They crossed deserts for safety. Some were five. Some were eight. Some were too young to name what happened to them but old enough to remember. The girls said he came at night. That they heard him before they saw him. That he used his keys to enter their rooms at Southwest Key's Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso. That he touched them. Again and again, he kept coming back.
He was fifteen years old. A man who worked at his Arizona shelter drove him to a hotel in Mesa. What that man made him do there, he says, went on for days.
For nearly a decade, from 2015 to 2023, staff employed by Southwest Key Programs, the nation’s largest contractor for unaccompanied migrant children, allegedly raped, abused, and harassed the very children they were paid billions in federal dollars to protect.
The U.S. Department of Justice, under the Biden administration, filed a civil rights lawsuit in July 2024. It laid out a horror show: rape, solicitation of nude photos, predatory sexual advances, threats to keep them quiet. Supervisors sometimes knew and covered it up.
Then Trump returned to power and in March 2025, the DOJ dropped the case. Why? Because an elite D.C. attorney representing Southwest Key told them to.
No trial. No jury. No accountability. Just silence.
Lisa Blatt’s Email
On February 11, 2025, Lisa Blatt, high-powered attorney for Southwest Key, longtime Supreme Court whisperer, and now a full-throated Trump ally, sent an email to officials at the Department of Justice. Her message was as cold as it was clear: drop the civil rights case against her client, a migrant shelter chain accused of child rape, cover-ups, and systemic abuse.
Her reasoning? Awarding migrant victims of sexual abuse could “incentivize crossings at the southern border” and it would “hobble the administrations crackdown on illegal immigration.”
That’s not a joke. She argued that letting children sue for being raped in ICE custody would make more of them want to come to the USA. Not justice. Not truth. Certainly not the safety of the children brutalized under her client's care.
This is the same Lisa Blatt who once draped herself in liberal credentials, bragging about being a lifelong Democrat who championed women’s rights and called herself a progressive but watch closely, and the cracks in that mask split wide open.
Blatt didn’t just cross party lines. She sprinted into the arms of the Federalist Society, a group drenched in dark money and powered by Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar influence machine.
This is the same network that helped hand-pick nearly every Republican Supreme Court justice now on the bench including the one Blatt fawned over on national television. The same justices who were quietly backed by anonymous millionaires and corporate interests through a web of shadowy donations. The same court that now guts protections for the very people Blatt claims to stand for.
She didn’t file a motion. She didn’t go through a judge. She didn’t argue in court where the public might hear her. Lisa Blatt took the backdoor. She sent a private email (off the record, quiet, direct) to DOJ officials. Not a formal legal brief. Not a public statement. Just a well-placed nudge from a woman who knows exactly which strings to pull and whose hands are holding them.
This wasn’t lawyering. It was lobbying. A whispered favor from a corporate fixer who knows the difference between justice and access and always bets on the latter. She didn’t challenge the case in court. She didn’t want a judge to weigh the facts. She wanted it buried. Silently. Quickly. Conveniently.
See, Lisa Blatt built her career representing power. She serves billionaires, defends corporations, and now shields institutions accused of preying on migrant children. When the public wasn't looking, she swapped principle for access, and compassion for cash.
So when she urged them to dismiss the case. Trump’s DOJ did exactly that. The dismissal was filed March 12 by Judge Albright. Quietly. With prejudice. Meaning the case cannot be refiled.
The National Center for Youth Law Begged Judge Albright Not to Dismiss
The National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), co-counsel on the original Flores Settlement, scrambled to intervene. They filed an emergency letter to Judge Albright, urging him to delay the dismissal and allow the victims to be heard. They argued that the DOJ betrayed its duty to the vulnerable.
Judge Alan D. Albright didn’t care.
On March 12, 2025, the same day Lisa Blatt whispered her well-timed suggestion to the DOJ, Albright signed off on the dismissal of the federal government’s civil rights lawsuit against Southwest Key Programs.
Judge Albright, a federal, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, was appointed by Trump in 2018. This is what happens when the government is full of political loyalists. We become akin to Nazi Germany.
Just like Lisa, Albright has a history of keeping corporate interests comfortable.
The dismissal came the same day Attorney General Pamela Bondi held a self-congratulatory press briefing. In a DOJ press release, she and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that children were being moved out of Southwest Key shelters due to “continuing concerns,” while claiming that ending the lawsuit somehow fit into the administration’s bold mission to fight child abuse.
“Under the border policies of the previous administration,” Bondi declared, “bad actors were incentivized to exploit children and break our laws: this ends now.”
