amy: we're joined now by hannah dreier, a pulitzer prize-winning reporter at "the new york times." r new investigation is headlined "as migrant children were put to work, u.s. ignored warnings." dreier's earlier piece is "alone and exploited, migrant children work brutal jobs across the u.s." hannah dreier, welcome back to democracy now! we had you on for your first blockbuster expose showing children as young as 12 working across the united states. now your reporting the biden administration knew about this, not only knew about this and did not do anything, they actually did do something -- they pushed out those within the administration who were raising alarms. can you talk about what you found? >> it is great to be with you. just as you say, people were punished for bringing this to the attention of their supervisors. people say they were fired, they were demoted. i spent a year talking to children who came to this country and are working in the most exploitive conditions in factories and slaughterhouses. i found these children in every single state of the country. after that sto

hannah dreier spent a year investigating all this for the new york times and joins me now. being with the newshour. so you spoke to people in this latest piece who raised red flags that this was happening to migrant children. who did they raise those concerns to and why weren't they heard? >> so, like you say, i spent a year looking into migrant child labor in this country, and we found kids working in all 50 states. these were sometimes 12, 13-year-olds. and i started asking myself how can it be that the biden administration didn't know about this when it is so widespread, and we're talking about tens of thousands of children, and it turns out there were people in the administration, some of them in senior roles who were trying to raise this. so the administration was told about people out in the field who are coming across children who said that they were being forced to work and then people at the highest levels of the administration people in the , white house were told about clusters of children working in meatpacking factories, working in car plants all around the cou

of purpose i the streets, i did everything could to warn them they just did not want to hear it hannah dreiert story. she is a pulitzer prize-winnin investigative reporter for the new york times she joins us now hannah, let's talk about the impact of your story you write about a 14 old boy antonio from guatemala, who is in florida he wanted to go to school, but felt trapped because he needed to earn money to repay his debts, support himself and for his siblings no one, he said, had ever come to check on him. how does a child from anothe country, teenagers mostly, and up and potentially dangerous labor conditions here in the country? >> antonio is one of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children who ar in this exact situation, who have come across the borde alone without their parents an been released to a person wh instead of taking care of them as put them to work. antonio did not sneak into thi country and noticed. he's not here undocumented i the shadows. he can't a shelter owned b have full human services and released to somebody who sai that he would be a sponsor inste