MCALLEN, Texas — As allegations of sexual abuse mounted at the largest provider of housing for unaccompanied migrant children in the U.S., authorities continued to place children in their care in a system that lacked adequate oversight, advocates say.
A lawsuit filed on Thursday by the Department of Justice alleges that employees of Southwest Key Programs Inc. sexually abused and molested children in their care for at least eight years. During that time, the nonprofit has amassed billions of dollars in government contracts and continued to harbor thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who entered the U.S.
It remained unclear Friday how many children were currently in Southwest Key shelters, and federal officials did not respond to questions about whether any action would be taken in response to the lawsuit. Critics say it reflects a system that has been unaccountable for years.
“The whole point of this complaint is that there is a pattern and a practice,” said Leecia Welch, deputy legal director at Children’s Rights. “If they’re filing this complaint that they saw a pattern and a practice of sexual harassment and violating these children and they’re still placing children in Southwest Key during the same time period, that’s why I have such a disconnect.”
Southwest Key, which operates with grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has 29 child migrant shelters — 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California — with space for more than 6,300 children.
The department did not respond to emailed requests for comment asking whether children would continue to be placed there. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment after the lawsuit was announced Thursday. Southwest Key did not respond to a follow-up email request for comment Friday.
“ORR continued to contract with Southwest Key despite knowing about some of these problems, so right now there’s no other place to house all of these children,” said Diane de Gramont, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law. “And we would be very concerned if children were then put in Border Patrol facilities for extended periods of time because ORR didn’t have enough beds for them.”
The Border Patrol must transfer custody of unaccompanied children to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours of their arrest. The department releases most children to their parents or immediate family members after a short stay in Southwest Key or shelters run by other contracted providers.
The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant children, called for children in custody to be immediately reunited with their families and given access to lawyers and “independent courts that will hear their claims for harm.”
Previous abuse at several shelters in Southwest Key led to their closure, including two large facilities in Arizona in 2018. The state their licenses revoked because they failed to conduct proper background checks on their employees. Further investigation revealed multiple cases of physical and sexual abuse, including allegations from the El Salvadoran government.
The abuse reflects the important role of state oversight, something now lacking in states like Texas and Florida, where Republican governors have revoked state licenses for facilities housing migrant children.
Critics say there is no equivalent system for reporting and investigating child abuse and neglect through the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the housing of migrant children.
“If there is an incident of abuse, if the state is there, there is a clear hotline that anyone can call,” de Gramont said. “There is a mandatory investigation … there is a strict series of events that should take place there.”
Some experts also questioned why the complaint was filed as a civil lawsuit, where no one would be held criminally liable.
Daniel Hatoum, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project who has experience defending children who are subjected to immigration contractor work, said a criminal case could come later.
“Corporate liability can be a lot more difficult for the Department of Justice to address than civil liability and especially individual criminal liability,” he said. The civil lawsuit seeks a jury trial and seeks damages for victims of the alleged abuse.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit comes less than three weeks after a federal judge has granted the request to lift the court’s special oversight of the Department of Health and Human Services’ care of unaccompanied migrant children, known as the Flores Agreement. This gave attorneys representing child migrants broad authority to visit detention facilities and interview staff and other migrants, and to file complaints with the court.
President Joe Biden’s administration has argued that new federal safeguards made the special oversight unnecessary 27 years after it began. In a court filing, Health and Human Services official Toby Biswas painted a rosy picture of the new rules’ many protections for unaccompanied children, as well as independent accountability for their custody circumstances.
Proponents, on the other hand, saw a gap in supervision.
Carrie Van der Hoek, deputy program director of the Young Center of Texas’ Child Advocate Program, said in a sworn statement opposing the termination of Flores’ agreement that her staff had reported about 10 cases of alleged abuse and neglect to the state Department of Family and Protective Services since Texas revoked her license in 2021.
“When we filed these reports, in some cases DFPS officials told us they would not investigate the complaint because DFPS did not have jurisdiction over ORR facilities,” Van der Hoek said. “In other cases, we received no response and were not aware of any action taken by DFPS or any other state agency to investigate the report.”
Van der Hoek also said that if a child were to call pre-programmed phones at the Refugee Resettlement Agency, an agency that allows them to reach the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline, they would get the same response.
Biswas said they began conducting “in-depth investigations” into allegations of abuse in Texas institutions in March 2022 and that starting in July of this year, they will begin their own investigations into alleged child abuse and neglect in Texas “or in another state if they stop conducting such investigations.”
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Associated Press reporter Elliot Spagat contributed to this report.