Except it didn’t end. It was erased. The migrant shelter system that allowed rape and abuse to happen unchecked was never held accountable. Southwest Key wasn’t put on trial. The victims weren’t heard and the government’s solution was to move kids to different shelters, slap out a press release, and pretend justice had been served.
NYCL argues the DOJ betrayed its duty to protect the vulnerable. That the real motive is political. That the government is shielding a contractor because allowing the lawsuit to proceed might cast too bright a light on what’s happening behind shelter doors.
In a searing public statement, Johnathan Smith, NCYL’s Chief of Staff and General Counsel, said:
“The Justice Department’s reprehensible actions here not only erode any semblance of accountability but also embolden those who would exploit and abuse vulnerable children. It is a betrayal of the government’s legal and moral obligation to protect these young lives.”
They didn’t mince words. The lawsuit had laid out credible, disturbing instances of sexual abuse committed by staff against children in federal custody. Instead of seeking justice, the DOJ folded under pressure. NCYL called it what it was: political interference.
They also sent a letter to Senator Chuck Grassley, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, demanding an explanation from the DOJ.
But as of May 2025, there has been no indication that Grassley, or his communications director Clare Slattery, ever responded. No statement. No inquiry. Nothing to suggest that the Senate's senior-most Republican lifted a finger to investigate why the federal government dropped a sex abuse case involving migrant children in its custody.
This was never about protecting the border. It was about protecting a billion-dollar contractor. This is how the system protects itself. Not through laws. Through favors. Through people like Lisa Blatt, who know which levers to pull, and do it without shame.
Of Course the Government Looks Away: Cruelty is the Point
I wish I could say I was shocked. But I’m not. Not when the same administration trying to dismantle the Flores Settlement in May 2025 has known for years what’s happening behind closed doors. Not when they’ve read the court documents. Not when they’ve heard the testimony. Not when they’ve seen the children. This isn’t a system gone wrong. This is a system working exactly as intended.
Warren Binford, one of the Flores investigators, went to the Clint Border Patrol station in June 2019. What he found should haunt every person in this country. His team was denied access to parts of the facility. They weren’t even allowed to see the worst of it. Instead, they interviewed children in conference rooms. And what those children showed them was horror.
Kids sat in front of them with clothes soiled from sweat, mucus, and urine. One little girl had breast milk dried to her shirt. A four-year-old child stood in front of them with hair matted thick with white flakes. Binford asked staff to wash her hair. To brush it. To treat her like a child who mattered. They said they would. When he came back the next day, nothing had changed. The child was still filthy. And staff insisted they had done it, because it was “charted.”
When the investigators first arrived, there were 350 people crammed into a facility meant for just 104. ICE told them capacity had been expanded. But when they returned the next day, there were suddenly 100 fewer people. Families were confused, but they were just grateful to have a little more space. There still weren’t enough beds.
Professor Bill Ong Hing interviewed girls at the same facility. They told him they were afraid to use the bathroom. Another child told them that diseases were spreading. Several children had caught the flu while in custody. There were toddlers, just two to four years old, with no adult to care for them. Teenagers looked after them out of kindness. There was no one else.
A 17-year-old boy told investigators he crossed the border on a raft with his nephew. They turned themselves in. They thought they were doing the right thing. They were taken to the Ursula station. They weren’t given mats or blankets. They had to sleep on the cold, concrete floor.
There were 50 people, ages five to twenty, packed into a single room. There wasn’t space to lie down, so some of them slept sitting up. The lights never went off. There was no heat. No shower. A single toilet sat in the middle of the room, with no walls.
No soap. No toothbrushes. No toothpaste.
Another boy, just fifteen and from El Salvador, said he was forced across the border by a drunk man who used him as a distraction. CBP arrested him in a border town near Mexico and threw away all his belongings, including phone numbers for his family. When he told an officer his wrist was injured, the officer squeezed it as hard as he could. For no reason except to cause pain. Then the officer kicked another man in front of him.
When they got to the processing center, the boy was soaked and freezing. He asked for a blanket. They said no. When he asked again, they screamed at him in English. He didn’t understand the words. He just knew he wasn’t welcome. One bald CBP officer laughed at him when he asked to go home.
They loaded him on a bus and told him he was being sent back to Mexico. That was a lie. He was taken to Weslaco, Texas. During intake, he saw his mother’s phone number on a screen. He confirmed it was hers, but they refused to give it to him or let him call. They had the number, but they would not let him reach her.
At Weslaco, he tried to play with another child. It was innocent. It was human. A CBP officer grabbed him by the shoulder, yanked him back, injured him and dragged him away. Screaming. They put him alone in a room for a day. He never found out why. They kept moving him between isolation and population, and he never understood the pattern. He just knew it hurt. He said he felt sad. The officers kept hurting him.
