According to experts, it is a "open secret" that many minors who cross the border into the US by themselves wind up working.
In factories, farms, and mills across the country, thousands of migrant youngsters labor long hours in demanding, frequently hazardous conditions.
The children often departed their home countries and came to the US alone by traveling across the southern border without their parents. Many of them are looking for protections under US and international law, including asylum, which can take years to complete and cost thousands of dollars.
They require means of sustaining themselves while they wait, as well as ways to transfer money to their family back home for many of them.
Numerous long-standing regulations against child labor are broken by night hours and unsafe jobs. How then does this occur? What does it indicate about how Americans approach immigrants, too?
In an UpFront special, host Marc Lamont Hill speaks with Mario Bruzzone, senior policy adviser with the Women's Refugee Commission's Migrant Rights and Justice program, and New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier, author of the expose Alone and Exploited: Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the US.
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