AAUSTIN — The largest provider of housing for unaccompanied migrant children engaged in “severe and widespread” sexual abuse and harassment of children in its care, the Justice Department alleges.
Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, have raped, touched or solicited sex and nude images from children in their care 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.
Based in Austin, Southwest Key is the largest provider of housing for unaccompanied migrant children, operating with subsidies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It has 29 shelters for migrant children: 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California.
The children who live there are aged between 5 and 17. Among the charges is the repeated abuse of a 5-year-old child in the care of a Southwest Key shelter in El Paso. In 2020, a youth caregiver at the provider’s shelter in Tucson, Arizona, took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel for several days and paid the minor to perform sexual acts on the staffer, the Justice Department alleges.
The children were threatened with violence against themselves or their family if they reported the abuse, according to the lawsuit. He added that testimony from victims revealed that, in some cases, staff knew about ongoing abuse and did not 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 suspend the special court’s oversight of Health and Human Services’ care for unaccompanied migrant children. President Joe Biden’s administration argued that the new safeguards made special oversight unnecessary 27 years after it began.
The Associated Press left a message with the company seeking comment on Thursday.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
