Homes with worst issues keep getting grants
A case in point is the Shiloh Treatment Center, a mobile home complex-turned-child care center. Located near rural Manvel, Texas, the center was founded in 1995 by Clay Dean Hill, now 69. In 2013, the resettlement agency began funding the shelter, sending it more than $25 million in grants over five years. In 2001, Stephanie Duffield, 16, had died after being restrained by staff. Following her death, Shiloh was found to be “in compliance” with state requirements, according to the refugee resettlement office. Since then, Shiloh has been dogged by allegations of child abuse, leading Brazoria County’s district attorney, Jeri Yenne, to call for increased monitoring of the shelter. Children have died at two other programs affiliated with Hill, Behavior Training Research Inc. and Daystar Residential Inc. Between 1993 and 2010, three children died after being restrained at those facilities. In 2002, Latasha Bush, 15, died from asphyxia. Eight years later, Michael Keith Owens, 16, died after being restrained inside a closet. Both were ruled homicides. Daystar closed after Owens’ death. Behavior Training Research remains registered as an active for-profit corporation. Over the last three years, Texas inspectors found eight deficiencies at Shiloh, including overdue background check renewals for staff and poorly supervised medication inside the facility. A pending lawsuit alleges immigrant children housed there were held down and forcibly injected with drugs, rendering them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly.Sexual abuse allegations
Several companies that house migrant children have employed workers accused of sexual misconduct and abuse, Reveal’s investigation found. KidsPeace National Centers for Kids in Crisis, a nonprofit headquartered in Pennsylvania, faced troubling allegations at its branches in Minnesota and Maine. In 2016, KidsPeace employed social worker Kelly F. O’Rourke, then 51, even though state regulators in Maine received complaints accusing him of having a sexual relationship with an adult client. O’Rourke continued practicing for six months after the complaint was filed with the Maine State Board of Social Worker Licensure. 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. Internal and external investigations were carried out there in 2016 following reports of three boys being sexually abused. St. Louis County confirmed that the center had not reported several allegations of sexual abuse to the authorities over the years. Mesabi Academy closed its doors in July 2016. In late 2013, an 11-year-old Guatemalan boy and his sister arrived at The Children’s Village, a short-term residential care center for youth almost 25 miles outside New York City. Their mother had been waiting for a “coyote” – someone paid to bring immigrants across the border – to safely transport her children to her in Atlanta. Instead, they were caught by Border Patrol agents and placed in the care of the refugee resettlement office. 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 mother had received a phone call telling her that her son would be flown to Atlanta after spending the night in a New York hospital. She told PRI that shelter officials told her that there had been “an incident,” but her son was “fine” and they would give her son a police report detailing what happened. The son arrived in Atlanta without any records. When the mother spoke to her son, she said he told her that he was in pain. She took him to an Atlanta hospital, which she said concluded the boy had been sexually assaulted. 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. The resettlement office found some cases files “lacked evidence of background investigations on sponsors” and others “had other documentation errors” in a report published in December 2017. Reveal reached out to His House’s founder, its executive director and the director of its Unaccompanied Alien Children program. None responded. 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. In one case, she asked a 15-year-old boy for a pornographic video of him, which he provided. 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.Few companies lose grants
Of about 70 entities that won grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, only two did not have their contracts renewed following confirmed complaints. At the end of March, the resettlement agency ended grant funding to International Educational Services Inc., a resettlement program with several shelters across Cameron County, Texas. The company closed operations but never publicly acknowledged why. 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 resettlement agency stopped its funding that same year. In suburban Washington, D.C., the resettlement agency had contracted with the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center to house migrant children in a secure, jail-like setting. 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. The agency cited “an unusual and compelling urgency” for the contract, adding that it was “at capacity for secure beds.” One way these shelters have continued to receive government funding is to voluntarily close any subsidiaries or strategically rebrand themselves following any allegations of mistreatment of children in their care. 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. After implementing better protocols and accountability measures, the company rebranded itself as Upbring. With Clay Dean Hill’s programs, it was a more complex rebranding of the Daystar Residential and Behavior Training Program following the deaths there. Hill subsumed all properties and facilities under another one of his registered nonprofits, the then-lesser-known Shiloh Treatment Center. 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.New grants to be awarded
The Office of Refugee Resettlement currently pays most of these organizations under grants awarded back in 2016. In May, the agency announced its latest round of three-year grants to house migrant children. This offers another opportunity to remove grantees from the program – as well as a window into the agency’s plans for the program. 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. Those plans abruptly changed this week. 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.Families splintered apart, by government and by storms
We continue our ongoing investigation into what happens to immigrant children after they’re detained by the U.S. government.
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