DID TRUMP'S FAMILY SEPARATIONS DESTROY JUAN SANCHEZ?

By Jeremy Raff

The Atlantic

AUSTIN, Texas—Juan Sanchez, the founder of America’s largest network of shelters for detained migrant children, greeted his employees at the company’s Thanksgiving potluck last November. 

“How you doing, brother?” he asked. 

“Como estás, mija?” The employees seemed preoccupied. Their company, Southwest Key, had been in the national spotlight for months. Since the Trump administration began separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border last year, Southwest Key has been integral to housing the thousands of children split from their parents and other relatives.

“I saw you on TV yesterday,” a worker told Sanchez in Spanish.

“Y que estaban diciendo?” Sanchez replied—“What were they saying?” “About Casa Padre,” she said, referring to a Walmart Supercenter that Sanchez had converted into a cavernous shelter. “This year has been long,” another employee said with a sigh.

“Crazy,” Sanchez replied.

Lean and still boyish at 71, a former Golden Gloves champ raised in a border barrio who came of age in the Chicano-rights movement, Sanchez was in the middle of his fiercest fight yet.

His Walmart facility had become a symbol of Trump’s industrial-scale separation policy, and he’d weathered months of criticism: that he was complicit in the destruction of migrant families, that his $1.5 million salary was unseemly for the operator of a charity, and that he’d failed to prevent sexual abuse in his shelters as Southwest Key grew into a massive operation. Within months of our interview last fall, he would leave the company he built from scratch.

All along, however, Sanchez maintained that he didn’t change—the political climate did. For decades, civil-rights leaders had lauded him as a champion of social justice who was providing migrant children excellent care. 

By the time we sat down in November, former allies—including his own employees—had abandoned him, arguing that the moral meaning of his shelter empire had changed as the Trump administration weaponized the country’s immigration bureaucracy.

As if to rehabilitate his image, Sanchez had invited me to tour one of the shelters and to introduce me to his childhood confidants in South Texas. But the week after my first visit, Sanchez abruptly canceled my next trip when The New York Times exposed a pattern of financial mismanagement at Southwest Key. He did not respond to further requests for comment.

At the potluck, however, Sanchez was bullish. In his office, decorated with framed quotations from Che Guevara and Martin Luther King Jr., he explained to me that critics were jealous of his success and would prefer to see him laboring in the cotton fields, as he had in his youth.

“Not many Latinos I know of run a half-billion-dollar company,” he told me. “That pisses people off.”

Juan Sanchez grew up in Brownsville, Texas, the southernmost city along the U.S.-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley. In his neighborhood, families sprawled across the international line, and English was hardly spoken at home. 

When he was a young schoolkid in the 1950s, teachers punished Sanchez for speaking Spanish in class, he told the journalist Maria Hinojosa of NPR's Latino USA last summer. One teacher claimed she couldn’t pronounce Juan, so she decided to call him Johnny instead. “They were always trying to change your identity,” Sanchez told Hinojosa.

After his father died, when Sanchez was 14 years old, he began working the fields in California during summer breaks to support his family. His escape was the boxing ring, where he thrived on competition. “It's you and the other guy, and you try and hurt each other,” he told Hinojosa. He learned to be disciplined and to “hit very hard.”

In college and graduate school in the 1970s, Sanchez channeled that fighting spirit into activism. “He was always a rabble-rouser,” Leonard Cash, a former classmate at St. Mary’s University, told me. “Always angry.” 

Later, at the University of Washington, where Sanchez got his master’s degree, he and a group of Chicano-rights activists occupied the university president's office to pressure the school to hire more faculty members of color.

In one photo, wearing an Army-surplus shirt and a fedora pulled low over his eyes, Sanchez has his boots propped up on the president’s desk. “What we were fighting for was to have some representation,” Sanchez told me.

Ellen Sanchez, Juan’s ex-wife, who kept his last name after their divorce in the 1990s, met him at a protest to pressure the University of Washington to serve lettuce picked by the United Farm Workers, the union led by Cesar Chavez. 

Juan went on to pursue a doctorate in education, choosing Harvard “so he could out-credential the people who would try to keep a Latino out,” Ellen told me.

For his dissertation, Sanchez studied grade schools in the Southwest that embraced Chicano culture, essentially searching for a model where a Juan would get the same chances as a Johnny. At his Harvard graduation, he wore a serape instead of a robe. 

“That year, I was the only Latino that got a doctorate from the School of Education,” Sanchez recalled to me. He posed for a photograph with his fist in the air, a Harvard Yard radical. “I was making a statement,” he said. “I wanted people to remember me that way.”

To read rest of artcie, click on link: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/family-separations-trump-juan-sanchez-southwest-key/596209/