Texas Investigating ‘Credible’ Reports of Sex Abuse Inside Migrant Teen Shelter

Gov. Abbott says San Antonio shelter for migrant teens should be shut down.

By Terri Langford & Rhonda FanningApril 9, 2021 1:20 pm,

For weeks, there’s been a surge of migrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone and most are being held in Texas.

But this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott criticized the care being provided in one of the 10 so-called influx sites that now hold children. Nine of those 10 facilities that have been set up to house a steady stream of unaccompanied minors, are in Texas.

“This facility is a health and safety nightmare,” Abbott said on Wednesday, during a press conference outside the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio. “The Biden administration should immediately shut down this facility.”

Freeman is one of the 10 makeshift influx centers and about 1,300 teenagers are being housed there.

Abbott has refused what he calls “credible” reports of sexual abuse inside Freeman. But reporters have yet to confirm those reports.

“So we don’t really know a lot,” reporter Lomi Kriel told the Standard on Friday. ““The governor also said that he had not been inside the facility. So we just really don’t know a lot more about exactly what those allegations involve.”

Kriel, who is a member of the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, was the first to reveal a few years ago the Trump administration’s move to separate children from their parents at the border.

“It’s obviously disturbing and the state will investigate,” Kriel said of the allegations. “This is not the first time, certainly, that these types of allegations have occurred when we’re talking about this kind of context with very vulnerable children and large settings.:

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