The New York Times is releasing data kept by the U.S. Department of Human Health and Services on children who have migrated to the United States without an adult. This data details the children’s locations once they are released to sponsors in the U.S. as well as their relationships to those sponsors. The Times gained access to this data through a Freedom of Information Act request, after a lawsuit. This dataset was used to report several articles, including Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.; As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings; The Kids on the Night Shift, and Children Risk Their Lives Building America's Roofs.

The data files contain anonymized information on more than 550,000 child migrants and cover the period from January 2015 through May 2023. They contain information on the child's gender and country of origin, date of entrance to the United States, date of release to a sponsor, relationship to that sponsor, and the ZIP code to which the child was released.

Data was provided to the New York Times as three separate Excel files. These files have been converted to CSV format and concatenated into a single spreadsheet.

The original data files contain two instances of rows with duplicate IDs: 1905 and 3787. Those duplicates are preserved here.

The Sponsor Category field is defined as 1) parent or legal guardian; 2) immediate relative; 3) distant relative or unrelated adult individual.

In general, we are making this data publicly available for broad, noncommercial public use, including by historians, researchers, policymakers and local news media. If you use this data, you must attribute it to “The New York Times” in any publication. See our LICENSE for the full terms of use for this data. This license is co-extensive with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, and licensees should refer to that license (CC BY-NC) if they have questions about the scope of the license.

If you have any questions about the data or licensing conditions, please contact Hannah Dreier at: [email protected]