Coming to Bartholomew County: Hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children released to area sponsors

Hundreds of children traveling alone who were picked up at the Mexican border by U.S. immigration authorities have been sent to live with “sponsors” in Bartholomew County and the surrounding area in recent years, federal records show.

The children, mostly from Guatemala, were in the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — in some cases for nearly two years — before being released to local sponsors. The department is required under law to provide care for each unaccompanied child who arrives in the U.S. without an adult while officials work to place the children with “vetted” sponsors, which usually are parents or other relatives.

The children then live with these sponsors while they go through immigration proceedings. Many unaccompanied child migrants apply for asylum, officials said.

In total, 599 unaccompanied migrant children were sent to live with sponsors in Bartholomew, Jackson and Jennings counties from January 2015 to May 2023, according to federal records. More than 550,000 unaccompanied migrants were released to sponsors across the country during that period.

Most of those migrant children have wound up in Jackson County, including 509 children who were sent to live with sponsors in Seymour. A total of 84 children were released to sponsors in and around Bartholomew County, as well as six were released to sponsors in Jennings County.

At the same time, the number of migrant children who entered the U.S. and were released to local sponsors has risen since the pandemic struck, the records show. From 2015 to 2020, an average of 42 children were released to sponsors each year. But that number shot up to 150 in 2021 and then increased to 153 in 2022.

The figures come from The New York Times, which obtained data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the locations of unaccompanied migrant children once they are released to sponsors and their relationships to those sponsors. The Times gained access to the records following a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit.

The data includes anonymized information on more than 550,000 children who migrated to the U.S. without an adult from January 2015 to May 2023. These children were not separated from their parents by U.S. immigration officials at the border as part of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

“We see it day to day,” said Ashley Caceres, executive director of Su Casa Indiana, a non-profit that serves Latino immigrants and has offices in Columbus and Seymour. “Just hearing the numbers validates (what we’ve been seeing).”

82% from one country

While the local migrant children have come from several different countries, federal records show that 82% of them are from Guatemala, a country of around 17 million people that borders Mexico and is slightly smaller in land area than Pennsylvania.

Federal records do not indicate where in Guatemala these children are from, though officials said many Guatemalans in Jackson County come from Huehuetenango, which is located in the country’s Western Highlands region along the border with Mexico, and are of the Chuj indigenous group.

Huehuetenango is “one of Guatemala’s poorest and most rural regions,” and migration from there is “overwhelmingly driven by poverty,” according to a 2022 report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Officials said Guatemalans started arriving in Jackson County at least a couple decades ago, attracted to the lower cost of living and job opportunities in manufacturing, agriculture and construction. Since then, the Guatemalan population there has grown and at one point was the subject of a report in National Geographic, which estimated that there were 2,000 Chuj residents in Seymour in 2021, or about 10% of the city’s population.

Local officials and immigration experts say that a complex mix of factors has driven children and families to make the dangerous — and often deadly — trip north from Guatemala through Mexico and into the United States.

“It’s usually a decision made to escape (something),” Caceres said. “A lot of it has to do with the natural disasters that happened a couple years ago in Central America, as well as dangers around violence and discrimination.”

Most of the unaccompanied migrant children who came to Bartholomew County and nearby communities did so to reunite with family members who were already here, according to local officials. Federal records show that 38% of local sponsors were one of the children’s parents, while 55% of the sponsors were other family members, including grandparents, adult siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins.

One common scenario that Su Casa has seen is that a parent or guardian leaves their children behind with family in their home country and comes to Seymour or Columbus by themselves “to get a sense of where they were going to live and work,” officials said. Then they will arrange for their children to join them. Another common scenario is that parents send their children first to live with a relative who is already here until they can come themselves.

However, in 41 instances from 2015 to 2023, the local sponsors were not related to the children, and federal records do not specify who those people are. Caceres said she suspects that some of the unrelated local sponsors might be a family friend or someone from the family’s hometown who they trust with their children.

“Something that I think is very beautiful about the Guatemalan community is that they’re very tight knit, because they usually come from the same state or the same town or the same county,” Caceres said. “…And so, everybody is considered a family member, even if they’re not blood-related.”

At the same time, some of the migration from Guatemala to Bartholomew County and the surrounding area is related to gang-related violence in the country, which to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says has become an increasing problem in Guatemala and other parts of Central America over the past couple decades. Guatemala has some of the highest child homicide rates in the world, according to UNICEF.

“A scenario that has been relayed to me before is, ‘My dad is in the States working and sending money. I’m a teenager, and I am being recruited by the local gangs to be a member (and they) extort money to threaten my family if I don’t do this or that,’” said Felipe Martínez, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Columbus. “And it becomes an untenable situation to the point where they flee. They flee sometimes internally within the country, but then they also flee to another country and often to the United States.”

“Those are traumatic, traumatic experiences,” Martinez added. “This is not something that is taken lightly, at least not anecdotally from the people I have spoken with, because these are young kids.”

It is not clear how old the unaccompanied migrant children who have wound up in Bartholomew County and the surrounding area are. However, national-level data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this month that 76% of all unaccompanied children referred to them in fiscal year 2023 were older than 14, though many are younger than 12. Locally, about 60% of unaccompanied migrant children are boys.

