The Justice Department said Thursday that employees of the biggest housing provider for unaccompanied migrant children in the US sexually abused and harassed children in their care over and over again for at least eight years. The department said that the employees did this while the company got billions of dollars in government contracts.
As early as 2015 and maybe even earlier, workers of Southwest Key Programs Inc. raped, touched, or asked for sex and naked pictures of children, according to a lawsuit filed this week by the Justice Department. Since 2020, at least two employees have been charged with crimes connected to the claims.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many kids are in Southwest Key’s huge network of shelters in three states. These homes can hold more than 6,300 kids. When asked if the department thought that children should be taken out of the shelters or that the nonprofits’ contracts should be stopped, a Justice Department spokesperson said that they could only say what the lawsuit said.
“In some cases, Southwest Key employees made threats against children to keep quiet,” the lawsuit says. “When these Southwest Key employees harassed these kids, they took advantage of their weaknesses, language barriers, and lack of close family and friends.”
SW Key said in a statement that it was looking into the report and disagreed with how it was portrayed that it cared for children.
The charity group houses more unaccompanied migrant children than any other group. It does this with help from the US Department of Health and Human Services. 17 are in Texas, 10 are in Arizona, and 2 are in California. It has 29 homes for children who are migrants. The company’s biggest shelter, which can hold 1,200 people, is in Brownsville, Texas, and used to be a Walmart.
The provider has been a big but not very well-known part of how the government has dealt with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of children traveling alone as migrants in recent years and with the breakup of thousands of families in 2017 and 2018 during President Trump’s administration. From 2015 to 2023, the government gave the company more than $3 billion in contracts.
Within 72 hours of arrest, the Border Patrol has to give Health and Human Services custody of any children who are not with an adult. After a short stay at Southwest Key or a shelter run by another contracted provider, most of the children are released to their parents or close cousins.
The most current information on the Health and Human Services website says that on June 17, 6,228 children were staying at all of its facilities. The website does not break down the numbers by shelter or provider. The department wouldn’t say how many kids are in Southwest Key’s care at the moment or if the agency is still sending kids to its sites.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in Austin, Texas, where Southwest Key is based, goes into great detail. It says that since 2015, officials have received more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the provider’s shelters.
One of the claims in the case is that an employee at the Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso, Texas, “repeatedly sexually abused” three girls ages 5, 8, and 11. A child aged 8 told police that the worker “repeatedly entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private area,’ and he threatened to kill their families if they told anyone about the abuse.”
Another claim in the case is that in 2020, an employee of the provider’s shelter in Tucson, Arizona, took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to do sexual acts for a few days.
The claim says that children were told they would be hurt by themselves or their family if they told anyone about the abuse. It also said that victims’ statements showed that some staff members knew about the abuse going on but didn’t report it or tried to hide it.
He said Thursday that the complaint “raises serious pattern or practice concerns” about Southwest Key. Becerra is the secretary of health and human services. The spokesperson said in a statement that HHS does not accept any kind of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual behavior, or discrimination.
The company behind Southwest Key Programs Inc. said Thursday that they are still looking over the complaint, which they say “does not paint a true picture of the care and commitment our employees provide to the youth and children.”
Texas, like Florida, took away the licenses of facilities that house migrant children in 2021 because of a huge surge of people coming across the border from Mexico. This was seen as an oversight void by some critics.
The case comes less than three weeks after a federal judge agreed to the Justice Department’s request to stop keeping a close eye on how HHS cares for migrant children who are alone. The government of President Joe Biden said that 27 years after it started, special oversight was no longer needed because of new federal safeguards.
The Border Patrol is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is still supervised by a special court.
In the case for court oversight, Leecia Welch, an attorney for unaccompanied children, said that the accusations against Southwest Key are “absolutely disgusting.” She also said that Texas’ decision to take away their licenses was “a powder keg waiting to explode.”
Welch, deputy legal head of Children’s Rights, said, “I applaud the efforts to make up for the terrible wrongs these children have been through, but I hope the federal government will also take some responsibility for the part it played.”
Another lawyer who is watching over the court, Neha Desai, said the accusations were “deeply disturbing and shocking.”
Desai, senior director for immigration at the National Center for Youth Law, said, “I hope that the government takes the strongest steps possible to make sure that children on the Southwest Key facilities are not in danger.”
There were emails left with the offices of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday by the Associated Press. The attorneys general of Arizona and California both refused to say anything about the case.