This is not an accident. It is not a glitch. It is not a failure to follow procedure. This is the procedure.
Cruelty is not the byproduct. It is the purpose.
They hurt these children because hurting them sends a message. They want people to be afraid to come here. What kind of person sees a child covered in their own urine and doesn’t flinch? What kind of system catalogs a four-year-old’s hair as “clean” while white crusted flakes still cling to her scalp? What kind of adult checks a box on a form and calls it care?
You have to ask yourself: what has to break inside a person to look at a sobbing, shivering child and feel nothing?
Because that’s what we’re looking at. That’s what these records show us. Not just neglect. Not just failure. Something deeper. Something colder. The deliberate erasure of empathy. The full disassembly of a child’s personhood.
They weren’t called children. They were “UACs.” Unaccompanied alien children. Acronyms scrubbed clean of softness. Bureaucratically engineered to avoid the word child. Because “child” implies innocence. “Child” evokes protection. So they stripped the word away.
And when someone tries to stop it, they lie. They silence the witnesses. They erase the evidence. They drop the lawsuits. They rewrite the narrative.
But we remember. We know what happened. These children aren’t statistics. They aren’t border problems. They are little kids who just wanted to be safe. They needed kindness. They were met with contempt and the people who did this to them still hold power.
Remember
They crossed deserts for safety. Some were five. Some were eight. Some were too young to say the word “rape,” but old enough to remember it. They came here looking for refuge and found cells. They found concrete floors, open toilets, and fluorescent lights that never turned off. They found officers who squeezed injured wrists until the children cried out.
They found blankets denied, even when they were soaked and shaking. They found kicks, shouts, isolation. They found punishment for asking to go home.
What kind of country throws away a child’s belongings, including the phone number of the only person who loves them, then laughs when he asks to call her?
This wasn’t just sexual abuse. It was deliberate physical harm, extreme neglect, and psychological torment, inflicted by adults paid to protect. It was lice crawling through unwashed hair, clothes crusted with urine and dried breast milk, and toddlers too young to speak being cared for by teenagers who couldn’t sleep for fear the babies would choke in the night. It was children with the flu, coughing and vomiting in overcrowded cells, denied medicine and warmth. It was body odor that clung to the walls and despair that seeped into the skin.
They were treated as subhuman.. unworthy of comfort, of hygiene, of basic dignity. The people in charge looked away, then called it policy. The system saw broken bodies and empty eyes and kept moving.
Because when children are not seen as children, you can justify anything.
So yes, this country buried a lawsuit but it buried more than that. It buried the bruises. It buried the fingernail marks on bathroom walls. It buried the shaking hands, the fevers, the hunger. It buried the memory of a four-year-old girl standing silently with flakes caked into her scalp because no one thought to wash her. It buried truths. And in doing so, it told every child still inside those shelters that what happened to them is not worth justice. That their pain is disposable. That their suffering can be edited out of history if the right people send the right email.
But the children remember. Their bodies remember. And so will we.
Call to Action:
Tell Congress to investigate this dismissal. Demand that child abuse in federal custody be prosecuted and not buried. Ask why this happened. Ask who profited. Ask who knew.
And don’t stop asking until every survivor has their day in court.
Demand that they defend the Flores Agreement if they have even a shred of humanity left in them.
You can:
Use the free 5 Calls app, available on Google Play and the App Store
Look up your elected officials at usa.gov/elected-officials
Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your senator or representative
Visit house.gov or senate.gov to find contact information directly
You don’t need to be eloquent. You just need to be loud. Tell them we see what they’re doing, and we will not be silent.
This attack on migrants was never about “deporting bad guys.” This was never about law and order. It was always about skin color and their attacks on children solidify that. It was always about power. When you put racists and xenophobes in charge, when you hand a deportation machine to people who believe their whiteness makes them superior, this is what you get.
But I am not corporate media. I will not soften the truth. I will not be bought. I will keep telling these stories, no matter how brutal they are, because someone has to. I will continue to expose the human cost of this administration’s violence.
If you want to keep seeing these stories, subscribe for free. If you’re able, consider a paid subscription to help me keep going. But know this: I will never put the truth behind a paywall. Because the world needs to know and I will not stop telling it.
I hope to God that Karma rains sheets of fire on all of these cretins.Other than that what these mofos deserve isn't printable here.
Those poor kids.Just shameful.
Not in our name, by the hands of the depraved. These children deserve their experience to find the light of day. This horror.