U.S. alleges sexual abuse at company's shelters for migrant kids

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 past eight years, the U.S. Justice Department alleges.

Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, have raped, touched or solicited sex and nude images 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 disputed the accuracy of the claims in a written statement late Thursday.

Based in Austin, Texas, Southwest Key is the largest provider of housing for 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, according to the complaint. The company’s largest shelter in Brownsville, Texas has a capacity of 1,200.

The suit alleges one incident, in 2021, at the provider’s shelter in Tucson — that a 15-year-old child reported a male youth-care worker entered his bedroom without knocking while the child was lying in bed and touched the child’s buttocks. The child reported his discomfort with the worker’s touching and said the worker “kept going into my room like six times without knocking” and without another employee present, in violation of Southwest Key’s policies.

Allegations of child sexual abuse at Southwest Key’s Tucson residential facility were featured in a 2018 ProPublica investigation based on police reports from immigrant youth shelters.

The company’s Arizona facilities also came under fire in 2018 after a series of allegations of physical abuse and inadequate staff vetting, prompting the Arizona Department of Health Services to initially seek to revoke the licenses of all 13 of its locations, before a settlement agreement allowed the company to continue operating with conditions, the Arizona Mirror reported.

The settlement imposed $73,000 in civil penalties and compelled Southwest Key to hire a third-party consultant to oversee quality-management systems, as well as agree to unannounced inspections by ADHS personnel for two years, according to the Arizona Mirror.

ADHS, which licenses behavioral health residential facilities like Southwest Keys’, did not immediately respond to the Arizona Daily Star’s Thursday request for information on how Southwest Key sites were monitored after 2019.

Vulnerable migrant children placed in large congregate-care centers are too often the victims of abuse, said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, manager of the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project’s children’s legal program. The Florence Project is the only nonprofit legal service provider in Arizona that provides pro-bono legal and social services to detained children, she said.

“We have seen this pattern of abuse and mistreatment and the lack of accountability for years,” Avila-Cimpeanu told the Star on Thursday. “We have seen the government rely on these massive congregate-care facilities, and we have seen there’s not effective oversight on the federal side or on the state side.”

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 the numbers down by shelter or provider. The department declined to say how many children were currently in Southwest Key’s care or if the agency continues to assign children to its care.

The lawsuit, which provided details of some of the alleged abuse, asserts that authorities received more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the provider’s shelters since 2015.

Among the suit’s allegations: An employee “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 area,’ and he threatened to kill their families if they disclosed the abuse.”

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At the company’s “Casa Kokopelli” location in Mesa, an employee took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts for several days in 2020, the suit alleges. At the same location in 2019, a teenage girl reported that she felt uncomfortable with her clinician who asked her graphic questions about her sexual experiences, telling her to look him in the eyes when she answered, while “looking her body up and down,” the complaint said.

The Star left multiple messages at the company’s Tucson location on Thursday, with no response.

Southwest spokesperson Anais Biera Miraclea said Thursday that the provider is still reviewing the complaint, which she said “does not present the accurate picture of the care and commitment our employees provide to the youth and children.”

The ADHS website shows that eight Southwest Key residential facilities in Arizona shut down in January 2022, including its Tucson residential facility. The counseling facility located at the same address, 1601 N. Oracle Road, is listed as active.

Two other Southwest Key residential facilities in Arizona closed in May 2022 and another in July 2023. Six Southwest Key counseling facilities remain active in Arizona, according to the ADHS website.

Children in Southwest Key’s care 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.

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 Joe Biden’s administration argued that new safeguards rendered special oversight unnecessary 27 years after it began.

That’s another source of concern for Avila-Cimpeanu of the Florence Project. The Flores settlement was based on a case brought by a young child that resulted in protections for immigrant children, she said.

That “critical” protection has now been replaced by “insufficient” regulations governing the care of migrant minors in custody, she said.

The regulations “actually lack things like oversight, transparency and licensing requirements,” she said. “Children in care today have even less oversight than when the incidents in the (DOJ) complaint happened, and so we’re very concerned with that continuing lack of oversight and accountability.”