A Daily Beast Exclusive
Just as Texas stopped sending foster children to centers operated by one man, the U.S. government tossed him a new source of money: immigrant kids.
By Will Evans, Lance Williams and Matthew Smith
This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX.
By
the time the federal government started sending immigrant children to
Shiloh Treatment Center in 2009, the warning flags were waving blood
red.
Three children had died after being physically restrained at
Shiloh and affiliated facilities in rural Texas run by the same man,
Clay Dean Hill. A teenager from California died after running away and
getting hit by a truck. Texas officials repeatedly had cited Hill’s
residential centers for troubled youths after caretakers were found to
have slapped, punched, and kicked children.
Yet nine years ago,
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent its first delivery
of federal tax dollars to Hill, a one-time
longshoreman-turned-millionaire entrepreneur specializing in the care of
vulnerable children. The federal government wanted Hill to take
immigrant children with mental health problems who were caught crossing
the border without parents or papers.
The funding started a couple of months before a male caretaker in his 40s was caught preying on a 15-year-old girl from California,
sexually abusing her at one of Hill’s all-girl dormitories, where he
was assigned overnight. He’s now a convicted sex offender.
“It
shows you how disgraceful the place was,” said the former resident, now
25, who told her story publicly for the first time to Reveal from The
Center for Investigative Reporting.
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