‘Vetted’ sponsors

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that sponsors are “vetted” and that government officials complete a sponsor assessment to identify risk factors and other potential safety concerns before releasing the children. The assessment includes a criminal records check and “in most cases” a sex offender registry check.

There have been cases of migrant children who have been sent to live with sponsors in the U.S. who then exploited them for labor. Last year, NBC News reported that 340 migrant children were sent to live with sponsors already hosting three or more unaccompanied migrant children in what experts said “could be a red flag for child labor trafficking.” The New York Times recently reported that many underage migrants have wound up working dangerous jobs at Midwestern slaughterhouses, factories and elsewhere in the U.S. as part of a “shadow workforce” that “extends across industries in every state.”

Officials at Su Casa said they are unaware of any cases of labor exploitation involving migrant children in Columbus and Seymour, but they are on the lookout for it and recently underwent a human trafficking training.

Caceres said Su Casa is taking “extra steps to confirm (sponsors’) identification, confirm guardianship before offering someone a service.” “This is definitely, unfortunately, a possibility with these individuals,” she said.

Policymakers and migration

The increase in the number of unaccompanied migrant children released to sponsors in Bartholomew County and the surrounding area mirrors national trends. In fiscal year 2023, which ran from October 2022 through September 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provide care to 118,938 unaccompanied migrant children, up from 69,488 in fiscal year 2019. As of Jan. 19, there were 8,042 children being housed in government shelters awaiting sponsors.

Nationally, Guatemala was the most common country of origin of unaccompanied children picked up at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2023, representing 42% of all migrant children referred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that year.

The Migration Policy Institute says that migration from Huehuetenango to the U.S. is not a new phenomenon but has accelerated in recent years and “is likely to continue for some time” as many people in the region see migration as “the best way to help their family get ahead in life.

Néstor Rodríguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying migration from Guatemala to the U.S. for decades, said that most migrants, including some children, are coming to the U.S. because they want to work.

Some children in Guatemala, including the Western Highlands, are ready to start working full-time once they turn 14, which is when many children there finish sixth grade, he said. And when someone does make it to the U.S. and is successful — they bought a car or built a house in Guatemala — word tends to get back to their hometown, prompting more people to want to come.

“Many people who are involved in making migration and border policy don’t understand migration and how the border works,” Rodríguez said. “They have preconceived notions of people attacking the border or something. They don’t understand that many people who are coming just want to work. They don’t want to live here. They want to work for a few months and then go back home. And it used to be that way when I started doing research in the 1970s and 1980s. Many migrants would come, they’d work for a few months and go back to Mexico. …But when we started enforcing the border, it got harder to go home and come back because if you went home, you couldn’t come back to your job in the U.S. …So, the number of undocumented (migrants) in the country began to grow and grow and grow because people weren’t leaving anymore.”

Smuggling also is a big business in Guatemala and other parts of Central America. A 2021 study by the Migration Policy Institute found that migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were paying an estimated $1.7 billion per year to smugglers.

Rodríguez said he has visited towns in Guatemala where smugglers have arrived, advertising “tours to Houston” or “tours to Los Angeles.” The smugglers then hold a meeting for people who are interested in going on a “tour,” though “everybody knows that the ‘tour’ means (being) smuggled into the U.S.”

As of December 2023, smugglers were generally charging about $8,000 to $10,000 per person to transport people from Guatemala to the U.S. — a price that the migrants cannot afford, prompting them to get into debt with the smugglers and put up the few assets they have as collateral.

“(These) people don’t have $8,000 to $10,000,” Rodríguez said. “If they did, they wouldn’t need to migrate. So, that means they have to get into debt, or they have to put up collateral — their property, their little peasant farm.”

“They have to succeed … because if they don’t make money to pay back the smuggler, then they lose their land,” Rodríguez added. “They can’t go back (to Guatemala) if they lose their land. There’s nothing to go back to. They’re going to starve. So, they have to keep trying to cross (the border.)”

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, a geography professor at Indiana University who studies forced migration, said the labor shortage across the U.S., including in Indiana, plays a role in migration even though those two topics are generally discussed as separate issues.

“The biggest thing that we don’t talk about in migration is that the reason people are coming to the United States as opposed to somewhere else is that our labor market needs them,” Dunn said. “We have a labor shortage. …If there were no jobs here, they would not be coming.”

Local officials, for their part, say there is “humongous gap in our immigration system” and a “lack of empathy” for people who are just trying to survive.

“There is a lack of recognition and a lack of empathy when all we do is talk in polarized political talking points. These are real people who are trying to survive in every possible way,” Martínez said. “…It’s a disservice to their humanity for us to think of them just in terms of obeying a particular statute in civil law, as opposed to the humanity of somebody who is just trying to feed themselves or their family.”

“The country benefits from an underground economy fueled by undocumented immigrant labor,” he added. “And on the other hand, we don’t recognize it in any functional legal way. And both political parties have made a mess of any efforts to fix it.”