AUSTIN, Texas — Employees of a controversial facility that houses unaccompanied migrant children across the country repeatedly sexually abused and harassed children in their care for at least eight years, the Justice Department said Thursday.
Southwest Key Programs Inc. employees, including supervisors, raped, touched or solicited sex and nude images of children beginning in 2015 and possibly earlier, the Justice Department said in a lawsuit filed this week. At least two employees have been charged since 2020.
The nonprofit organization 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. The company’s largest shelter in Brownsville is at a converted Walmart with a capacity for 1,200.
Southwest grew as unaccompanied children began crossing the border in large numbers in 2014, overwhelming U.S. authorities. The government awarded the provider more than $3 billion in contracts from 2015 to 2023.
Southwest Key disputed the accuracy of the claims in a written statement late Thursday.
The lawsuit
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Austin, where Southwest Key is based, provides extensive details, saying authorities received more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the provider's shelters since 2015.
At a shelter in Channelview, according to the lawsuit, a girl was raped and abused by a shift leader who also solicited nude photos of her. The supervisor threatened to hurt her if she reported it but she eventually told a teacher when the leader was on vacation.
Also 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. 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."
The suit also alleges that an employee of the provider's shelter in Tucson, Arizona, took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts for several days in 2020.
Southwest Key issues in Houston
In 2018, then-Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tried to stop Casa Sunzal, a Southwest Key facility at the corner of Emancipation Avenue and Prairie Street, from opening.
"The best solution would be for Southwest Key not to move forward with their plans," Turner said at the time.
At the time, Casa Sunzal was set to become Southwest Key's fourth immigrant youth shelter in Houston.
In 2019, then-Democratic Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke held a rally in front of Casa Sunzal calling for it to be shut down.
Texas, like Florida, revoked licenses of facilities that house migrant children in 2021 in response to an extraordinary influx of people across its border from Mexico, creating what some critics said was an oversight void.
Leecia Welch, an attorney for unaccompanied children in the case for court oversight, said the allegations against Southwest Key are "absolutely disgusting" and blamed Texas' revocation of licenses for "a powder keg waiting to explode."