Feds kept quiet reports of ‘staff-on-child’ sex abuse at Miami-Dade detention center | Opinion
The shameful secret is out.
At least four Central American immigrant children reported being sexually abused by staff members at the privately run Homestead detention center for unaccompanied minors, the Miami Herald reports.
The act of violating vulnerable kids is appalling enough.
But the crime was perpetrated with the complicity of a U.S. government that treats these children as collateral damage of a border crisis, and therefore unworthy of protections available to American children.
No one went to prison for these alleged crimes. No one was prosecuted. No victim, apparently, was given the opportunity to speak to an experienced investigator from Miami-Dade Police’s sexual-crimes team.
The claims made by these children were handled within the confines of secrecy that the federal government set for the facility’s private contractor, Caliburn, as if U.S. and Florida state law didn’t exist for these children.
The only consequences for violating mass-incarcerated children with little communication with the outside world: the firing of one employee and the resignation of two others. One more worker involved allegedly couldn’t be identified.
Workers not vetted
The deplorable acts don’t end with the lack of justice.
The government has been evasive about details, but we know enough to know this could’ve been prevented.
None of the employees caring for the migrant kids were vetted for prior child abuse or neglect by Caliburn or the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the federal agency tasked with oversight. No background checks were done on them, as mandated by Florida law for anyone who works with children.
Why?
For the outrageous reason that this is a “temporary emergency influx shelter” that sits on federal land. Therefore, the Florida law designed to keep perverts away from children supposedly didn’t apply.
Jurisdiction, circumstance and geography are the excuses for setting up the conditions for child abuse to happen.
Feds knew children were at risk
The Trump administration was repeatedly warned by advocates that abuse at facilities for unaccompanied minors and other immigrant detention centers was (and is) happening. But the administration’s designated surrogates enabled the abuse and covered all of it up — the misdeeds and how the abuse complaints were handled — until it couldn’t any longer.
A Miami congresswoman demanded answers — and she wouldn’t go away.
If it weren’t for the persistence of U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Miami, who filed an official inquiry asking some 50 questions, the administration would have gotten away with keeping the disturbing allegations secret.
But now — a year since the congresswoman filed the inquiry and 11 months after the facility was shut down following a Miami Herald report that the shelter had no hurricane plan — ACF finally sent her office a 17-page report, obtained by the Herald.
Now we know, it’s at least on record — and it matters.
There are still predominantly Central American children held in other detention facilities in similar circumstances and substandard level of care.
“They made a conscious decision to not conduct abuse background checks on employees,” Mucarsel-Powell told the Herald’s immigration reporter, Monique O. Madan. “This matters, whether it’s open or closed. Every single day it matters. Not just here in Florida, but across America, where kids are still in detention facilities today. “
It also matters because the same government that allowed this to happen in Miami-Dade — under the noses of local advocates who kept a vigil outside the center for almost two years until it was shut down — isn’t showing any contrition.
ACF spokesperson Lydia Holt declined to comment on still unclear and incomplete parts of the report, calling the inquiry “irrelevant” because the center isn’t now open.
But it can be reopened anytime the administration wishes.
They’ve even given the facility a new name, “Biscayne Influx Care Facility,” supposedly to appease Homestead community members upset over the bad reputation the detention of innocent children who fled for their lives cast on their city.
But the fact that the jail sits on federal land in unincorporated Miami-Dade County near Homestead doesn’t diminish the stain of the crimes against these children on our community.
“Staff-on-child sexual abuse,” they call it.
The serious nature of the crimes alleged deserves if not a local or state, then a federal investigation.
American workers hurt these children, already damaged by strife, by life, by perilous flight — and they were allowed to get away with it.
Weep for the children this country didn’t — and still doesn’t — love enough.
This story was originally published July 17, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
