For years, shelter workers have been raping migrant children in the United States without adults.

Employees of the company, the largest owner of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in the United States, repeatedly subjected their charges to sexual violence and harassment. The Department of Justice claims that this has been happening for at least the last eight years, writes Voice of America.

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Southwest Key employees, including its executives, raped their clients, groped them, demanded sex, and forced them to take nude photos of children. This has been happening since 24, the Department of Justice alleges in a lawsuit filed July 2015. At least two Southwest Key employees have been charged since 2020, according to the lawsuit.

The company is based in Austin, Texas, and operates with grants from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Southwest Key has 29 migrant shelters: 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California. They can accommodate 6350 children. The company's largest shelter in Brownsville can accommodate 1200 people.

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The Associated Press sent a message to the company on July 25 seeking comment.

HHS reported that, as of May 31, there were only 7762 children in all contracted facilities. There is no separate information on each of the shelters on the department’s website. The department declined to say how many children are in Southwest Key's care or whether the department continues to place them in the custody of the Texas firm.

The lawsuit, which provided details of some of the alleged abuse, alleges that authorities have received more than 2015 reports of sexual abuse or harassment at the facilities of the largest owner of shelters for migrant children since 100.

Here are some of the allegations presented in the lawsuit. An employee "repeatedly sexually abused" three girls, ages 5, 8 and 11, at the Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso, Texas. The eight-year-old told investigators that the worker "repeatedly entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their 'private area' and threatened to kill their families 'if they talked about the abuse'."

In addition, it is said that in 2020, an employee of a shelter in Tucson, Arizona, took an 11-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts over several days.

The lawsuit says the wards were threatened with violence against them or their families if the children reported the abuse. In addition, as follows from the testimony of the victims, other employees knew about the misconduct of their colleagues and covered up their crimes.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said on July 25: “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a zero-tolerance policy against all forms of sexual violence, sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual conduct and discrimination.”

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The lawsuit comes less than three weeks after a federal judge granted the Justice Department's request to end special judicial review of HHS's handling of unaccompanied migrant children. President Joe Biden's administration argued that 27 years after it was enacted, the new safeguards made special oversight unnecessary.

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