Early morning on the New Bedford waterfront looks like a quaint New England scene, with colorful fishing boats lining up at warehouses to unload basket after basket of fresh fish.
But a 2023 investigative series by The Public’s Radio revealed some of these seafood processing factories illegally employed migrant teenagers in roles where they worked overnight shifts and operated powerful machines killing crabs and stripping the skin and bones off fish filets. The series chronicled the lives of kids as young as 14 who worked until early in the morning, sleeping for just an hour or two before going to high school.
Massachusetts lawmakers are now taking action in response to what the series uncovered. In June, State Rep. Christopher Hendricks introduced a bill he drafted with other New Bedford legislators to the state legislature’s judiciary committee.
“I filed this bill alongside Senator [Mark] Montigny and Representative [Antonio] Cabral in direct response to deeply troubling reports of child labor abuse in seafood processing facilities in the city of New Bedford,” Hendricks told his colleagues at the bill’s public hearing.
The proposed legislation seeks to clear up a legal gray area and definitively outlaw anyone under 18 from working in the state’s seafood processing or packing facilities, many of which are located in New Bedford, the nation’s highest-grossing fishing port.
Hendricks said the bill’s main purpose is to increase the minimum fine for child labor violations in Massachusetts from $500 to $20,000. The New Bedford Democrat said stricter penalties will get employers to take more responsibility for solving a child labor problem he said has lingered for over a decade due to lax enforcement.
“One of the main critiques about the law as it is written is that it doesn’t have any bite,” Hendricks said. “A $500 fine for a multimillion-dollar corporation isn’t going to do anything.
“Now they have an incentive to do their own due diligence,” Hendricks said.
Hendricks’ bill is the first effort by local officials to clamp down on a problem that he described as an open secret in New Bedford.
“I always knew it existed, not from the perspective of a policymaker or a lawmaker, but just by working downtown and just by working with them in restaurants,” said Hendricks, who worked as a bartender before his election to the state legislature in 2018.
A difficult balance
Advocates who work closely with New Bedford’s migrant teenagers have expressed skepticism about the bill, though.
Helena DaSilva Hughes, executive director of New Bedford’s nonprofit Immigrants’ Assistance Center, said she has “mixed feelings” about the effort to stop unaccompanied minors from working in the city’s seafood processing factories.
On the one hand, Hughes said seafood processing jobs are dangerous for teenagers. There have been fatal accidents in New Bedford’s fish houses where adults got their clothes and skin caught in machines that sucked them in and killed them.
But Hughes said not being able to work will hurt the kids too, as many of them still owe debts to the coyotes or smugglers who got them here.
“You’re putting your family in a very dangerous situation, to the point that the families could even be killed,” Hughes said, “and you hear this from the kids when you talk to them.”
The investigation by The Public’s Radio drew on interviews with more than two dozen teenagers who worked seafood processing jobs, and found many of them left their homes in Central America to financially support their families. Upon arriving at the U.S. border, many turned themselves into immigration authorities. They were later released into the custody of sponsors without any form of work authorization.
In New Bedford, many of the teens purchased fake identification and applied for the kinds of jobs open to undocumented people with a limited understanding of English, which often meant working in the seafood processing plants, which locals call fish houses or pescadarias.
Hendricks’ bill aims to crack down on Massachusetts’ seafood industry by raising penalties for child labor violations.
If it’s successful, Hughes said she expects New Bedford’s migrant kids will move to other places to find new jobs. She said it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay put and start living a normal American childhood when they have families depending on them financially.
“It’s a different culture. It’s a different mentality, right?” Hughes said. “They’re mostly focusing on going to work. And the reason why they’re going to school is because they feel like they’re being forced to.”
Without a federal overhaul of how unaccompanied minors are processed through the immigration system, or an international solution to the wealth inequality and violence that drives immigration from Central America, Hughes said many cities and states are left scrambling for local solutions to a problem that’s too big for them to solve.
‘An impossible situation’
Seafood processing companies in New Bedford are not supportive of the bill either.
Bob Vanasse, a public relations specialist who represents some of the Massachusetts firms accused of employing minors, said government officials should target enforcement efforts on the peddlers of falsified green cards and birth certificates. He said seafood processing companies are being tricked into employing minors.
“They’re not cases of employer negligence,” Vanasse said. “They’re cases of fraud, of deception.”
It has become as easy for immigrants to get fake green cards as it is for college students to get fake driver’s licenses, Vanasse said, which puts seafood companies in “an impossible situation.”
“They’re expected to detect fraud that even federal systems have proven unable to catch,” Vanasse said. “And what this bill would do is increase the penalties for failing to do the impossible.”
Hendricks’ bill is now under consideration at the Massachusetts State House. He said it’s up to New Bedford legislators to convince state House and Senate leadership that the bill — one of over 7,000 filed this session — is worth passing.
So far, the legislation hasn’t stirred up much of a public conversation. Hendricks was the only person to testify at the bill’s hearing before the judiciary committee in June. No other New Bedford lawmakers attended, and no one from the public came either.
The committee has until August 9 to edit the bill and decide whether to refer it to the full legislature for a vote.
