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we've heard is this comes up in the governor's races. We are just saying, you know, we inherited a tough situation. The Trump administration had gotten a lot of pushback for essentially putting kids in detention facilities that critics called, you know, putting kids in cages. So what did the Biden administration inherit? Like what did the situation look like when they got in? So Pacerra keeps going back to family separation and sort of the biggest outrages of the Trump administration when he's asked about this. But family separation doesn't have a ton to do with what the part of HHS that deals with migrant children was doing at this time. That was really an ice like CBP. Because they're an agency. Because it was families, right? Like that was families that were being taken apart. Exactly. Exactly. These are kids who are not here with families. And I mean, is there, yeah, is there any way that the first Trump administration handled migrant children that affected how the Biden administration was tackling it or was it more just the sheer number that they sort of, you know, got when they got in that was happening? I wonder what Pacerra is sort of trying to allude to there is that there weren't a lot of beds in shelters. There hadn't been very many children crossing the border partly because of the pandemic, partly because of Trump policies. And so when Biden came in, it's true that there just weren't a lot of beds for these kids to sleep in. And so they had to build these kind of tent cities. And that's one thing that the administration was getting really hammered on. But it's not that the Trump administration, the first Trump administration was sending children out to work in huge numbers or anything like that. I mean, my reporting show that this really started when Pacerra and Biden started sort of pushing these kids out to adults who were planning to put them to work. And I think it is important to note that some of that was with good intentions, right? Like Pacerra in your story you talk about the customs and border patrol facilities at the border were very like jail-like facilities, right? They didn't want the kids to be staying there. Absolutely. I mean, there's always this tension with migrant children between the impulse to get them out of congregate care to get them into regular homes with families and adults who want to look after them and then need to vet those adults. And it sort of swings back and forth. So with Republican administrations, kids are usually staying in shelters for longer, but Democrats' administrations usually get out of the shelters more quickly, but then sometimes there's issues with the families they're being sent to. And it's just impossible to get it totally right. I mean, nobody wants kids to be languishing in shelters. Yeah. Under Pacerra Health and Human Services changed some of its own rules around background checks and reviews of files. Why did that happen? And what was the impact of those changes? This is something that I heard about from ECHS workers. It get it again. They felt like they had this whole system of checks and balances that was there to prevent kids from being sent to unsafe homes. And they were getting enormous pressure from Pacerra to move kids along more quickly. And so they started doing things like not checking a certain category of distant relative as closely. A lot of people told me that they felt like they would flag cases for extra review. And instead of the cases getting reviewed, the kids would just be sent out before they could even check back to see what happened. I also heard from people who said that the adults weren't really made to prove their identities. So they would be talking to somebody who had said that they were a kid's uncle, and then they would get on the phone or get on a Zoom call. And it would just be another child who was trying to sponsor the kid. And they would just be shocked that it had gotten to that level. Those are the kinds of things that got changed during that period. So this was all in an attempt again to move kids through the process more quickly. But when these employees that you spoke with, you know, flag these issues, like what was then Secretary of Pacerra's response? Did they feel like he was taking these concerns seriously or that the people under him were? One thing we obtained was video of a meeting where Pacerra is berating his employees and telling them that they have to move children more quickly through shelters. And he's saying, we want to do this like an assembly line, Henry Ford, Defer would have become rich. If he hadn't been more efficient, and people who worked for him were horrified. They felt like this is not a Henry Ford factory. These are children and they felt like when they were sending up these warnings, they were just falling on deaf ears. After these kids are placed, Health and Human Services does have some responsibility right to follow up with the sponsors. Did they fulfill that obligation under Pacerra? I know you also reported that there was a hotline that kids could call, but didn't seem like there was a lot of sort of action if abuse was reported. So once the kids are away from the border, what was Pacerra's organization's responsibility there? So there's debate around how much HHS is supposed to follow up with these kids. It's not like the foster care system where they're supposed to track the kids all the way into adulthood. But on the other hand, they're charged with making sure that the kids are going to save places. So at the time, they were doing these phone calls 30 days after. And then there was also a hotline, but children told me that they would call this hotline and try to report abuse or try to report that they were being made to work these overnight shifts and would never get a call back. And it turned out that the policy that the hotline had was actually did not call these kids back, but instead to call some other agency or to try to sort of work around in some other system. And there were so many things like this where there were sort of stopgap measures to follow up with kids, but they just weren't working. After the reporting, a lot of that got changed and HHS started actually sending people to kids homes to make sure that they were okay. They fixed the hotlines so that it would call children back. And I think just the fact that they made those reforms sort of shows that the agency did accept that they had some responsibility to keep track of these kids after they were released. Yeah. I mean, I think your story does a really great job of explaining like the sort of multi-layers of this exploitation, right? You wrote, "The growth of migrant child labor in the United States is a result of a chain of willful ignorance companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms on factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And HHS behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine." even if HHS wasn't actually responsible. for going out and finding these kids and doing well checks the way like a foster system is, what about the sort of broader network? Like, for example, some of these adults seem to be luring kids here in order to exploit them. So, did the Biden administration more broadly like go after those folks? My sense is that a lot of people in the administration didn't know the extent of the exploitation. And I think a lot of the HHS workers who