Child migrant labor has been the subject of a series of stories in The New York Times this year, like this story about a boy who was severely injured doing work only adults are allowed to do.

The article highlights the terrible bind that many kids find themselves in: Many parents in Central America know that U.S. law is more lenient toward child migrants than toward adults. Faced with a choice between sending an older child north to work and letting all their children starve, parents make the logical — and terrible — choice.

Kids who arrive alone are first sent to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services and then released to any adult willing to sponsor them. The kids are required to attend school, but many do not because they have to work to pay off thousands of dollars in debt to “coyotes” who brought them to the country and to send remittances back to support their families. Employers, communities, and maybe even labor inspectors look the other way because they know the kids have no meaningful alternatives.

The Role of the Immigration Lawyer

There are poultry plants like the ones described in the Times article in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. Kids like these are among those who are represented by Immigrant Justice Corps Fellows.

Many migrant kids are eligible for a type of immigration relief called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS). If certain eligibility criteria are met to the satisfaction of a family court judge, the child will have a path to a green card. They will not be able to sponsor other family members — a policy decision made by Congress to prevent parents from using the program to obtain status for themselves — but the children themselves who obtain SIJS status do not have to spend their lives hiding in the shadows. They have a chance to get a better job, provide for their own children, and avoid perpetuating the cycle of extreme poverty.

Mine Is to Love Them

The Times story is troubling not only for the immense suffering it presents but for the policy questions it raises.

As an immigration legal scholar, those policy questions trouble me, and I’ll grapple with them elsewhere (in articles, books, or maybe later this week on How We Got Here, on Substack).

But as an immigration lawyer, I look at things differently.

In the documentary No Greater Love about the life and work of Mother Teresa, I recall a scene where Mother was asked why she focused on caring for the poor, when this did not prevent extreme poverty from occurring in the first place. Mother responded (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “That [work] is for others; mine is to love them and to care for them.”

When I sit across the table in our office from a child — strong, courageous, vulnerable, hopeful, and terrified, all at once — it’s not mine to care about the policy options. Mine is to love and care for this child of God. The one thing I can do is to advocate for them to receive protection under the program that Congress chose to set up for children like them.

If I can succeed at that, I can give this child one secure foothold in a world that offers them so very few.