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| Marvin Velasco, 15, poses at his new home in Los Angeles on Monday, Jan. 11, 2016. In September 2014, Velasco said he soon realized that nine other people lived in the apartment of his first sponsor in the United States, a distant relative whom he had never met. The sponsor told Velasco he would be punished if he left the apartment, and demanded rent payments. When Velasco told the sponsor he wanted to study, the man called the boy's parents in Guatemala, threatening to kick him out if they didn't pay. Then he started withholding food, Velasco said. |
LOS ANGELES
(AP) -- As tens of thousands of children fleeing violence in
Central America crossed the border in search of safe harbor, overwhelmed
U.S. officials weakened child protection policies, placing some young
migrants in homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced
to work for little or no pay, an Associated Press investigation has
found.
Without enough beds to house the record
numbers of young arrivals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services lowered its safety standards during border surges in the last
three years to swiftly move children out of government shelters and into
sponsors' homes. The procedures were increasingly relaxed as the number
of young migrants rose in response to spiraling gang and drug violence
in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to emails, agency
memos and operations manuals obtained by AP, some under the Freedom of
Information Act.
First, the government stopped
fingerprinting most adults seeking to claim the children. In April
2014, the agency stopped requiring original copies of birth certificates
to prove most sponsors' identities. The next month, it decided not to
complete forms that request sponsors' personal and identifying
information before sending many of the children to sponsors' homes.
Then, it eliminated FBI criminal history checks for many sponsors.
Since
the rule changes, the AP has identified more than two dozen children
who were placed with sponsors who subjected them to sexual abuse, labor
trafficking, or severe abuse and neglect.
"This
is clearly the tip of the iceberg," said Jacqueline Bhabha, research
director at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard
University. "We would never release domestic children to private
settings with as little scrutiny."
Advocates
say it is hard to gauge the total number of children exposed to
dangerous conditions among the more than 89,000 placed with sponsors
since October 2013 because many of the migrants designated for follow-up
were nowhere to be found when social workers tried to reach them.
Federal
officials won't disclose details of how the agency was stretched so
thin, but say they are strengthening the procedures as the number of
young migrants once again is on the rise, and recently signed a contract
to open new shelters.
"We are not taking shortcuts," HHS spokesman Mark Weber said. "The program does an amazing job overall."
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YOUNG VICTIMS
One
of the cases reviewed by the AP involved a then-14-year-old from
Guatemala who arrived in the U.S. in September 2014 and was sent to a
sponsor's tiny apartment in Los Angeles, where he was held for three
weeks. In an interview, Marvin Velasco said his sponsor, a distant
relative who he had never met, deprived him of food, which left him weak
and praying for his salvation.
"He told
authorities that he was going to take me to school and help me with food
and clothing, but it wasn't like that at all," said Velasco, who since
has been granted special legal status for young immigrants. "The whole
time, I was just praying and thinking about my family."
Velasco's
perilous journey from Guatemala included crossing a river, even though
he doesn't swim, and getting lost at night in a frigid desert. Once in
the U.S., he was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents, processed in
Hidalgo, Texas, and sent to a shelter run by HHS' Office of Refugee
Resettlement.
Unlike the extensive screenings
required in the U.S. foster care system, the ORR had stopped requiring
that social workers complete extensive background checks or fingerprint
most sponsors when they placed Velasco with his brother-in-law's father.
Social workers did not visit the sponsor's one-bedroom apartment before
he arrived or check up on him afterward, said Gina Manciati, the boy's
attorney.
Velasco said he soon realized that
nine other people lived there. The sponsor told Velasco he would be
punished if he left the apartment, and demanded rent payments. When
Velasco told the sponsor he wanted to study, the man called the boy's
parents in Guatemala, threatening to kick him out if they didn't pay.
Then the sponsor started withholding food, Velasco said.
With
help from the sponsor's son, Velasco escaped and sought sanctuary in a
nearby church, where he met a parishioner who took him in and became his
legal guardian. Now 15 and living with a Guatemalan immigrant family
that is raising him as their son, he is thriving in school and leads the
church's devotional band.
Other accounts uncovered by the AP include:
-
A 14-year-old Honduran girl whose stepfather forced her to work over a
period of several months at cantinas in central Florida where women
drink, dance and sometimes have sex with patrons.
