{"id":593948,"date":"2018-06-20T08:58:24","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T14:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=593948"},"modified":"2018-06-20T13:48:14","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T19:48:14","slug":"separated-migrant-children-are-headed-toward-shelters-with-a-history-of-abuse-and-neglect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/06\/separated-migrant-children-are-headed-toward-shelters-with-a-history-of-abuse-and-neglect\/","title":{"rendered":"Separated migrant children are headed toward shelters with a history of abuse and neglect"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

Pu Ying Huang \/ for The Texas Tribune<\/p>

The Shiloh Treatment Center, in Manvel, is one of 32 Texas facilities licensed to care for migrant children who have been separated from their parents. The facility, where inspectors have found eight recent health and safety violations, has received $25 million in federal payments since 2013.<\/p><\/div>\n

Taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion in the past four years to private companies operating immigrant youth shelters accused of serious lapses in care, including neglect and sexual and physical abuse,\u00a0an investigation by\u00a0Reveal<\/a>\u00a0and The Texas Tribune has found.<\/p>\n

In nearly all cases, the federal government has continued to place migrant children with the companies even after serious allegations were raised and after state inspectors cited shelters with deficiencies, government and other records show.<\/p>\n

Since 2003, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department has awarded nearly $5 billion in grants through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, mostly to religious and nonprofit organizations in 18 states, to house children who arrive in the country unaccompanied. The program grew quickly in 2014, when around\u00a070,000 children<\/a>\u00a0crossed the southern border alone.<\/p>\n

Now this web of private facilities, cobbled together to support children with nowhere else to go, is beginning to hold a new population: the more than 2,000 children who arrived with their parents but were separated from them because of a Trump administration policy.<\/p>\n