Housing provider for unaccompanied migrant kids engaged in sex abuse, harassment: DOJ
Austin, Texas — Employees at the largest provider of housing for unaccompanied migrant children in the U.S. repeatedly sexually abused and intimidated the children in their care over the past eight years, the Justice Department alleges.
Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, have raped, touched or solicited sex and nude photos of children since at least 2015, the DOJ alleged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. At least two employees have been charged since 2020, according to the lawsuit.
Southwest Key, based in Austin, is the largest provider of housing for unaccompanied migrant children, working with grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It operates 29 migrant child shelters — 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California — with space for 6,350 children. The company’s largest shelter, in Brownsville, has a capacity of 1,200.
Health and Human Services reported 7,762 children in all contracted facilities as of May 31, according to the most recent data on its website, which does not break down the numbers by facility or provider. The department declined to say how many children are currently in Southwest Key’s Care or whether the agency will continue to assign children to its care.
The lawsuit, which detailed a number of alleged abuses, alleges that authorities have received more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the provider’s shelters since 2015.
Among the allegations in the lawsuit: A worker “repeatedly sexually abused” three girls, ages 5, 8 and 11, at the Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso, Texas. The 8-year-old told investigators that the worker “repeatedly entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private space,’ and threatened to kill their families if they revealed the abuse.”
The lawsuit also alleges that in 2020, an employee of the Tucson, Arizona, shelter took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sex acts over several days.
Children were threatened with violence against themselves or their families if they reported the abuse, the lawsuit said, adding that victim testimony revealed that in some cases, staff were aware of the ongoing abuse and failed to report it or concealed it.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Thursday that the complaint raises “serious concerns about patterns or practices” at Southwest Key. “HHS has zero tolerance for all forms of sexual assault, sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual conduct, 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 the court’s special oversight of Health and Human Services’ care of unaccompanied migrant children. President Joe Biden’s administration argued that new safeguards made the special oversight unnecessary, 27 years after it began.
The Associated Press sent a message to the company on Thursday seeking comment.
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This story has been edited to show that the HHS figures are for all children in migrant shelters, not Southwest Key specifically.