Taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion in the past four years to private companies operating immigrant youth shelters accused of serious lapses in care, including neglect and sexual and physical abuse, a Reveal investigation has found.
In nearly all cases, the federal government has continued to place migrant children with the companies even after serious allegations were raised and after state inspectors cited shelters with serious deficiencies, government and other records show. The program grew quickly in 2014, when around 70,000 children crossed the southern border alone.
Now this web of private facilities, cobbled together to support children with nowhere else to go, is beginning to hold a new population: the more than 2,000 children who arrived with their parents but were separated from them because of a Trump administration policy.
Last year, a youth care worker at a Florida shelter for migrant children was sentenced to 10 years in prison after she admitted to trading sexually explicit photos and text messages with minors at the shelter. That facility later closed but recently reopened under a more than $30 million contract to house 1,000 children.
In New York, a Guatemalan boy was sexually assaulted by an older boy at a shelter in 2013, according to a doctor’s report, and was treated at a hospital. After he was reunited with his mother, she received a hospital bill but, she later said, was told only that there had been “an incident with a boy.”
At a facility in Maine run by a behavioral and mental health nonprofit, a social worker remained on the job for months after state regulators received a complaint in 2016 accusing him of having sex with an adult client.
In those cases and dozens of others reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Texas Tribune, federal officials continued sending children who crossed the border to the shelters after the incidents came to light. Since 2014, 13 organizations that faced serious allegations or citations shared the $1.5 billion total nearly half of what the federal government spent to house immigrant children in that time.
Records reviewed indicate only two cases in which the agency terminated an agreement with one of the 13 shelter providers. One occurred after state regulators cited a Texas company, International Educational Services, with more than 100 deficiencies at its nine operations, including inappropriate sexual contact between staff and children, harsh punishment and lapses in medical care.
A spokesman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission said it was not up to the state to make licensing decisions for a facility that cares for migrant children.
Texas “is not a party to the contract between ORR (the Office of Refugee Resettlement) and the shelters and any questions on the operation of this program should be directed to either ORR or the facilities themselves,” spokesman John Reynolds said in an email.
Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said in a statement Sunday: “Congress gave HHS the responsibility to care for these children and teenagers, and we take this legal mandate very seriously.”
Occasionally, facilities changed names, switched locations or voluntarily closed some branches after problems were identified.
The sudden addition of thousands of children is straining these shelters, heightening the risk for neglect and abuse.
Those comments came in response to a federal audit that found that His House, a shelter in Florida, “might not have followed” the resettlement agency’s policies for 724 children regarding medical care, providing “appropriate clothing” and running background checks on adults taking custody of children.
The audit also found that the shelter “might have placed federal funds totaling 9 million dollars at risk of mismanagement or misappropriation.” From there, immigrant children resettled through the Office of Refugee Resettlement often are sent into the messy reality of foster care and shelters designed for unaccompanied minors.
During that time period, she had gone on on a hunger strike to demand her release while awaiting her asylum hearing and eventually was allowed to post bond. But Bernardez says she never fought as hard as she did during the nearly six months that her son was housed and drugged at the Shiloh Treatment Center.
Bernardez’s son had lived with her sister in Honduras but made his way north last October with a cousin to ask for asylum and reunite with his mother, who now lives in New Orleans. And her son says he and other Central American immigrant children routinely were physically assaulted including in front of other staffers.
“There was the man that hit me,” he told Reveal.
Shiloh has been awarded $26 million in federal money since 2013 from the Office of Refugee Resettlement to operate a residential treatment center for unaccompanied minors. The agency contracts with Shiloh to house, educate and medicate children.
Records reviewed by Reveal indicate that staff noted that Bernardez’s son often talked about wanting to leave the shelter. Bernardez says she noticed that he looked and acted markedly different.
“He was completely hypnotized and lethargic,” said Bernardez, who said she asked for a list of the drugs he was being given.
In a Portland Press Herald interview, a corporate spokesman for KidsPeace said the organization routinely performed criminal background checks on potential employees and declined additional comment.
O’Rourke pleaded guilty in January 2017 to sexual assault involving his client and of violating the conditions of his bail by contacting her.
Between 2009 and 2016, KidsPeace Mesabi Academy in Buhl, Minnesota, received 64 complaints regarding staff, care and the treatment of children housed at the center.
Not long after their arrival in Dobbs Ferry, New York, the young boy was sexually assaulted by one of the older children at the shelter, according to his mother in an interview with Public Radio International.
The only other documentation of the incident the mother received: a bill for $800 from the New York hospital.
Last month, His House Children’s Home a faith-based nonprofit program in Miami Gardens, Florida was at the center of another refugee resettlement office scandal. Evin Daly, a court-ordered guardian for children, reported concerns to Florida’s child abuse hotline that staff at the 10-cottage facility treated children like “virtual prisoners in a compound with a fence and a locked gate” and “caregivers sometimes have sex with each other while on duty.”
According to a review by the federal government, His House served 1,900 children during 2014.
Merice Perez Colon, an employee of a temporary shelter in Homestead, Florida, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in November for engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior with minors housed at the shelter.
The shelter, which shut down suddenly in April 2017, reopened in February after the federal health agency awarded it a contract of $20 million, which grew to more than $30 million when the number of children housed doubled from 500 to 1,000.
Yet between 2016 and 2018, the Texas health department had reported 116 deficiencies following 349 inspections of the company’s shelters, which included unsupervised firearms left around foster homes, inappropriate contact between a teacher and a child in care, and a child in care sustaining a second-degree burn, the cause of which was unknown.
Almost six hours northeast, the Galveston Multicultural Institute, Galveston’s branch of Children’s Center Inc., had all children in its care removed by the Administration for Children and Families following complaints of child abuse and neglect issued to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in March 2016. The federal government paid $7.3 million to house children there until 2016.
In early 2017, with a dip in local juvenile crime and no more federal money coming in, local officials considered cutting its budget entirely.
Instead, in August, the resettlement agency came back with a $4 million contract to house 30 more migrant children in the secure facility for one year.
In the case of KidsPeace, the parent company closed operations at Mesabi Academy but not at its other shelters across the U.S.
In 2013, Lutheran Social Services of the South, a nonprofit subsidiary of Lutheran Social Services Inc., was suspended by the state following the death of a baby at a foster home in Cedar Park, Texas.
Despite this, the company still raised several concerns in state inspections between 2015 and 2018 after reports that “a caregiver had allowed an individual with an extensive criminal history background that posed immediate risk to children in care to live in the home and have unsupervised access to children in care” and that a former case manager had signed documentation to allow a child to live in a foster home where a person with a serious criminal history also lived.
Another inspection found children’s personal items and other areas in the home infested with roaches.
In 2018, the resettlement agency still provides grant funding to the company. The deadline is June 29.
The agency wrote that it anticipates paying $500 million for low-security shelter placements, up from $100 million in 2016, and doubling the number of grant winners. For the more secure, jail-like settings, the agency plans to more than double its spending, from $9 million to $20 million
Following its rekindled relationship with the agency this year, the secure Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Commission had planned to hire a coordinator for its unaccompanied minor program.
On Tuesday, local officials announced they would stop participating in the resettlement agency’s shelter program when the current contract runs out at the end of August. Alexandria Mayor Allison Silberberg called the family separation policy “unacceptable,” and said she’d been assured that no children had been housed at the facility after being separated from their parents.
That, which followed local outcry against the contract, may be the first case in which a facility has ended its partnership with the resettlement agency in response to the Trump administration’s new family separation policy.
