IMMIGRATION

A cleaning company illegally employed a 13-year-old. Her family is paying the price.

One of 27 minors hired to clean a Nebraska slaughterhouse, the middle-schooler and her family now fear deportation and more.

By Maria Sacchetti and Lauren Kaori Gurley
March 3, 2023 at 1:58 p.m. EST

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. —

At 13, she was too young to be cleaning a meatpacking plant in the heart of Nebraska cattle country, working the graveyard shift amid the brisket saws and the bone cutters. The cleaning company broke the law when it hired her and more than two dozen other teenagers in this gritty industrial town, federal officials said. ... Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel.

First, she lost the job that burned and blistered her skin but paid her $19 an hour. Then a county judge sent her stepfather to jail for driving her to work each night, a violation of state child labor laws. Her mother also faces jail time for securing the fake papers that got the child the job in the first place. And her parents are terrified of being sent back to Guatemala, the country they left several years ago in search of a better life.

“I have no words,” the mother said last month, sobbing in the doorway of their pale-peach house hours after police had led her husband away in handcuffs. The girl, now 14, hugged her mother and struggled to describe how she felt. ... “Bad,” she said, finally.

A sweeping investigation of Packers found 102 teens, ages 13 to 17, scouring slaughterhouses in eight states, part of a growing wave of child workers illegally hired to fill jobs in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries. Driven in part by persistent labor shortages and record numbers of unaccompanied migrant minors arriving from Central America, child labor violations have nearly quadrupled since 2015, according to Labor Department data, spiking in hazardous jobs that American citizens typically shun. ... Homeland Security Investigations has opened a criminal investigation into possible human trafficking related to the Department of Labor’s civil probe, a spokesperson said, and the Biden administration this week pledged a broader crackdown. But the fallout in Grand Island illustrates the painful complexity of enforcing the nation’s child labor laws.

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JBS billboards across the street from its Grand Island facility on Feb. 25. (Madeline Cass for The Washington Post)

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By Maria Sacchetti
Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for the Washington Post, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the court system. She previously reported for the Boston Globe, where her work led to the release of several immigrants from jail. She lived for several years in Latin America and is fluent in Spanish. Twitter https://twitter.com/mariasacchetti

By Lauren Kaori Gurley
Lauren Kaori Gurley is the labor reporter for The Washington Post. She previously covered labor and tech for Vice's Motherboard. Twitter https://twitter.com/laurenkgurley