A World Cup soccer match was playing on the shelter’s TV when the two older teenagers tackled Alex on July 1 and dragged him into the empty bedroom. Wrestling him onto his stomach, one of them, a tattoo on his forearm, got on top. As Alex struggled to move, he said he could feel the teen’s penis grinding against his butt.
“Take off his shorts!” he heard the other teen, who’d bragged he’d been a gang member in Honduras, shout. “Let’s get him naked!”
Just 10 days earlier, Alex, 13, had been caught by the Border Patrol after traveling from Honduras with his 17-year-old sister and 5-year-old stepbrother, to flee the country’s gang violence. Now, they were being held at Boystown outside Miami, one of more than 100 youth shelters in the government’s sprawling system meant to provide a temporary haven for migrant children caught crossing the border.
The two teens had been taunting Alex since he’d arrived at the shelter, making crude sexual jokes about his pregnant sister. Now, in the bedroom, Alex said, they yanked down the front of his shorts.
“At least your sister has already tasted a man,” he heard one of them sneer. “But you haven’t even tried a woman.”
Alex said he fought as hard as he could, somehow managing to pull up his shorts and kick until he broke free. As he lay on the floor catching his breath, he said, the boys fled, warning him to keep his mouth shut.
Over the past six months, ProPublica has gathered hundreds of police reports detailing allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant children’s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion for housing and other services since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014. The reports, obtained through public records requests, revealed a largely hidden side of the shelters — one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.
Several of the incidents have led to arrests of shelter employees or teenage residents. And in one particularly heinous case, a youth care worker was convicted in September of molesting seven boys over nearly a year at an Arizona shelter. The employee had worked for months without a full background check.
Coverage of such incidents by ProPublica and other media triggered demands for investigations.
Arizona’s governor ordered a statewide inspection of the shelters, leading to the shutdown of two centers run by Southwest Key after the nonprofit failed to provide proof that its employees had completed background checks.
And late last month, federal investigators warned that the Trump administration had waived FBI fingerprint background checks of staffers and had allowed “dangerously” few mental health counselors at a tent camp housing 2,800 migrant children in Tornillo, Texas.
But ProPublica’s review of the hundreds of police reports showed something else about the assaults. Something that went beyond background checks. Kids at shelters across the country were, indeed, reporting sexual attacks in the shelters, often by other kids. But again and again, the reports show, the police were quickly — and with little investigation — closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.
And there are likely even more such cases. ProPublica’s cache of records is missing many police reports from shelters in Texas, where the largest number of immigrant children are held, because state laws there ban child abuse reports from being made public, particularly when the assaults are committed by other minors.
Now, as the immigration system struggles to house and care for 14,600 children — more than ever before — an examination of how federal and state authorities investigated the assault against Alex, one of those children, reveals startling lapses.
For a few days, Alex said, he didn’t report his assault, heeding his attackers’ warning, worried that speaking up would delay his release from Boystown. But as they continued to harass him, he decided to tell his counselor.
The counselor told him that a surveillance tape had captured the teenagers dragging him by his hands and feet into a room, and that there might have been a witness.
But Alex’s report did not trigger a child sexual assault investigation, including a specialized interview designed to help children talk about what happened, as child abuse experts recommend.
Instead, the shelter waited nearly a month to call the police. When it finally did, a police report shows, the shelter’s lead mental health counselor told the officers “the incident was settled, and no sexual crime occurred between the boys like first was thought among the staff.”
And instead of investigating the incident themselves, officers with the Miami-Dade Police Department took the counselor’s word for it and quickly closed the case, never interviewing Alex.
A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, which received $6 million last year to care for about 80 children at Boystown, said it handled Alex’s case correctly, blaming him for any delays. In response to questions, a Miami-Dade police spokesman said the department was reopening the case.
An examination of Alex’s case shows that almost every agency charged with helping Alex — with finding out the full extent of what happened in that room — had instead failed him.
The police closed Alex’s case 72 minutes after responding to the call.
