The Trump administration said Wednesday it has stopped sending illegal immigrant children to facilities run by Southwest Key, the largest player in the migrant child detention business, due to “appalling” accounts of kids being abused.
“For too long, pernicious actors have exploited such children both before and after they enter the United States. Today’s action is a significant step toward ending this appalling abuse of innocents,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services.
The kids, known officially as “unaccompanied alien children” or UACs, come to the U.S. without a parent and are supposed to be quickly transferred from Homeland Security to HHS, which places them in shelters until some decisions can be made about their future.
Southwest Key has been paid billions of dollars over the last 15 years to run some of those shelters.
The kids are considered among the toughest border cases, having in many instances survived terrible abuse on the way here.
But the government last year charged that the abuse didn’t end at the border. Southwest Key employees raped children, solicited them to produce child pornography and made threats to keep them from reporting it, the Justice Department said.
It said Southwest Key was aware of the pattern of abuse and didn’t stop it.
In one case, an employee was accused of running off with a 15-year-old boy, putting him up in a hotel for days, where the employee paid the teen for sex.
In another case, a girl said she was repeatedly raped and figured other employees were aware because they juggled assignments to give the man time alone with her.
Those allegations were part of a civil case brought last year under the Fair Housing Act.
The government and Southwest Key agreed to dismiss that case Wednesday.
The Washington Times has reached out to Southwest Key for this story.
UACs have long tested the limits of America’s immigration system. Their numbers began to rise in the Obama years, seemingly coinciding with the president’s creation of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Under a quirk of the law, UACs who come from Mexico or Canada can be quickly sent back, but those from further afield are transferred to HHS where social workers seek sponsors to care for them while they go through immigration cases.
Realizing the chance at their children gaining a foothold, parents began to send their kids in large numbers — oftentimes with the expectation that a relative, in many cases already living here illegally, would sign up to be the sponsor.
The numbers surged during the early months of the Biden administration, with the Border Patrol recording more than 18,000 a month at the peak.
That number has tumbled under President Trump’s new border shutdown, with Border Patrol agents recording just 734 UAC encounters along the southern border in February.
