Housing provider for unaccompanied migrant children engaged in sexual abuse, harassment, U.S. says
AUSTIN, Texas — Employees of the largest housing provider for unaccompanied migrant children in the U.S. have repeatedly sexually abused and harassed children in their care over the last eight years, the Justice Department alleges.
Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, have raped, touched or solicited sex and nude images of children since at least 2015, the Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. At least two employees have been charged since 2020, according to the lawsuit.
For the record:
2:10 p.m. July 18, 2024An earlier version of this story said incorrectly that numbers of children provided by the Department of Health and Human Services were for Southwest Key specifically. Those numbers are for all children in migrant shelters.
Based in Austin, Southwest Key is the largest provider of housing to unaccompanied migrant children, operating under grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It has 29 child migrant shelters — 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California — with room for 6,350 children. The company’s largest shelter in Brownsville, Texas, has a capacity of 1,200.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported 7,762 children at all of its contracted facilities on May 31,, according to the most recent data on its website, which does not break down the numbers by shelter.
The 1,000-bed facility will house girls under 17 and boys under 12.
Children living there range in ages from 5 to 17. Among the allegations is the repeated abuse of a 5-year-old in the care of a Southwest Key shelter in El Paso. In 2020, a youth care worker at the provider’s Tucson shelter took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel for several days and paid the minor to perform sexual acts on the employee, the Justice Department alleges.
Children were threatened with violence against themselves or family if they reported the abuse, according to the lawsuit. It added that testimony from the victims revealed staff in some instances knew about the ongoing abuse and failed to report it or concealed it.
As of Friday, 13,359 children were in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement after being transferred from Customs and Border Protection.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Thursday that the complaint “raises serious pattern or practice concerns” about Southwest Key. “HHS has a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual behavior, and discrimination,” he said in a statement.
The lawsuit comes less than three weeks after a federal judge granted the Justice Department’s request to lift special court oversight of Health and Human Services’ care of unaccompanied migrant children. President Biden’s administration argued that new safeguards rendered special oversight unnecessary 27 years after it began.
The Associated Press left a message with the company seeking comment Thursday.
Weber and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press.
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