In shelters for immigrant children, cases of sexual assault are opened and closed in two by three

In shelters for immigrant children, cases of sexual assault are opened and closed in two by three https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20181221-boystown-1200x630.jpg?1545669677

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The hostel television showed a World Cup match when the two older teenagers who tackled Alex on July 1 dragged him into the empty bedroom. They forced him to turn on his stomach while one of them, tattooed on his arm, was on him. When I tried to move, Alex said he could feel the other guy's penis rubbing on his butt.

"Let's remove the calzoneta!" He heard the other teenager shout, who presumes to have been a gangster in Honduras. "Let's undo it!"

Just ten days before, Alex, aged 13, was stopped by the Border Patrol after traveling with his 17-year-old sister and 5-year-old stepbrother, when they escaped gang violence in their country. The brothers then stayed in Boystown, on the outskirts of Miami, this being one of more than a hundred hostels for minors of the network established by the government to provisionally shelter migrants detained while crossing the border.

These two teenagers made fun of Alex since he arrived at the hostel, making sexual jokes about his pregnant sister. Now, in the bedroom, Alex said, they pulled the front of the calzoneta.

"At least she has tried man, she was the scorn of one of them. "But you have not even tried a woman."

Alex said that he fought against them with all his strength, somehow managing to climb the calzoneta and kicking to free himself. The other guys fled and he was lying on the ground catching his breath. When they left, they warned him to shut his mouth.

In the course of the last six months, ProPublica collected hundreds of police reports with allegations of sexual assault in the shelters of immigrant minors, places that have received US $ 4.5 billion dollars to host and provide other services to the wave of children and unaccompanied Central American children who have arrived in the country since 2014. The reports, obtained when requesting public records, reveal a generally hidden side of these shelters; many times, both the staff and other residents they were the ones that acted as predators.

Certain incidents led to the arrest of employees of shelters or resident adolescents. In a particularly egregious case, a juvenile case manager was convicted in September for having sexually abused seven children for almost a year in a shelter in Arizona. That employee had worked for months without his criminal record having been thoroughly investigated.

The coverage that ProPublica and other media have given to these incidents made it possible to start demanding investigations in this regard.

The governor of Arizona issued an inspection in all the shelters of the state with which two centers administered by Southwest Key were closed, since that nonprofit organization failed to verify having conducted thorough investigations of the background of its employees.

And, at the end of last month, federal investigators they warned that the Trump administration had eliminated the requirement to carry out FBI investigations to obtain personnel criminal records by means of fingerprints, allowing a "dangerously" low number of mental health counselors in the tent shelters in Tornillo, Texas, in which 2,800 immigrant children reside.

However, ProPublica's review of hundreds of police reports showed something else about the attacks. Something that goes beyond the investigations on criminal records. In fact, children in shelters across the country have reported cases of sexual assault in these places, often on the part of other children. However, according to reports, the police repeatedly closed the cases quickly and without much investigation; often in a period of days or even hours.

It is very likely that there are many more. The registry of records that ProPublica has lacks a large number of police reports of shelters in Texas, the state where the largest number of immigrant children is detained. That's because state laws prohibit reports of child abuse from being disclosed to the public, especially when the assault is committed by another child.

Now, while the immigration system tries to host and care for 14,600 minors, an amount greater than ever, the exploration of how federal and state authorities investigated the attack against Alex, one of those children, reveals gaps. amazing

Alex says he did not say anything about the grievance for several days, abiding by his aggressors' warning and worried that mentioning him would delay his departure from Boystown. However, he decided to talk with his counselor because they continued to harass him.

The counselor told her that the surveillance recording had captured the moment when the two teenagers dragged her hands and feet to the bedroom, and that it was also possible that there was a witness. However, Alex's complaint did not trigger a sex offender investigation, which includes a special interview designed to help children talk about what happened, as recommended by child abuse experts.

Instead, the shelter took almost a month to call the police. When it finally did, the police report shows, the shelter's chief mental health counselor said that "the incident had already been resolved and that no sexual offense had occurred among the boys, as the staff had originally thought."

Then, instead of investigating the incident themselves, the officers of the Miami-Dade Police Department took the counselor's word and closed the case quickly, without even interviewing Alex.

