What’s in the jailing of vulnerable migrant children? Money. Lots and lots of it. The former CEO of a “nonprofit” that has won lucrative federal contracts to detain kids—including many stolen from families at the border under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy—“was paid $3.6 million during the charity’s most recent tax year,” The New York Times reports.
“Juan Sanchez, the chief executive of Southwest Key Programs, received that income, which included life insurance and retirement benefits, between September 2017 and August 2018.” This was during the height of the family separation crisis. “It was more than twice what he was paid the previous year, and it eclipsed the maximum amount of grant money that the government allows migrant shelters to use to pay an employee, which was $189,600 last year.”
Sanchez was paid this, The New York Times continues, “even as the nonprofit organization came under intense scrutiny for its high compensation packages for executives.” Former chief financial officer Melody Chung raked in a $1 million salary, while Sanchez’s wife, Jennifer, earned half a million. Both Juan Sanchez and Chung resigned from Southwest Key, while Jennifer Sanchez remained as of March.
Jailing children for cash is reprehensible, but even worse than that is the fact that children have been abused while under the watch of Southwest Key. Surveillance video dating back to September 2018 showed staffers at the now-closed Hacienda del Sol facility in Youngstown, Arizona, physically abusing children. In one video, blurred to protect the child’s identity, an adult is shown pushing and shoving a boy so hard he hits the wall behind him.
“Another video,” NBC News reported at the time, “appears to show another person dragging a child through a room and then trying to pull the child across the floor as the child lay down and tried to use its legs to block a doorway. At the same time, another person dragged a different child with its arms extended across the same room.” No one, however, was charged after an investigation.
Southwest Key’s interim chief executive claimed Sanchez has returned his salary to the company—it really should be returned to us—but the issue is not as clear-cut as it seems: Sanchez and Chung “still own a shelter in Conroe, Texas, through a shell company; the shelter is rented to Southwest Key. Asked by The Times last year about that potential case of self-dealing, in which the executives collected rent paid by the federal government, a Southwest Key spokesman said the partners would seek to sell their ownership stakes. The property has not yet been sold.”