The motion to dismiss the suit against Southwest Key Programs was filed after the federal government announced it had moved all unaccompanied children to other shelters.

The complaint, filed last year during the Biden administration, alleged a litany of offenses between 2015 and 2023 as Southwest Key Programs, which operates migrant shelters in Texas, Arizona and California, amassed nearly $3 billion in contracts from the Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency said it stopped sending unaccompanied children to the provider’s facilities “out of continuing concerns relating to these placements,” and said it would review grants going to the contractor. In view of the agency’s action, the Department of Justice has dismissed its lawsuit against Southwest Key, HHS said in a statement.

The shelter provider said they were pleased with the decision to dismiss the case. “Southwest Key strongly denied the claims relating to child sexual abuse in our shelters, and there is no settlement or payment required,” the statement Wednesday evening said.

“We always believed the facts would prove the allegations to be without merit. We thank the Government for its commitment to reviewing the whole record and dropping the case with prejudice,” they added.

This week, Southwest Key Programs furloughed employees across the country. “Due to the unforeseen federal funding freeze and the stop placement order on our unaccompanied minor shelters and Home Study Post Release programs by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, we have made the difficult decision to furlough approximately 5,000 Southwest Key Programs’ employees,” the company said in a statement shared Tuesday.

According to allegations in the 2024 lawsuit, Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, raped, inappropriately touched or solicited sex and nude images of children beginning at least in 2015.

Among the accusations: One employee “repeatedly sexually abused” three girls ages 5, 8 and 11 at the Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso, Texas, with the 8-year-old telling investigators the worker “entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private area.’”

The lawsuit also alleged that another employee, at a shelter in Mesa, Arizona, took a 15-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts for several days in 2020.

Children were warned not to report the alleged abuse and threatened with violence against themselves or their families if they did, according to the lawsuit. Victims testified that in some instances, other workers knew about the abuse but failed to report or concealed it, the complaint said.

“DOJ’s lawsuit revealed horrific sexual abuse and inhumane treatment of children detained in Southwest Key shelters,” said Leecia Welch, an attorney who represents unaccompanied children in a separate case. “It’s shocking to me that the government now turns a blind eye to their own contractor’s actions. I hope the impacted children will have other legal recourse and support in healing from their abuse.”

The lawsuit may not be over. On Wednesday, the National Center for Youth Law asked the court not to dismiss the case and grant them an opportunity to formally intervene on behalf of those affected by the alleged abuse. If granted, they would have 30 days to file a motion in the lawsuit.

At least two employees have been indicted on criminal charges related to the allegations since 2020.

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By Aura Bogado

In its first three months in power, the Biden Administration recorded hundreds of incidents when migrant children in the custody of the federal refugee agency expressed past or present thoughts of suicide. Some of those children also attempted to end their lives. 

Putting an exact number to this tragic reality took years. 

Over the years, family and community members, attorneys, and advocates had warned that migrant children confined in the federal government’s vast shelter system were thinking about ending their lives, or attempting to do so. In 2019, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the federal government, hoping that records archived by the Office of Refugee Resettlement would shed light on what was happening behind closed doors. 

While the request was acknowledged, and we communicated about narrowing my request, the government didn’t produce records. The following year, in 2020, The Center for Investigative Reporting filed suit — not only for these records, but for four other federal information requests I’d previously requested. 

As part of a long settlement process, the refugee agency initially produced summary data: for the period between 2014 and 2019, more than 7,000 migrant children experienced suicidal episodes in federal custody. But those records were stripped of basic facts, like dates when the incident occurred and, just as importantly, they didn’t include narratives about the incidents. Without that information, it was impossible to provide a clear picture to the public of what took place. 

We asked the government to produce those details, but it claimed doing so would take years. In 2021, as the settlement discussion dragged on, we agreed to accept records about suicidal episodes concerning migrant children during the first three months of the Biden administration. Ultimately, we received eight data sets for a total of 666 records; each record contained 61 columns that included the child’s age, country of origin, and placement location, along with five columns detailing the incident that had occurred. 

It took weeks to clean the data. I had to read each of the narratives to ensure they really reflected suicidal episodes, and remove those that didn’t. Others were removed because they were duplicates – but they were difficult to identify quickly because they contained small differences, like one punctuation mark. The work was done by carefully combing every entry, one by one, and it unveiled a rich data set that helped me see where, when and under what circumstances these migrant children were most at-risk of suicidal thoughts. 

