By Theodore Shoebat
The seventh sexual abuse allegation has been reported at the largest migrant center in the United States, the Homestead Branch. The Florida Department of Children and Families received the report of the allegation, but cannot do anything about it since this issue is under the jurisdiction of federal authorities. We don’t know the full scale of the situation and the US government has been doing quite a good job in keeping from the public details about what is occurring in the Homestead.
One report from NBC Miami states:
A new report details a case of alleged sexual abuse between two minors at the Homestead facility that houses unaccompanied migrant children.
The Florida Department of Children and Families received the report in May, the News Service of Florida reported. No details were provided due to confidentiality issues.
This is the seventh report of sexual abuse at the center, which has seen an influx of migrant children. It houses approximately 3,000 since it opened in February of 2018, making it the largest migrant shelter in the nation.
“Nobody seems to look at what’s happening. Everything a secret,” said Jonathan Fried, executive director of WeCount, an immigrant rights organization. “The people who work there are sworn to secrecy, there’s something wrong going on there.”
The DCF tells New Service of Florida that they have “erroneously accepted” the May report, which has been referred to the federal government.
“In this case of alleged sexual abuse, DCF can’t investigate it, because it’s on federal land,” Fried said.
In fact, in four years the federal government has received more than 4,500 complaints about the sexual abuse of immigrant children. According to the New York Times:
The federal government received more than 4,500 complaints in four years about the sexual abuse of immigrant children who were being held at government-funded detention facilities, including an increase in complaints while the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was in place, the Justice Department revealed this week.
The records, which involve children who had entered the country alone or had been separated from their parents, detailed allegations that adult staff members had harassed and assaulted children, including fondling and kissing minors, watching them as they showered, and raping them. They also included cases of suspected abuse of children by other minors.
From October 2014 to July 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a part of the Health and Human Services Department that cares for so-called unaccompanied minors, received a total of 4,556 allegations of sexual abuse or sexual harassment, 1,303 of which were referred to the Justice Department. Of those 1,303 cases deemed the most serious, 178 were accusations that adult staff members had sexually assaulted immigrant children, while the rest were allegations of minors assaulting other minors, the report said.
“The safety of minors is our top concern when administering the UAC program,” Jonathan H. Hayes, the acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said in a statement, using an abbreviation for unaccompanied children. “None of the allegations involved O.R.R. federal staff. These allegations were all fully investigated and remedial action was taken where appropriate.”
The records do not detail the outcome of every complaint, but they indicate that some accusations were determined to be unfounded or lacking enough evidence to prosecute. In one case, a staff member at a Chicago detention facility was accused in April 2015 of fondling and kissing a child and was later charged with a crime. The report did not state whether that person had been found guilty.
The documents, first reported by Axios, were made public by Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, the night before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday about the Trump administration’s policy of family separations at the southern border. That policy, which was put in place last spring, resulted in more than 2,700 children being separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting anyone caught crossing the border illegally, including those with families seeking asylum on humanitarian grounds.
For most of the four years covered by the report, the number of allegations made to the Office of Refugee Resettlement stayed about the same from month to month. But the number of complaints rose after the Trump administration enacted its separation policy. From March 2018 to July 2018, the agency received 859 complaints, the largest number of reports during any five-month span in the previous four years. Of those, 342 allegations were referred to the Justice Department, the report showed.
During the hearing on Tuesday, a discussion of the records sparked a heated exchange between Mr. Deutch and Cmdr. Jonathan White of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who last year repeatedly warned a top official in Health and Human Services that the family separation policy could permanently traumatize young children.