A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Miami, which received US $ 6 million last year to serve about 80 children in Boystown, he said he handled Alex's case correctly, blaming him for any delay. In questioning the department, a Miami-Dade police spokesman said he would reopen the case.

When the case of Alex was reviewed, it was found that almost all the agencies in charge of helping him, that is, to find out everything that had happened in the bedroom, had really failed him.

The police closed his case 72 minutes after answering the call.

Alex's mother, Yojana, received the call from Boystown on July 27, just after leaving work tired for a hot day installing pools in southwest Missouri. She was waiting for her routine talk with her children, so she answered excitedly when the Florida phone appeared on her cell phone.

Yojana had left them in Honduras four years earlier when she left in search of a better life in the United States. Now he would meet them soon, when they left the shelter where they had been detained for almost a month.

But, instead of the voice of his children, he heard the unknown from a member of the hostel staff. Something had happened to Alex.

The woman told him that a surveillance video showed two older teenagers who had knocked Alex out by dragging him into a bedroom. "There are no cameras in the bedroom," he said, "so we could not see anything else." The woman handed the phone to Alex, who cried as she told her mother what had happened in that room.

Yojana was furious after hanging up. The attack had happened more than three weeks ago. Why did you find out so far? Where was the staff? Why was nobody watching them? What if the attack had been worse than Alex told him?

Hokyoung Kim, special to ProPublica

As a mother, Yojana commented that her instinct was to go to the police and break down the door if necessary to ensure that both the shelter and the teenagers were held responsible. However, I knew that, in the United States, she was not a mother like everyone else. Years before, her husband Jairo and she had crossed the border illegally separately and lived in the country without permission. The family allowed us to tell their story as long as we did not disclose their surnames.

Yojana had reasons to worry. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been arresting parents, relatives, or cohabitants of home, in the country illegally, when they show up to pick up their children or children from their guardianship. This month, ICE reported that between July and November it had arrested 170 sponsors, or people related to them; 109 of those people had no criminal record.

If Yojana and Jairo went to the authorities, or pressed too much on the case, they could risk everything they had fought to achieve.

Weeks before, Alex had started a career with which he thought he would get help. Four days after the attack, he finally had the courage to inform his counselor. Alex remembered that she told him "it was very sad what happened to me and I was very sorry". His counselor took him to the office of his supervisor, Marianne Cortés, where he re-told what happened.

She said that Cortés told her that she and her counselor would watch the surveillance video, and that "if that is how she told me we are going to report her". After they saw him, Alex said, his counselor told him that the recording had something else, something he had not noticed during the attack. There was a witness.

"There in the video, my counselor told me that there was another child in a window," he said.

Even with the revealed, nothing happened. It was not investigated anymore.

In an interview, Mary Ross Agosta, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said there was no reason to investigate at the time. Alex "was interviewed by the staff and he said there had been oral harassment, sexual gestures and jokes about his sister, but no nudity," she said.

He also mentioned that the staff had reviewed the surveillance video and that, in effect, "they grabbed his hands and feet and put him in the bedroom", but that this was a "humiliating" act, not delinquent.

The report of the incident presented by the shelter to the federal authorities was sexual harassment. The staff did not call the police, she said, "because there was no sexual contact, no misconduct other than making fun of him."

Ross Agosta said that allowing three weeks to go before calling Yojana had been "an oversight," discovered when Cortés was preparing to call her and begin the process of reunification.

It was not until July 30, he said, that Alex informed the staff about the sexual event. But Alex said that Cortés already knew everything for those dates. He had told her when he first reported him in early July and she had heard him again when he told her to his mother on July 27.

On July 30, said Ross Agosta, the shelter called the Miami-Dade police as well as the Florida Department of Children and Families.

The experts on child abuse say that waiting in a situation like this goes against best practices. Regardless of what Alex has reported the first time, they commented, counselors who work with children should know that it is common for grievance victims not to mention all the details initially.

"It can be overwhelming at times," said Chris Newlin, lead author of the best practices to interview minors in abuse cases used by the US Department of Justice. Young victims may not be sure what to do, what will happen if they say something, or how the system works, he said. They could have been threatened or traumatized.

Newlin said that even a child in Alex's situation would be less likely to report something because of his immigration status. That is why it is critical, he added, that the staff take each and every case seriously and look for signs of trauma.

Ross Agosta said police came to the shelter on July 30, followed by DCF investigators the next day. He also said that both agencies determined that there was "no sexual offense."

