The New York Times has released a trove of raw government data on the unaccompanied alien children who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. Among over 10,000 pages of information is data on the number of children who crossed the border into America without an adult and then were handed over to someone other than a family member.
From January 2015 through May 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released tens of thousands of minors who crossed the border illegally to sponsors who weren’t an immediate or distant relative, raising concerns about human trafficking and forced labor.
“More children are crossing the border on their own than ever before, and thousands are ending up doing dangerous, illegal jobs,” New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier wrote on X in a thread sharing the numbers with the public.
The Times sued the government to gain access to the records, which reveal more than 550,000 minors crossed the border illegally between 2015, halfway through Barack Obama’s second term as president, through May 2023, about two years and four months into Joe Biden’s presidency. From 2017 through 2020, Donald Trump was president.
