Southwest Key Programs SUED By Department Of Justice For Compliance In Minor Sexual Assault

The Department of Justice has sued Southwest Key Programs, a large operator of shelters for underage immigrants awaiting placement with sponsors in the U.S.

The lawsuit says: “A Southwest Key Youth Care Worker who in 2022 repeatedly sexually abused a five-year-old girl, an eight-year-old girl, and an eleven-year-old girl at Casa Franklin in El Paso, Texas. The eight-year-old girl disclosed that the Youth Care 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.”

Southwest Key has received $4 billion in federal funding since 2019, with payments up substantially as illegal border crossings increased. According to federal spending data, funding increased by $391 million in 2020.

The lawsuit follows news of dangerous conditions for unaccompanied minors who arrive in the US. Migrant children are released to contractors who receive little training and then place them with unvetted sponsors, federal employees said in testimony before Congress last week. 

Deborah White, a whistleblower at HHS — recalled the “horrifying” realization that “children were being trafficked with billions of taxpayer dollars by a contractor failing to vet sponsors and process children safely, with government officials complicit in it.”

According to the lawsuit, there have been “over one hundred Reports of unlawful sexual abuse or harassment of children in Southwest Key’s care since at least 2015.”

“These instances are examples of Southwest Key’s longstanding pattern or practice of illegal sexual abuse, harassment, and misconduct against children in Southwest Key’s care. Southwest Key failed to consistently correct its practices and permitted the harassment to continue without adequate intervention,” the suit reads.

In one case, a teenage girl at Casa Kokopelli in Mesa, Arizona told a “clinician” that she missed her mother, and “the clinician turned the conversation to sex,” and said in a discussion with another teenage girl that he “can be more than your clinician if you would allow me to,” the suit said.

“Another 2019 Southwest Key Report details how, at Casa Rio Grande in San Benito, Texas, a child reported a male Youth Care Worker told him he liked dating ‘transexuals, transgenero, personas gay,’ translated to ‘transexuals, transgender, gay individuals.’”

The Biden administration has relaxed the process of unaccompanied migrant “sponsors,” removing DNA testing and, in many cases, FBI background checks.

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