GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Following the release of the New York Times explosive report on migrant children working overnight factory shifts in Grand Rapids, local Congresswoman Hillary Scholten reached out to the White House to form a federal task force to address the situation.
Scholten represents Michigan's third congressional district, which includes Grand Rapids.
The report in the Times details a number of children, some as young as 12-years-old, attending school during the day, and working jobs on the line inside Hearthside Food's Grand Rapids factory at night. Some of the students doing this attend Union High School.
“As a mother, I will not stand by as this tragedy continues. These are my constituents. These are my kids and I'll protect them with everything I have,” Rep. Scholten said in an address to the United States House of Representatives on February 27.
“These children... are working marathon shifts, often with dangerous machinery to package our foods, sew our clothes and build our homes.”
After the report was published on February 25, Scholten says she immediately began reaching out to her contacts at the White House.
"I asked them to form an interagency task force to address this unique problem,” she told FOX 17 during a sit-down this week.
“We need to make sure that we are enforcing the laws that are on the books to protect kids from these types of dangerous conditions, and also that we're really getting to the heart of the matter that will prevent this type of exploitation from happening in the future."
The task force will allow a collaboration of efforts and resources between the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Many of the children working these grueling shifts are doing so to either pay back the people who helped them cross the border, or to send much-needed funds back to their families in their home countries.
"The Department of Health and Human Services is doubling down on its efforts to vet the sponsors who take these children, and who are responsible for caring for them while they're in the United States, and making sure that they're not being forced to work, even by the sponsors who are charged with protecting them,” Scholten told FOX 17. "I think it is telling of just what a dire situation we are in when... instead of going to school, these children are being forced to work full time jobs in these dangerous conditions."
Part of the problem, Scholten says, is our country's antiquated immigration laws, and major inadequacies at our southern border.
“But we have the technology, we have the man and the woman power to patrol the border in a safe and effective manner," Scholten said.
If executed effectively, she believes it will "make sure that individuals will always have the right to seek asylum in a third country, but that we're not, in our efforts to serve a humanitarian end, we're not doing a deep humanitarian disservice by allowing children to be smuggled into our country for dangerous jobs.”