were trying to warn them about this would say that that was because of intentional lack of curiosity. But I didn't think that I was going to find this, but I started this reporting. You know, I thought probably some kids are working, but they're probably working maybe as dishwasher as maybe they're working on farms. I would never have guessed that it was going to be mostly sort of industrial exploitation. And my sense is that the Biden administration also, you know, wasn't following up with these kids. So I was following up with some of the warnings that employees had sent up the chain. Like, when case worker told me she talked to a sponsor who was a stranger who told her outright over the phone that he was going to put the kid to work and the kid got released to that person. But the case worker didn't know what happened. And it wasn't until I went and knocked on that kid's door that I found out, yes, he had in fact been put to work immediately and had never seen the sponsor again. But they sort of weren't doing that legwork, I think, to even really know what the final outcome was in a lot of these cases. Yeah, because there's also other agencies other than HHS that could have been sort of put on this, right? If there was more warnings, I'm thinking about, I mean, the companies that were exploiting these kids include like, hearth side, which makes and packages foods for free-to-lay and general mills and quicker oats. So where was the labor department or other sort of investigators there? I mean, yeah, there's so many breakdowns that contribute to this. So the labor department wasn't going out and basically checking who was working on these shifts. They were relying on tipsters to tell them if they were child labor issues. And they're, you know, if you think about it for two seconds, you can sort of figure out why people are going to be unlikely to alert the federal government about child labor on like your night shift making materials. Because a lot of the other workers were themselves undocumented. People thought that these kids maybe needed the jobs. The kids were mostly working with fake papers. So they weren't coming out and telling the employers that they were children. They often were telling their co-workers, but their co-workers saw what a desperate situation they were in, how they had to pay rent, they had to pay back debts. And after this reporting, the labor department really stepped up what they were doing and started going out and conducting investigations and finding child labor. But before this, it was this sort of passive system. And these cases just were not being investigated. I mean, it also just strikes me when you read this that like we all as Americans are essentially profiting from this exploitation. Because if you buy cereal, if you buy clothes, if you buy meat, if you buy dairy, like it seems at least at this moment in time, likely that a child worked to get those products onto people's plates and in their homes. Oh, I mean, when I was doing this reporting, going to the grocery store became impossible. Like, I was trying to go to the farmer's market because that was the only place I could figure out to get, you know, chicken and eggs that didn't have some kind of horrible exploitation behind them. One study that I read that's really stuck with me found that if people in slaughterhouses or a lot of these kids were working, we're paid just $2 more an hour. Many, many more Americans and adults would be willing to take those jobs. A lot of these kids were doing jobs that were low paid, the working conditions were terrible and adults didn't want to take them. And I think about that a lot, like if things were just a little more expensive for us, the consumer, it would probably be much easier to get child labor out of the system. Yeah. I just want to say as somebody with a 13-year-old, like on a personal level, reading your reporting is just so heartbreaking and upsetting. And it does sort of beg the question, sort of pivoting back to the politics. Like, why Bacera hasn't been a little more empathetic? Like, it just seems like you could talk about this and, you know, maybe not say, "Oh, this was all my fault." But at least acknowledge that this was happening. I mean, have you been surprised at the tenor of how his campaign has pushed back? I've been really interesting to see. I mean, at the time in 2023, two days after we published the first of these stories, the White House responded immediately. The press secretary said that it was a heartbreaking situation, sort of everything that you've just said, said that it wasn't acceptable and they were going to make all of these changes. But Bacera never said anything like that. And he was called before Congress many times and grilled on exactly what we've been talking about, how this was allowed to happen with all of these children. And he said the same thing that we're hearing today, that it wasn't HHS's fault. This was other agencies and basically never took responsibility, even as his own agency was making changes and improving things. And it really worked, I think, politically at the time. You know, people wondered if he might be fired at the time and he never was. And I wonder if it's working now also. Yeah. Well, tell us before I let you go, like, what were the changes that were enacted? Do you have any confidence that some of the problems that your investigation uncovered were addressed? A lot of what we uncovered was addressed and really much more quickly than that I've ever seen, anything I've ever reported on, these things. Immediately the Labor Department started going out and looking for these cases. HHS totally changed the way that they were following up with children. They got rid of that 30-day call thing and started going and really providing services to kids after they were released. They also took steps to get these kids lawyers because that's sort of what allows a kid to work a legal job and a safer job. And they started a whole office with in HHS just defined exploited kids and make sure that more children weren't released to these situations. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for your time today and for this excellent piece of reporting. It really, um, folks should go back and read it. It was just heartbreaking but also really important. Thank you. It's so great to talk again and I'm wishing you so much luck with this crazy political season. Everyone must be running on fumes. Thank you. Hannah Dryer, that's New York Times reporter Hannah Dryer. She want to pull a surprise for her investigation into the exploitation of migrant children. Before we go, please join us for our final town hall at KQED. This one's with Tom Steyer, a top Democrat in the race for governor. Steyer is going to be taking questions from the audience and talking with KQED's Guy Marzorati on Tuesday, May 26th at 6 p.m. Right here at our headquarters in San Francisco. You can register for that event and many others at KQED.org/events. We'll also add a link to our show notes. And for more election information, two weeks from now, June 2nd, you can find our voter guide at KQED.org/ That is a wrap for Tuesday, May 19th political breakdowns of production of KQED. Our engineers Jim Bennett and our producers Izzy Bloom. I'm Marisa Lagos. Thanks for listening. Support for KQED podcast comes from Xfinity. Plus, get online in minutes with same day Wi-Fi. 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