YET MORE RUMORS OF SEXUAL HANKY PANKY AT S-WEST KEY

By Juan Montoya

Concerns are growing for the safety of unaccompanied minors held at Southwest Key facilities across the country following reports that a 6-year-old girl who was separated from her mother  was sexually abused by another child at a facility for migrant children run by the Brownsville-based company in Phoenix, Az.

And sources among the staff at Casa Padre Southwest Key facility in Brownsville say that even before that case went public, Southwest Key CEO Juan Sanchez has aggressively pushed for workers here to attend intensive sexual-abuse prevention/education courses.

"Apparently, Juan is preempting potential sexual-abuse cases arising from the care of these minors by subjecting the workers there to take these classes just in case the company is accused of neglect if future cases arise," said a local worker. "He was adamant about us taking these courses the last time he was here. He has even hired a high-priced Washington D.C. public relations firm to polish up Southwest Key's image."

Well, guess what? According to sources at the Brownsville Southwest facility here, his efforts may have come a bit late to prevent sexual shenanigans inside the facility.

They say that just this week there was a report of a female worker engaging inappropriate sexual conduct with a teenage boy under her care.

One version of the incident has a worker coming across the female worker engaged in some sort of sexual act fondling the genitals of the of the teenage boys under her care.

"Things are getting crazy in there," one staffer said.  

Under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance border policy, children whose parents were caught crossing the border illegally have been separated  from them. The federal court s have ordered the government to reunite thousands of such children with their parents, with some success. In some cases, the government has been unable to reunite them because the parents had been deported.

In the Phoenix case, as first reported in The Nation. the child was assaulted twice during her stay at Casa Glendale in the Phoenix area. 

The child, without any parental permission, also was forced to sign a document saying she would stay away from anyone associated with the abuse, according to a migrant advocate.

Jeff Eller, a spokesman for Southwest Key, told The Arizona Republic on Friday that officials in charge of caring for the child and handling the case made a mistake labeling the incident as "sexual abuse,” when it should have been characterized as “inappropriate behavior.”

Southwest Key houses more than 1,500 children in Arizona, California and Texas under a $458 million contract with the federal Unaccompanied Alien Children Program.

Employees at two Arizona Southwest Key facilities have been accused of inappropriate contact with minors on at least two occasions since 2015, including an incident that led to a conviction for sexual abuse, police records show.

So far, there has been no indication of what the response will be from the administrators at the Southwest Key Brownsville facility.