Alex’s mother, Yojana, had just gotten off work on July 27, bone-tired after another hot day installing swimming pools in southwest Missouri, when the call came from Boystown. She’d been expecting her regular chat with her children, so when her cellphone showed a Florida number, she answered excitedly.
Yojana had left them behind in Honduras four years earlier to seek a better life in the United States. Now after a month in the shelter, they’d soon be reunited.
But instead of her children, she heard the unfamiliar voice of a shelter staff member. Something had happened to Alex.
There was surveillance video, the woman said, showing two older teenagers grabbing Alex, throwing him to the floor and dragging him into a bedroom.
“But there are no cameras in the room,” she said, “so we couldn’t see the rest.”
The woman passed the phone to Alex, who sobbed as he told his mother what happened in the bedroom.
When she hung up, Yojana was furious. The attack had happened more than three weeks ago. Why was she only finding out about it now? Where was the staff? Why wasn’t anyone watching them? And what if the attack had been worse than Alex said?
As a mother, Yojana said her instincts were to go to the police — to break down any door she had to — to make sure the shelter and the teens were held accountable. But she knew that in the United States, she wasn’t just any mother. She and her husband, Jairo, had separately crossed the border illegally several years earlier and had been living in the country without permission ever since. The family agreed to let us tell their story as long as we didn’t use their last names.
Yojana had reason to worry. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been arresting parents and family members, or members of their households, who are in the country illegally when they come forward to claim their children. This month, ICE said it had arrested 170 such sponsors, or people connected to them, between July and November; 109 of those people had no criminal record.
If Yojana and Jairo went to the authorities, or pressed too hard, they could risk everything they’d worked for.
Weeks earlier, Alex had started on a path he thought would lead to help. Four days after the attack, he finally got up the courage to report it to his counselor. “She told me it was very sad what happened to me and that she was very sorry,” Alex recalled. His counselor took him to the office of her supervisor, Marianne Cortes, where he repeated his story.
Then, he said, Cortes told him that she and his counselor would watch the surveillance video and “if it’s like you told me, we’ll put in a report.” After they watched the video, Alex said, his counselor told him that there was something else on the tape, something he hadn’t realized during the attack. There’d been a witness.
“In the video, my counselor told me there was another boy in a window,” he said.
But then, after those revelations, nothing happened. There was no further investigation.
In an interview, archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said at that time there was no reason for one. Alex “was interviewed by staff, and he claimed it was verbal harassment, sexual gestures and teasing about his sister, but no nudity,” she said.
The staff had reviewed the surveillance footage, she said: “They did grab him by his hands and feet and take him in the room.” But, she said, it was “humiliating,” not criminal.
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Donald Trump’s MAGA media propagandists are so deep in the tank for the former president that they’ve been praising him for repeatedly falling asleep during his New York City hush money trial.
Since April 15, Trump has regularly been in a Manhattan courtroom, where he faces charges of falsifying business records in order to conceal payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors say these payments were intended to keep Daniels’ claims that she had an affair with Trump from becoming public during the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, age 77, often mocks President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” suggesting that Biden is too old and frail to fulfill his duties. But reporters in the courtroom have repeatedlyobserved Trump appearing to fall asleep during the trial — most recently on Monday morning before opening statements began.
That evening on Fox News’ Special Report, chief political anchor Bret Baier suggested that news outlets are providing too much coverage of the first-ever criminal trial for a former president, and criticized them in particular for covering the spectacle of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s inability to stay awake in the courtroom.
“You know, we cover it every day,” Baier said of the trial, “and we will — all the details of each day in court — but there are some places that are obviously covering it ad nauseum and have gone through every single detail, including four times that he might have fallen asleep, everything that happens inside the courtroom.”
Meanwhile, Baier’s colleagues and their ilk spent last week attempting to turn Trump’s proclivity for nodding off in public into a virtue — apparently unphased by their years of denigrating Biden as an addled old man whose energetic speeches can only be the result of performance-enhancing drugs.
“I mentioned that Maggie Haberman posted this update from the courtroom, ‘It appears that Trump might be sleeping’ — this was on day one,” Republican political operative and Fox host Sean Hannity said on his April 18 radio show. “By the way, I think I’d fall asleep if I was there,” he added.