After talking with Alex, Yojana and Jairo released everything to cross the country by car to Boystown. That season should have been a happy moment, but now they traveled full of worry.

Yojana, 33, had arrived in the United States, from Honduras, in 2014, leaving behind Alex, 9 years old at the time, and her sister Yemerly, 13. She met with her sister in southwest Missouri and found I work in a processing plant, packing frozen chicken during the night shift.

She kept in touch with her children through video calls and photos on Facebook, such as Alex's painted clown at one of the birthday parties that she missed.

The money he sent to Honduras helped Alex and Yemerly go to a private school, an exceptional privilege that he hoped would isolate them from the gang violence that affects the country. Yojana had not studied above the sixth grade, but Yemerly wanted to be a civil engineer.

However, she and Jairo commented, those signs of economic success made them vulnerable to the kidnappers. One night, after not knowing anything about Yemerly for several days, Yojana saw a report on television about five girls who were kidnapped. He decided then that it was time.

"For not sending them to be brought, we are going to lament for life," said Jairo.

Alex, Yemerly and her half brother, Amahury, left Honduras in June, along with their 8-year-old cousin. They crossed Mexico in a packed refrigerated truck and, eleven days later, crossed the Rio Grande in a green inflatable boat. They were quickly apprehended by the Border Patrol and taken to Monsignor Bryan Walsh Children's Village, the facilities run by Catholic Charities known to most people like Boystown.

Five weeks later, when they finally met again in the cafeteria in that place, the photographs show that Yojana did not even let go of her purse before hugging her children tightly. Alex was already taller than her, had a new haircut with a thick wave above the head and shaved ends ending in tip like soccer stars who adored. Yemerly wept in her mother's arms.

"Right now I see them," said Yojana later, "I already feel that the children I left behind in Honduras as they have returned to live."

But he also said that he felt that part of Alex had locked himself up. The boys will not leave until a couple of days later, so when Alex called her at the hotel, Yojana decided to press him a little to give him more details about the attack, as well as recording it on his phone.

Hokyoung Kim, special to ProPublica

During the call, Alex told him that the police would go to the place, and that they had told him they were going to interview him. However, he was afraid that something he said might affect his departure. He said "I did not want to be there anymore."

Yojana encouraged him to tell the truth by saying: "When the police arrive, you, that's what you told me ... you have to say that, you understand me?" Said Yojana. "You do not have to be afraid of what the kids were doing to you. You have to say. "

In the background Yojana could hear the noise coming from a walkie-talkie radio.

"Wait, right now the counselor comes for me," Alex said.

It disputed what happened right away. Alex said that after hanging up he was not interviewed by the police or anyone else.

Initially, the Miami-Dade police informed ProPublica that they had not been able to find any report related to an alleged sex offense in Boystown, even though they received the full name of Alex, the address of the shelter and the date and description of the incident.

After reviewing a list of 145 calls from the shelter received by the police since 2013, we found it under the vague label of "conducting research."

According to the report, Miami-Dade police officers went to Boystown on July 30 at 4:42 p.m., concluding their investigation at 5:54 p.m. The report does not describe what they did during those 72 minutes. The narrative contains three statements.

It is indicated that Cortés had called the police to "warn that on the appointed date and the approximate time," Alex had had "an incident" with two other boys. However, she "reported that the incident had been resolved and that no sex offense had occurred among the boys as the staff had initially thought".

Basically, that was all. The police withdrew. Nothing was mentioned about a surveillance video. They did not interview the teenagers or the possible witness. They did not talk to Alex. There was no mention of how Boystown had reached its conclusions, nor the reasons the police had for believing them.

In the "Case Status" section, one of the officers wrote "CLOSED".

During a brief call, Cortés said that, under the rules on confidentiality, she was unable to comment on how she and other people in the shelter had responded. He also asked that the questions be addressed to the archdiocese.

"The only thing I can tell you is that we were the ones who advocated for him and for his care," said Cortés. "We believe in anything that happens to a child and that can be traumatic. We do not minimize it. We take everything very seriously. "

Detective Alvaro Zabaleta, spokesman for the Miami-Dade police, said he did not know if the officer who handled the case was told there was a video. However, he did not want to doubt his judgment about not interviewing Alex.

