The Justice Department announced a lawsuit Thursday against Southwest Key, one of the government’s major providers of care for illegal-immigrant children, of allowing vile and rampant sexual abuse of those children.

Prosecutors said they’ve uncovered cases of employees raping migrants, soliciting them to produce child pornography, and making threats to keep the children from talking about it. And they said Southwest Key was aware of the abuse but failed to fix it.

The Justice Department said the abuse — and Southwest Key’s failures — date at least back to 2015 and continued up through last year.

“Sexual abuse of children is a crisis that we can’t ignore or turn a blind eye to,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. “This lawsuit seeks relief for children who have been abused and harmed, and meaningful reforms to ensure no child in these shelters is ever subjected to sexual abuse again.”

Prosecutors detailed instances of abuse in court documents, saying the company oversaw “pervasive” abuse.

One worker “repeatedly sexually abused” a 5-year-old girl, an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old girl, coming into their bedrooms at night to touch their “private area.” The employee threatened to kill the girls’ families if they talked about it, prosecutors charged.

A supervisor “repeatedly raped” a teenage girl at another facility. She finally told a teacher about it, saying she thought other Southwest Key employees were helping the man get away with it because they would juggle assignments to give the man time alone with her.

That man also demanded nude photos of her, she said.

In another case an employee ran off with a 15-year-old boy, putting him up in a hotel for days where the employee paid the teenager for sex.

Southwest Key said it was reviewing the case but said it “does not present the accurate picture” of the company.

“Southwest Key Programs’ primary focus is the safety, health, and well-being of each one of the children and youth we care for,” the firm said.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia, Texas Democrat, said the accusations were “utterly appalling” and a “profound moral failure.”

“Southwest Key is entrusted to care for these children during one of the most turbulent times in their young lives,” she said. “The federal government must do everything to hold those responsible for these vile acts.”

The migrants in question are Unaccompanied Alien Children, or UACs in government-speak, because they showed up at the border without parents.

Under U.S. policy they are required to be quickly released from Homeland Security to the federal Health and Human Services Department, which is supposed to hold them until sponsors can be found to take them.

UACs used to be a tiny fraction of the border crossers but starting late in the Obama administration they began to surge. Under President Biden the flow became a tsunami, with Border Patrol agents regularly recording 10,000 a month and a few months topping 18,000.

Caring for the children has become big business.

Southwest Key runs 29 shelters in Texas, Arizona and California, and has collected $3 billion in taxpayer money from 2015 to 2023.

The government’s lawsuit was filed under the Fair Housing Act.

Prosecutors said the government has catalogued more than 100 reports of sexual abuse or harassment since 2015. The ones documented in the case files span a number of Southwest Key’s facilities, and include a wide array of behavior.

One teenage girl said a medical worker kept leering at her while asking about her sexual history, including positions and types of sex. The man later admitted to it.

A 16-year-old girl reported being convinced she was in a relationship with an employee, and she left him a love letter when she was discharged from the facility. Southwest Key discovered that other employees had known about the relationship and even facilitated communications.

Another worker, while groping his own groin, quizzed a a boy about whether he liked dressing like a woman. The child was transferred but Southwest Key kept the man on the job, prosecutors said.

And a 16-year-old boy said a female supervisor would touch him while he was in the shower, and told him they should “have children” together. Southwest Key found she violated its policy by riding alone with the boy in a vehicle, but she was allowed to keep working.

When one girl with visible hickeys on her body reported a sexual assault, a Southwest Key employee told her to “cover up” the marks and never wrote up a report nor send the child for a medical exam. After the child talked to another employee, that person went to a supervisor who instructed her not to write up a report.

When the employee tried to report the incident directly to HHS, supervisors claimed not to have the hotline phone number.

“The conduct of multiple Southwest Key employees and supervisors toward children who reported sexual abuse or harassment, including the examples described above, caused many children to fear that reporting harassing incidents would negatively affect their reunification with family, as documented in multiple Reports,” the lawsuit said.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.