And Hannity wasn’t the only Trump flunky to attest that they, too, would sleep through a trial just like their beloved former president.
“I'd be falling asleep at that trial too,” Hannity’s colleague Laura Ingraham said on her April 15 Fox show.
“That’s exactly how all of us would act in, like, the ‘Intro to Gender Studies’ class at the University of Missouri,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said on his radio show.
Others praised Trump for falling asleep in court and urged him to be even more disrespectful during his trial.
“Did Donald Trump nod off for a moment? Good for him. These things are boring,” Newsmax host Greg Kelly offered on April 16.
“Trump appearing to sleep and be bored is exactly the response this Kafkaesque persecution deserves,” Fox host Greg Gutfeld said on the April 16 edition of The Five. “He is America, who, unlike this frothing infantile media, doesn't see this as some mutant form of entertainment and justice.”
“Trump should go to trial, bring a big book, big fat John Grisham novel, just sit there and read,” Gutfeld added. “Just sit there and read. That's the only response this manufactured mayhem deserves — is just contempt.”
Co-host Jesse Watters replied that he was going to send Trump’s team a copy of his new book so Trump “can open it up inside the courtroom.”
On Sunday’s MediaBuzz, Fox contributor Tomi Lahren praised Trump’s “excellent job” and claimed that journalists are “trying to distract from Joe Biden” by pointing out that Trump keeps falling asleep.
“I don't think anybody's buying it,” she said. “Good job media, but I don't think that it's resonating when you've got the current guy, President Joe Biden, in the office, who quite literally falls asleep.”
Less than 24 hours later, Trump apparently once again dozed off in court.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) hasn't shied away from criticizing former President Donald Trump in the past. But on Tuesday he gave his frank and candid take on the allegations surrounding the ex-president's ongoing criminal trial.
Trump's attorneys have spent the first portion of the Manhattan trial making their case that the former president is a "family man" who has been unfairly painted in the media as immoral. While speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, the Utah senator — a fifth-generation practicing Mormon — offered his opinion on that characterization of Trump to CNN congressional correspondent Kristin Wilson.
"I think everybody has made their own assessment of President Trump's character, and so far as I know you don't pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you," Romney said.
Romney — who was the GOP presidential nominee in 2012 — appeared to be referencing the hush money payment Trump allegedly made to buy the silence of adult film star and producer Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Daniels maintains that she and the reality TV star had an affair in 2006, just weeks after Trump's wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. The former president continues to deny the allegations.
Tuesday's trial proceedings featured the testimony of David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media Inc. — the company that publishes the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper. Daniels' story was part of the so-called "catch and kill" scheme in which Pecker would purchase the rights to certain stories in order to bury them and limit public knowledge. Pecker told prosecutors that he agreed during a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower to be the "eyes and ears" of Trump's 2016 campaign.
One such "catch-and-kill" scheme involved the story of former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said she had an ongoing relationship with Trump while he was married. When Trump reportedly asked Pecker his thoughts on whether they should pay McDougal, Pecker responded with, "we should take this story off the market.
"And I said, 'it's my understanding that she doesn't want her story published. I think the story should be purchased and I believe that you should buy it,'" Pecker said on the witness stand.
According to the 34-count indictment unveiled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last year, Trump's personal lawyer and "fixer" Michael Cohen made the $130,000 payment to Daniels at the behest of Trump, who then reimbursed Cohen and labeled it as a legal retainer. Cohen has said repeatedly that there was no such retainer, and that the $130,000 was explicitly done to prevent Daniels from going public with her story.
Cohen will be one of the prosecution's key witnesses, and will be expected to guide the jury through the hush money payment process. In 2018, he was handed a three-year federal prison sentence for his role in the scheme, among other crimes.
Jurors were excused at approximately 2 PM ET on Tuesday, and the trial will be paused on Wednesday in observance of the Jewish Passover holiday. Proceedings are expected to resume on Thursday morning, with the defense expected to cross-examine Pecker on the stand.