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As Florida officials enable Trump’s mass deportation policies, lawmakers in the state are looking to children to take on some of the jobs that have typically been done by immigrants.
Making its way through the state Senate is a new law, Senate Bill 918, that aims to loosen child labor laws and allow teenagers to work overnight shifts.
The state’s legislature on Tuesday advanced a bill that would loosen child labor laws, allowing children as young as 14 years old to work overnight shifts. If the new law is passed, teenagers would be able to work overnight jobs on school days. They are currently prevented from working earlier than 6:30 am or later than 11 pm per state law.
S.B. 918 also “includes a number of changes including eliminating working time restrictions on teenagers aged 14 and 15 if they are home-schooled and ending guaranteed meal breaks for 16 and 17 year olds,” CNN reported.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis backs the law and has defended the idea of teenagers and college students working these jobs. DeSantis also explicitly linked the effort to the loss of immigrant labor. Speaking about the consequences of state verification laws at an event with border czar Tom Homan, the governor said, “Yes, we had people that left because of those rules, but you’ve also been able to hire other people. And what’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now?”
In recent years, several states — many of them led by Republican governors — have rolled back child labor laws. This map from the Economic Policy Institute illustrates the spike in states rolling back these laws from 2021 to 2024. Back in 2023, for example, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill that made it easier for companies to hire children without getting consent from their parents. One month earlier, The New York Times published a bombshell report about the exploitation of immigrant children in factories operated by some of the most well-known companies in the U.S.
That story should have spurred a nationwide push to strengthen child labor laws. Instead, states like Florida are going in the opposite direction, weakening such laws in part to deal with the fallout from the conservative movement’s demonization of immigrants. They’re essentially using child labor to paper over the gaps left by their draconian immigration policies.
Project 2025, the far-right playbook for Trump’s second term, specifically calls for rolling back “hazard” regulations around child labor. The text claims, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs” and argues that “with parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”
Even as child labor laws are being rolled back, the Trump administration is working to gut social services, including funds that help provide school lunches to children and programs, like the supplemental nutrition assistance program, that help feed poor families. And if those cuts stay in place, they may leave American families with few alternatives to sending their children to work to keep food on the table.