Zabaleta added that the hostel staff is trained to work with immigrant children and about the problems they face. So, "when it comes to these guys and we have their counselors," he said, "they become his voice and they are there to look after the interests that benefit a child the most."

For the child abuse experts we consulted, the officer's decision not to interview Alex seemed unusual.

"How is it possible to carry out an investigation without obtaining the comments of the only person who could be considered as the most credible witness of what happened or did not happen?" Said Newlin. "How to know who to talk to? How to know what evidence to look for if you do not get a statement from that person?

Mike Haney, who is exempt from prevention and intervention for cases of abuse at DCF and the Florida Department of Health, said the state developed its abuse case investigation scheme in 1978 when it created integrated "child protective equipment" by pediatricians, social workers and child psychologists. The teams work with law enforcement agencies and the DCF to evaluate reports of child abuse, provide services and carry out what is known as "forensic interviews."

Haney said that these should occur "as soon as reasonably appropriate for the child," but generally within a period of 24 to 48 hours. The above is due to the fact that children are under considerable pressure when a report is presented to the authorities and the DCF, he said.

"I'm not sure what the officer would think when responding to an allegation like this without interviewing the boy," Haney said. "And, if the clinical staff says, 'I talked to the kids and they said this,' I would like to know that the child told me the same story."

Even so, Haney said that under Florida law, the officer does not have the obligation to call a child protection team to conduct a forensic interview because the law only requires them when the child alleges that the abuse was on the part of one of the parents or a caregiver. The information provided by Alex is known in Florida as a "minor vs. minor" case.

"I think that any minor who declares a supposed sexual abuse should be evaluated by a professional," Haney said, "but that becomes a problem of resources, funds and personnel. That is the main reason. The costs would increase significantly if we put those things within reach of any minor. "

The hundreds of police reports reviewed in ProPublica revealed a large number of incidents that were quickly dismissed, such as Alex's, in immigrant child shelters.

In 2016, one of the employees of a shelter outside of Phoenix, Arizona, saw a boy rubbing his hips over another, with a blanket placed between them. The victim would not stop crying and refused to talk to the employee. A police officer took the report and the case was closed.

One year before the incident, and in the same facilities, one of the social workers for young people found a boy with half-pants, standing behind another who was bent over the bed also with his pants down. During a medical examination the next day, the boy mentioned to the nurse that one of his roommates had held him tightly while another violated him. But, five days later, when he was finally taken to a formal interview, he denied that something had happened. That case was also closed.

In March 2017, a 16-year-old Honduran boy informed one of the employees of a New York shelter that his roommate had raped him when he was in a shelter in Renton, Washington. A detective finally interviewed the teenager after almost two months of paperwork, but, by then, the boy "did not want to do anything about it." Like the others, that case was also closed.

On many occasions, the officers who dealt with the cases only wrote brief reports about the incidents, without investigating them as possible crimes.

Those who criticize the system say that this is the main error that comes up. Because it is typical for immigrant children to only be in the jurisdictions of investigative agencies for a few weeks, it is difficult for detectives to pursue a case even if they want it. Many times, the children are transferred from place to place within the shelter system, sometimes without prior warning or during the night. When they are released, they are often sent to other states to live with their parents or relatives who might not want to interact with the police because they are in the country as undocumented or because they live with people with that immigration status.

Towards August 1, when Boystown finally released Alex and his brothers, Yojana was also given a folder with Alex's admission documents, immunization records, and blood tests. The folder contained information about how to be a good sponsor and what to do for follow-up with the immigration court, but nothing about what happened to your child, not even a report about the incident.

When Jairo asked to watch the surveillance video, the staff informed him that what was taken from the security cameras was automatically recycled.

He commented: "They said that after 30 days the video was erased and unfortunately today is the 31st day, it means that yesterday was erased, very casual thing."

In those moments he and Yojana did not want to press. They had their children again and for the first time in their lives they could go out and be together in America.

After leaving Boystown, the family stopped at a Honduran restaurant to talk and decide if they should go to the police or just go home.

They had few days of leave to work and Jairo felt pressure to return. On the other hand, someone had to pay for what happened to Alex. If not for the good of the boy, to prevent hurting other kids in the shelter.

And, at the same time, the shelter had said that a complaint was filed with the police. Although they still did not interview Alex, surely an officer would follow him up.

