They aren’t technically in cages anymore so there isn’t the press coverage. Things are still pretty terrible. Instead there are the open air holding camps that the Border Patrol is funneling people into. Camps that children are starving and freezing in. And once children do get processed, they are still separated from their families and no one is doing any real checks on the people they are being sent to. It is likely that a large number of migrant children have been victims of labor trafficking.

With the government struggling at the time to place children in safe homes, one caseworker said supervisors were warned that adoption attempts by some sponsors may indicate children were at risk because the sponsor was trying to take on at least a half-dozen children, a common indicator of labor trafficking. For instance, workers discovered that purportedly different guardians living at several addresses in one U.S. city had ties back to the same person, documents show. That suggested one sponsor was recruiting children for work, they said.