PHOENIX (AP) — Staff members at a Phoenix-area shelter for unaccompanied migrant children physically abused three children, leading to the closure of the shelter, federal officials said. It was the latest in a series of incidents of alleged abuse involving staff members at shelters and children.
Southwest Key’s Hacienda del Sol shelter was shut down last Friday, but federal officials did not reveal the reason behind the closure until Tuesday.
The Texas-based federal contractor has fired the staffers involved in the Sept. 18 incident, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
The agency did not release additional details about the incident or how many staff members were involved.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request to locate the incident in its files. It was not immediately clear how many staff members were involved, or if any face possible criminal charges.
The Health and Human Service Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement oversees children who crossed the border without their parents or have been separate from their parents due to the Trump administration’s previous zero-tolerance border policy.
“ORR has a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of abuse or inappropriate behavior at (migrant) care provider facilities and acts quickly to address any alleged violations of policy, including initiating employee disciplinary action, termination, or reporting to law enforcement agencies and all relevant licensing bodies,” the agency said.
The children were all relocated to the company’s other shelters within 10 days, The Arizona Republic reported.
Southwest Key is working to retrain staff, said Jeff Eller, a Southwest Key spokesman.
The closure comes after Arizona officials moved to revoke the licenses for Southwest Key after it missed a deadline to show that all employees passed background checks.
Arizona has seen numerous allegations of sexual abuse at its many shelters for immigrant children, including one made by the government of El Salvador, which said it received reports of three children, 12 to 17, who were sexually abused at unnamed shelters in Arizona.
Last month, a former youth care worker was convicted of sexually abusing seven teenage boys at a Phoenix-area shelter for immigrant children.
In August, authorities arrested a 32-year-old man on allegations that he had molested a 14-year-old girl at a Southwest Key facility the previous month.
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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
So who is leading this effort in AZ? Who at ORR is responsible for making sure that complaints are investigated?
Burn in hell, Trump. There will be a special place in hell for you and your minions, for your negligence, inhumanity, and brutality against the weak.
My worst fear is that the complaints fade into the fog that is tRump. This is a horror.
That is my fear with ORR moving these kids out of shelters and holding them in tent cities.
This from a Huffington Post article. Tent cities are not held to the higher standards of state licensed facilities.
People who run child services agencies around the country know that abusers are attracted to their organizations. They work hard to keep abusers out. States regulate such organizations closely to make sure kids are safe. Parents monitor their children’s care even more closely. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, bad things can and will happen to some children. That is why they are so diligent.
Here we have the Trump program which was designed to brutally separate kids from their parents, is essentially unsupervised and is very secretive. It employees government contractors who where given emergency contracts for a brand new program instituted by a government that just doesn’t give a shit and run by people who have more background in running private prisons than child service organizations. What could possibly go wrong?