-
A 17-year-old from Honduras sent to live with an aunt in Texas, who
forced her to work in a restaurant at night and clean houses on
weekends, and often locked her in the home.
- A
17-year-old Guatemalan placed with a friend's brother in Alabama who
vowed to help him attend school, but instead was made to work in a
restaurant for 12 hours a day to earn rent.
- A
Central American teen placed with a family friend who forced her to
cook, clean and care for a group of younger children in a Florida
trailer park.
- A Honduran teen placed with a
sponsor in New York City who was so physically abusive that she ran away
and sought refuge in a shelter.
Experts who
work with migrant children, including a psychologist and an attorney,
cited cases in which unaccompanied children were raped by relatives or
other people associated with their sponsors.
Weber
said the ORR has added more home visits and background checks since
July, when federal prosecutors charged sponsors and associates with
running a trafficking ring in rural Ohio that forced six unaccompanied
minors to work on egg farms. Lured north with the promise of an
education, the teens instead were forced to work under threats of death
for up to 12 hours a day.
"These tragic
situations do happen when there are bad actors involved, and that makes
it incredibly difficult for the government to ferret them out," Weber
said. "I know we learn from lessons and keep trying to improve the
system to ensure the child is placed in a safe place, and I'm confident
the vast majority of the kids are."
---
HOW THE PROBLEM EVOLVED
Contractors
and advocates say that, starting in 2012, they repeatedly warned HHS
about the steady increase in children arriving at the border. The agency
itself warned case management staff in 2013 that "fraudulent sponsors"
in Colorado, Iowa and Minnesota had sought to claim multiple, unrelated
minors. By the summer of 2014, the challenge of dealing with a sea of
unaccompanied minors had become a full-blown crisis.
"So
many kids were piling up at the Border Patrol stations that the agency
had to start emptying their shelter beds," said Jennifer Podkul, senior
program officer at the nonprofit Women's Refugee Commission. "They sped
up reunification procedures that they had in place for years."
By
law, child migrants traveling alone must be sent to an ORR facility
within three days of being detained. The agency then is responsible for
the children's care until they are united with a relative or sponsor in
the community they can live with while awaiting immigration court
hearings. Sponsors can be parents, grandparents, distant relatives or
unrelated adults, such as family friends, and all are expected to enroll
the children in school, help them get health care and attend court.
In
2012, caseworkers followed a stringent process before releasing
children to sponsors, including background checks, fingerprints, 60-day
home studies and signed agreements that the children would appear in
immigration court. But in November 2013, overburdened by a sudden influx
of unaccompanied children, the agency took the first of what would be a
series of steps to lower its standards, stating in a manual that most
parents and legal guardians would not be fingerprinted.
ORR
said the relaxed rules on the front end were compensated on the back
end by more children getting social services attention after being
released into the community. Even now, though, most young migrants
rarely see child welfare workers after landing at sponsors' homes.
Only
a small group of at-risk children who the government believes need
extra protection are visited by social workers contracted by ORR, and
the services cease when the children turn 18. But sometimes, those
vulnerable children vanish before social workers reach them. Federal
contractor Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service has tracked 201
cases in which children ran away or the families couldn't be traced,
which represents 11 percent of their closed cases since 2013.
Last
year, a social worker visited an apartment complex in Fort Meyers,
Florida, to see if it was suitable for a new placement. The government
had sent more than a dozen other children to live there, but the social
worker found nothing but an empty apartment, said Hilary Chester,
associate director of anti-trafficking programs at U.S. Council of
Catholic Bishops, another federal contractor.
"We
were concerned that it could have been a front to have those kids
released so that traffickers could get them into the workforce," Chester
said. "No one knows where the kids are."
ORR
bars releasing children to people who have been convicted of child abuse
or neglect or violent felonies like homicide and rape. But in November,
a whistleblower told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that federal
authorities had placed unaccompanied children with convicted criminals.
The whistleblower alleged that 3,400 sponsors listed in a government
database had criminal histories including homicide, child molestation,
sexual assault and human trafficking, according to Grassley's office.
Weber, the HHS spokesman, said the agency's inspector general is reviewing the claim.