Once clean, the data indicated that between January 20 and April 28, 2021:

• Migrant children reported suicidal episodes 567 times while in refugee agency custody. The reports were daily occurrences, with as many as six children expressing these feelings or taking these actions per day. 
• One in every four children who reported suicidal episodes were referring to incidents that occurred before arriving into custody, indicating that migrant children often experienced significant trauma before arriving to the United States.
• The average length of stay for the 140 children who experienced suicidal episodes while in federal custody was an average of 37 days; that showed that, on average, thoughts of suicide developed after weeks away from family. 
• Licensed programs were more likely to deal with the incident on-site. Children in unlicensed emergency shelters, meanwhile, were 20 times more likely to be treated by outside emergency rooms and psychiatric centers. 

But the numbers alone don’t really speak for themselves: The narratives contained in the records provided harrowing details behind the suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. Over and over again, children reported that the strain of being away from their families and communities was taking a severe toll on their mental health, to the point that they were thinking about or attempting to end their lives, and ten children did attempt to do so.

Before the pandemic, I would often spend a considerable amount of time with migrant families whose children had suffered in refugee agency custody: children who’d been forcibly drugged, placed in empty office buildings, or separated from their families for half-a-dozen years. 

During the pandemic, it’s been impossible for me to make those in-person connections. Early on, I didn’t want to talk to a child or to their family about a time when they tried to end their life by phone or video-call. I drew a line – not only out of a desire to protect children who’d already experienced incredible trauma but also to protect my own mental health. 

What I didn’t anticipate was the way the narratives, just words on a screen or paper I’d print out, would deeply affect me. Some records contained extremely short descriptions — one incident simply described that the child “commented he wanted to leave and wanted to kill himself to get out of shelter,” but didn’t capture the reasons why. The only other note in the record states that he was observed at the in-house clinic. Other descriptions were far more detailed, containing up to 3,000 words in one record to describe the situation in sometimes graphic detail. 

For weeks, I spent days reading about horrific cases of sexual abuse, torture, and death. A full night’s sleep was sometimes hard to come by — and even when I did sleep well, every new morning meant returning to the same records on the same screen. 

Part of what haunted me was the impossibility of capturing every narrative in one story. I began tracking some of the most compelling narratives – a pregnant 16-year-old, a 9-year-old who was isolated due to COVID, a 14-year-old who was ripping her hair out — to help produce graphics that readers could swipe through. Creating a space for some of the nearly 600 suicidal episodes was a relief. 

U.S. immigration policy, which continues to favor visitors from white-majority countries and regions, results in the separation of families. Migrant children, particularly those from Central America, will continue to arrive alone at the border, seeking asylum and reunification with a family member already in the U.S. According to the records I’ve amassed, more than 400,000 have been through the refugee system in the last decade. That number will continue to grow. 

There are hundreds of thousands of records and stories about what happens to these children. Knowing what records to seek, fighting to make sure those records are released, and having a grip on the context is the very least I can do to help the public understand what’s happening to some of the most vulnerable children on the planet.

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By Aura Bogado

For years, the bulk of my work has focused on what happens to young migrants who’ve been detained by the federal government. 

I’ve talked to children who’ve been held in freezing cells on the border, shortly after arriving in the United States by themselves. I’ve spent time talking with kids who’ve been forcibly drugged at a residential treatment center in Texas. I’ve detailed the separation of a mother from her child after crossing in Arizona, and the way her 6-year-old was placed in a vacant office building run by a defense contractor in Phoenix. I’ve documented the way a 10-year-old was separated from her family at the border under Obama and shipped around to countless shelters all around the country before asking to be deported back to Honduras — the place she fled as a child after her uncle was assassinated. And I’ve illustrated the way shelters call local police to tackle behavioral issues, sometimes resulting in brutality. In the latter case, a sheriff deputy’s body camera video speaks for itself. 

Detention changes people, and it really changes children. Some grow up too fast, bearing the burden of family separation with a mature facade that conceals what’s crumbling inside. Others are understandably angry at the years that were stolen from them — formative childhood years where they didn’t get to develop like free children do. And for some children, the mental harm that comes with confinement feels like it’s too much to bear: they physically hurt themselves. 

This detention didn’t start with the Trump administration. In fact, the policy that governs the treatment of migrant children in federal custody stems from a Reagan-era class action suit, filed by four Central American teen girls who were kept away from their families in brutal conditions. Nearly four decades later, the detention of migrant children has changed, but it hasn’t stopped. Close to a year after he was elected, Biden’s administration is confining more than 10,000 migrant children, mostly in a collection of federally funded shelters in multiple states.

