To their credit, some members of Congress (amazingly including some Democrats) have not lost sight of earlier reports indicating that more than 85,000 children seem to have gone missing after crossing the border into the United States illegally. Some of them may (hopefully) have wound up safely with family members around the country while others were tragically fed into a sex trafficking pipeline. But another large number of them have turned up working, sometimes in forced labor situations. This led to the questioning of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra yesterday over how his Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is tracking migrant children and how bad the child labor problem has become. Shockingly, Becerra admitted that there has been a 44% increase in children found to be illegally employed this year. And that’s only the ones we’ve been able to locate. (NBC News)

The same day that Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra faced criticism on Capitol Hill from members of both parties about reports of underage migrants working dangerous jobs, Labor Department officials announced a 44% increase in the number of children it found to be employed illegally.

During a hearing Wednesday on immigrant child labor, Rep. Anna Eshoo, D.-Calif, told Becerra that she was not satisfied with his agency’s response to questions she and 25 other House members had sent him in late May. After reports of child labor surfaced, they sent Becerra a letter asking about how carefully HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which finds homes for unaccompanied migrant minors, was vetting the sponsors who were offering to host the children.

Becerra agreed that the reports of illegal child labor were both “real” and “repulsive.” But he also tried to shift the blame elsewhere. The HHS secretary claimed that ORR’s vetting process for sponsors (people who agree to take in migrant children) “remains thorough.” He also said that once the child is transferred to the sponsor, the agency’s responsibility “legally ends.”

While that may be technically true, at least in terms of ORR’s responsibilities, we definitely shouldn’t be accepting this answer at face value. If there were only a comparative handful of children coming across the border in any given month as was more common a few years ago, they could probably do a decent job of vetting the sponsors. But we’re facing a human flood these days and ORR is facing the same shortfall of personnel as every other agency that is in any way involved in immigration issues.

We’ve also seen repeated incidents of people coming across the border and simply lying about who they are and what familial relations may or may not exist within groups of migrants. Some of the children also arrive with names of supposed relatives they are supposed to seek out, but vetting all of them is likely an equally impossible task. If ORR is ‘meeting and exceeding its statutory requirements’ (as Becerra claimed) how did almost 90,000 children go missing? How are so many of them winding up in illegal working conditions?

Child labor laws in the United States have always struck me as a complex issue. In general, I find the laws to be too restrictive in most cases and they can be detrimental to children’s early development. I was already working for pay on a farm at the age of ten (granted, I was getting paid in dimes and quarters) and I had my first job drawing an actual paycheck at 14. (I earned $1.95 per hour.) My father believed that instilled a good work ethic in young people and there have only been a couple of months where I wasn’t employed in the half-century since then.

But I’m talking about the children of American citizens living in hopefully stable homes. Illegal migrant children being brought into the country are another question entirely. While we need to do a vastly better job at controlling the flow, we also can’t be heartless enough to ignore the minors who wind up alone and subject to abuse. And whether Xavier Becerra thinks it’s fair or not, this is his responsibility.