McALLEN, Texas: The Trump administration resumed family detention of immigrants last week in a South Texas facility after a Biden-era pause, a legal nonprofit group providing services to migrant families said Wednesday.
At the same time, the Department of Justice dropped a civil rights lawsuit it filed last year against the national nonprofit Southwest Key Programs alleging its employees had sexually abused unaccompanied minors who were housed in its shelters after entering the country illegally.
Fourteen immigrant families with children as young as one year old were in the detention facility in Karnes County, Texas, about 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) southeast of San Antonio, according to RAICES, which provides services to families at the center. The families are originally from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkiye and Brazil.
Faisal Al-Juburi, the organization’s chief external affairs officer, said the families had been detained in the US near the Mexican and Canadian borders. Some were in the US for as little as 20 days and others for as long as about 10 years, Al-Juburi said. The nonprofit provided service to adult detainees at the center prior to last week’s shift in the center’s detention population when the adult detainees were moved out.
Both the Obama administration and Trump’s first administration detained families until their immigration cases played out. Trump severely curbed asylum and forcibly separated children from their parents at the border in a policy widely denounced as inhumane.
The practice of family detention was largely halted, but not abolished, during the Biden administration, which briefly considered restarting it in 2023.
US Customs and Immigration Enforcement did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Wednesday.
Geo Group, the private corporation that operates the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, said the facility can hold up to 1,328 people in a statement issued Monday. It said its contract with the federal government runs through August 2029 and will generate about $79 million in revenue in its first year.
It’s the second facility planned for family detention. Last week, CoreCivic, a company that operates detention centers, announced it entered into a contract with ICE to hold immigrant families at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, with a capacity of 2,400 people.
Immigration advocates expressed concern for the welfare of children held in detention.
Dr. Alan Shapiro is a cofounder and chief strategy officer for Terra Firma National, which works to provide immigrant children and families access to health care and legal representation. Shapiro visited family detention centers under the first Trump administration and said detained children experienced behavioral regression, anger and thoughts of self-harm.
“We also heard about suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts from children in the facility themselves and other significant mental health concerns, including self-harm and eating disorders that were not present prior to detention,” Shapiro said.
Sexual abuse of migrant kids
In dropping the civil rights lawsuit it filed last year against the national nonprofit Southwest Key Programs, the US Department of Health and Human Services lleging its employees had sexually abused unaccompanied minors who were housed in its shelters after entering the country illegally, according to a court filing on Wednesday.
The department decided to drop the lawsuit after the US Department of Health and Human Services stopped the placement of unaccompanied migrant children in shelters operated by Southwest Key and initiated a review of its grants with the organization, HHS said in a press release on Wednesday. The health department said it has moved all children in Southwest Key shelters to other shelters.
“For too long, pernicious actors have exploited such children both before and after they enter the United States,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in the release.
“Today’s action is a significant step toward ending this appalling abuse of innocents.”
Austin, Texas-based nonprofit Southwest Key contracts with the federal government to care for young migrants arriving in the US without parents or legal guardians, and has operated 27 shelters in Texas, Arizona and California. It is the largest provider of shelter to unaccompanied minor children.
The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in July 2024 in the Western District of Texas alleging a “pattern” of “severe or pervasive sexual harassment” going back to at least 2015 in the network of Southwest Key shelters.
The complaint included alleged cases of “severe sexual abuse and rape, solicitation of sex acts, solicitation of nude photos, entreaties for sexually inappropriate relationships, sexual comments and gestures.”
Lawyers representing the Justice Department and Southwest Key submitted a joint motion for dismissal on Wednesday, the court record shows.
While Southwest Key did not immediately respond to a request for comment, it had previously sought to have the case dismissed and denied the allegations of sexual assault of children.
“Southwest Key takes pride in its record of providing safe shelter care, and it vehemently denies the allegations that there is any ‘pattern or practice’ of sexual abuse, harassment or misconduct at its facilities, or that it ‘failed to take reasonable, appropriate, and sufficient action to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse and harassment of the children entrusted to its care,’” it wrote in a court filing last year.
The plans to dismiss the case were first reported by Bloomberg. In that story, the news outlet reported that an attorney for Southwest Key had reached out to the Justice Department and asked it to dismiss the matter, saying the case could hinder the crackdown on illegal immigration by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The abrupt reversal by the Justice Department comes at a time when Attorney General Pam Bondi has made combatting illegal immigration take priority over other initiatives that were pursued during President Joe Biden’s administration.
In response to the Justice Department’s decision, the National Center for Youth Law sent a letter to United States District Court Judge Alan D. Albright seeking to intervene in the case, in a bid to keep the case against Southwest Key alive.
The center asked Albright to delay a ruling on the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss by 30 days and allow it to file an intervening motion “on behalf of intervenors whose interests are no longer protected by the United States,” according to the letter written by the center’s co-director of litigation, David Hinojosa.
“Until today, the United States has faithfully sought to uphold the rule of law by prosecuting claims and seeking relief that would help both protect unaccompanied children and compensate them for their damages,” Hinojosa wrote.
“Countless children now risk being denied any recourse for the terrible harms suffered while in the care of Southwest Key.”
The court record shows Albright accepted the joint motion to dismiss and ordered the case closed.
The National Center for Youth Law also wrote a letter to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley urging him to call on the Justice Department to explain its reasons for dropping the lawsuit and identify who made the decision.
“Given your history of advocating for the safety of unaccompanied children, we respectfully request your office’s continued leadership to protect these children and hold accountable all entities — public or private — that jeopardize their welfare,” wrote Johnathan Smith, the center’s chief of staff and general counsel.
Grassley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
