Austin, Texas — Employees of the largest housing provider for unaccompanied migrant children in the U.S. repeatedly sexually abused and harassed 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 images from 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.
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 – with capacity for 6,350 children. The company’s largest shelter in Brownsville has capacity for 1,200 people.
Health and Human Services reported 7,762 children across all of its contracted facilities as of May 31, according to the most recent data on its website, which does not break down numbers by shelter or provider. The department declined to say how many children were currently in Southwest Key’s care or whether the agency continues to assign children to its care.
The lawsuit, which provided details of some of the alleged abuse, says authorities have received more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the provider’s shelters since 2015.
Among the lawsuit’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 came into their rooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private area’ and threatened to kill their families if they revealed the abuse.”
The lawsuit also alleges that an employee at the provider’s shelter in Tucson, Arizona, took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts over several days in 2020.
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.
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This story has been edited to correct that the HHS numbers are for all children in migrant shelters, not specifically for Southwest Key.
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