The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should be apologizing for the reported sexual abuse of migrant children in its custody over the past several years and making sure every child is safe, but instead, HHS officials are demanding an apology from a Democratic House leader who exposed the thousands of complaints last week—and they say they won’t meet with him until he provides it.
According to CNN, during a hearing last week, House Ethics Committee Chair Ted Deutch said documents revealed that HHS had “received more than 4,500 complaints of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors from 2014-2018,” alleging that "over the past three years, there have been 154 staff on unaccompanied minor, let me repeat that, staff on unaccompanied minor allegations of sexual assault." But HHS disputed this, arguing that the kids were in facilities run by contractors, not HHS staff.
“Representative, let me first correct an error,” said HHS official Jonathan White. “Those are not HHS staff in any of those allegations. That statement is false.” Deutch responded, “I will make that clarification, but it doesn’t make what happened any less horrific.”
A number of companies are being paid obscene amounts of taxpayer money by the federal government to detain vulnerable migrant children, but those children are still in HHS custody, and in fact there hasn’t been enough scrutiny of these contractors despite allegations of horrific abuse. Southwest Key, for example, received $626 million in federal grants last year alone, yet has had numerous employees arrested and charged with child molestation. In Arizona, the “non-profit” was forced to give up licenses for two of its facilities after failing to show proof of background checks for employees.
This is happening as the Trump administration recently had a record number of migrant kids in detention, nearly 15,000, the vast majority of them minors who came to the U.S. by themselves. Currently, that population is at about 10,000, and nearly 1,600 of those kids are being detained at a Florida prison camp being operated by yet another contractor. It’s reportedly operating without a license because it’s supposedly a “temporary” facility. There needs to be apology all right, but thousands of them, and to these children.