"I wanted to grab that phone and break it because I could not stand the pressure," said Jairo; "I have many responsibilities to fulfill and I could not be in this, in the other, in that, I already had the children, that was good and let's go."

They decided to leave.

Days later, in Missouri, Alex slipped into the backseat of Jairo's truck to accompany him to a job installing swimming pools.

As they drove east on Highway 44, passing exit ramps for Waffle House restaurants, Best Western hotels, Flying J gas stations, Alex stared out the window and silently, sometimes resting his forehead on the glass, and nervously walking the sewing the jeans with the tips of your fingers.

Hokyoung Kim, special to ProPublica

For days Yojana and Jairo hesitated between seeking justice and feeling helpless about how to do it. Jairo said he had a business card from a lawyer in Kansas City who could take Alex's case and maybe find out what had really happened, although neither he nor Yojana had called yet to make an appointment.

There was a lot to decipher. They were not sure if Alex had told them everything that had happened at Boystown, or if they were hiding something worse. Yojana mentioned that she had wanted to touch the subject but Alex asked her not to ask any more questions.

The boy had said that the day he was the police, he and his counselor, "We were waiting for the police to call me, but Marian Cortes spoke with them and there my counselor told me that they were not going to interview me anymore."

Alex said he was confused. He had wanted to tell the police what the other two boys had done to him, and he did not understand why the shelter had counted things for him.

When we asked him what he wanted to happen, Alex undoubtedly answered: "I want to denounce them," he said. "Go to the police."

In mid-August, DCF issued a report with three violations committed by Boystown regarding state rules related to residential facilities for child care.

The report indicated that the shelter did not have enough staff; that he had not promptly reported the suspicion of child abuse; and that he had not notified the parents or legal guardians of the minors about critical incidents.

The records did not mention Alex or describe what prompted the investigation. However, they did show that on August 16, more than two weeks after the boy left, Boystown agreed to implement a "corrective action plan", with which he promised to retrain the staff and submit biweekly reports that would allow the state verify that Boystown had enough staff to supervise the children.

David Frady, DCF spokesman, said that, under the confidentiality issue, he could not talk about Alex's case, nor could it confirm whether an incident had occurred at Boystown.

"I can not confirm or deny whether we have spoken or not spoken with a supposed victim," he said.

The Miami-Dade police rejected the request to interview the officers who came to the case and refused to hand over the recording of the body camera they were wearing when visiting Boystown. Of the seventeen minutes of video and sound that exist, the department said that only twelve minutes were public material because Florida law prohibits disclosing body camera footage captured in a "private residence."

ProPublica withdrew that decision, but the department said that the conversation occurred in an office, where the social worker could have the expectation of confidentiality.

However, after receiving our questions about the way the case was handled and reviewing the incident, Zabaleta said that the department had assigned an investigator to re-evaluate him, in reality, to reopen the case.

The department said it would not disclose even the twelve seconds of video because the case was still being investigated.

The Federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for defraying and regulating shelters, said Boystown transferred the "perpetrators" to another dormitory after the incident. However, the agency refused to answer when it questioned whether Boystown had handled the incident properly, or what the ORR had done or not done about it.

"Our focus is always on the safety and best interests of each child," spokeswoman Lydia Holt said in an e-mail message. "We do not have more information related to this case that is shared."

Currently, Alex's case remains in the hands of the state attorney's office, but child abuse experts say that the possibility of knowing the truth about what happened in the Boystown dormitory fades more and more.

This is clear: if Alex's case is a guide, the thousands of children who go through the country's overcrowded sheltered system, with insufficient staff, and increasingly similar to long-term orphanages, should not expect a rigorous investigation if they suffer abuses in these places.

"Someone has to pay for mistakes and they are monstrous things," said Jairo. "You can not go unpunished. If this stays that way, in many centers they will allow this to continue happening. "

Antes de publicar este reportaje, y sin saberlo ProPublica, la reportera independiente Silvina Sterin Pensel estableció una página de GoFundMe para ayudar a un familiar de Jairo a regresar a Missouri después de que su hijo saliera de un albergue de Nueva York. Ese esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos fue lanzado cuando ProPublica y Sterin Pensel ya contaban con la cooperación de Jairo y su familia para este reportaje y no afectó la elaboración del mismo de ninguna manera.

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