Over time, I’ve requested a lot of records concerning the care of migrant children in federal custody, particularly those held in shelters funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Children are only supposed to be held for short periods of time before being reunited with family members. But I kept hearing that this wasn’t happening. 

When the government refused to respond to my records requests, I sued. The data I’ve acquired as part of the resulting settlement is illuminating: I finally had close to 300,000 records, one for every child held in custody over a period of six years. The data are children whose time in custody has been rendered into columns about who they are, where they were in the shelter system, and for how long. But, because I’m a novice when it comes to data, I’ve always had to rely on a reporting partner and my organization’s data team to make sense of it. 

Now well into the second year of an ongoing settlement, the government has finally started producing records that chronicle the mental health of migrant children confined in shelters under the early part of the Biden administration. The fight for these records has been long, in part because the data includes thousands of detailed personal narratives that describe challenging mental health episodes in custody. Episodes that shelters, sometimes staffed with hourly workers with nominal training, are ill-equipped to handle. 

While so much immigration reporting delved into family separation under Trump, I remain committed to documenting migrant child welfare regardless of who’s president. My 2021 Data Fellowship will be a first glimpse into the mental health of migrant children in custody during Biden’s first 100 days. The data I’m obtaining will drive my reporting and provide an opportunity for policymakers to respond about the way children are being treated in what remains a secretive federal system, charged with taking care of some of the most vulnerable kids on Earth.

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HOUSTON (AP) — With its long-term facilities for immigrant children nearly full, the Biden administration is working to expedite the release of children to their relatives in the U.S.

U.S. Health and Human Services on Wednesday authorized operators of long-term facilities to pay for some of the children’s flights and transportation to the homes of their sponsors. Under the agency’s current guidelines, sponsors can be charged for those flights and required to pay before the government will release children, even if the sponsors have been vetted by the government.

Those costs can sometimes exceed $1,000 per child.

An internal memo sent Wednesday and obtained by The Associated Press authorizes facility operators to use government funding for transport fees “in the event that a sponsor is not able to pay fees associated with commercial airfare, and a child’s physical release would be otherwise delayed.” HHS declined to say how many flights would be funded.

HHS has drastically cut its capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly all of the department’s 7,100 beds for immigrant children are full. Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents are apprehending an average of more than 200 children crossing the border without a parent per day. Most Border Patrol facilities aren’t equipped for long-term detention, with children forced to sleep on mats in cells where the lights stay on around the clock.

To take children from the Border Patrol, HHS reopened a surge facility at Carrizo Springs, Texas, that can hold up to 700 teenagers, and may soon reopen another site at Homestead, Florida. While they have beds, classrooms and dining areas, surge facilities cost an estimated $775 per child per day and are not subject to the same licensing requirements as regular facilities.

Democrats sharply criticized them during the administration of former President Donald Trump, and news of Carrizo Springs’ reopening has drawn criticism from some Democrats as well as Republicans who argue Trump was unfairly blamed. Some have accused Biden of moving to detain children in “cages.” No children are detained in cells or behind chain-link fencing at Carrizo Springs, which has long trailers that serve as dormitories and a large tent as a dining hall.

“We had to expand and open additional facilities because there was not enough space in the existing facilities if we were to abide by COVID protocols,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday. Psaki noted that Biden halted a Trump-era practice of expelling unaccompanied immigrant children under public health law, though the U.S. still expels immigrant families and single adults who cross the border without permission.

“Our objective is to move these kids quickly from there to vetted, sponsored families and to places where they can safely be,” she said.

But experts on the detention of immigrant children say HHS needs to change how it works to relieve pressure on the overall system.

Leecia Welch, senior director of child welfare at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, said HHS could have made several policy changes months ago that would alleviate what she called “a government-created crisis.” She applauded the move to pay for flights and called on U.S. officials to explore other ways to release children from HHS faster, including by raising the capacity of regular facilities while ensuring that protocols are followed to stop the spread of the virus.

“While we recognize the Biden administration’s efforts to process unaccompanied children in a responsible way that addresses public health needs and prioritizes children’s safety, it is critical that it not repeat the mistakes of the Trump administration,” Naureen Shah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

One longstanding requirement that has delayed some releases is forcing sponsors to pay for airfares.

“Facilities have told families that they will not release a child unless they specifically go to a specific travel agency and purchase tickets,” said Dr. Amy Cohen, executive director of the advocacy group Every Last One.

In one case this week, Cohen said, staff at a facility told a woman that she would have to bring a certified check to the airport in order to collect her child, who has been in an HHS facility for three weeks.

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