Where Migrant Children Are Living, and Often Working, in the U.S.

Since 2021, migrant children have been traveling alone to the United States in record numbers: Nearly 400,000 children have crossed the southern border by themselves, most of them fleeing extreme poverty.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for placing these children with adult sponsors. While about a third of the children are reunited with parents in the United States, the rest live with other relatives or even strangers.

The New York Times analyzed H.H.S. data to determine the areas of the country with the highest concentrations of migrant children sent to sponsors who are not their parents.

Here is where they are ending up.

Many of these unaccompanied migrant children are coming from rural areas in Central America that were crushed by the pandemic and its economic fallout. In the highlands of Guatemala, for instance, work dried up and food prices soared.

A decade ago, most unaccompanied migrant children were released to their parents. 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.

Social workers, teachers and lawyers who work with migrant children estimate that a majority of these children end up working full time, often in dangerous jobs that violate labor laws.

The Times obtained detailed data about where migrant children were released after successfully suing H.H.S. for a range of documents in October 2022.

The Times has used this database to identify small towns and urban neighborhoods in which disproportionate numbers of migrant children were living without their parents.

Some of the children living in these clusters have suffered serious injuries at work, like Marcos Cux, who was maimed at a Perdue Farms poultry plant in Virginia. Others have struggled to stay in school, like Carolina Yoc, who tried to balance ninth grade with a full-time night job packing Cheerios. Both were in ZIP codes where more than 90 percent of the migrant children were released to non-parent sponsors.

To help others study and report on this work force, The Times is releasing a 553,322-row dataset that details with new specificity where migrant children have ended up after coming to the United States on their own.