Less than a week after news broke that minors had been sex trafficked at a Texas Department of Family and Protective Services-contracted home for formerly sex trafficked girls, the Texas Department of Public Safety pivoted to say there’s no proof behind the allegations. The initial story garnered national attention for the state of Texas’ long-beleaguered child welfare system, which a federal judge has stated leaves children “more damaged than when they entered.”
But the new information, revealed in a March 16 letter from DPS Director Steven McCraw to Gov. Greg Abbott, doesn’t tell the full story. On March 17, during a Texas Senate special committee hearing on child protective services, McCraw, DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters, and others detailed misconduct at The Refuge Ranch, the Bastrop facility at the center of the scandal, which failed to ring alarm bells at several agencies even after concerns about sex trafficking came to the attention of supervisors.
According to Masters, a staffer at Refuge Ranch alerted a case worker that another staff member had naked photographs of two resident minors. On Jan. 24, that case worker alerted their supervisors at DFPS. Two days later, the case worker learned that the employee with nude photos also had close personal relationships with several other staffers at the facility. Despite this, a supervisor at DFPS failed to elevate the urgency of the case. It was not until March 11 that DFPS issued a closure order for The Refuge Ranch. According to McCraw’s letter, four staff members have been terminated, although nine were originally suspected of involvement. In the committee hearing, Masters laid blame on human error. “I do not think this was a failure of process,” she told the committee, adding that the supervisor who failed to elevate the incident has been terminated. “Naked pictures of children in our care should have rang every bell,” she said.
That supervisor wasn’t the only DFPS staffer who lost their job in the aftermath of the scandal. Sunday, Justin Lewis, who served as the director overseeing child care investigations for the agency, resigned after making sexist comments about U.S. District Judge Janis Jack via text message. Jack is presiding over a decadelong lawsuit filed against the agency. Lewis said “she needs to get hit by a bus.”
According to McCraw, his agency’s investigation of The Refuge Ranch yielded no proof of allegations or evidence that residents had been “sexually abused or assaulted by anyone.” McCraw cited “inaccuracies” and “information that had not been properly verified” in a March 10 letter from DFPS to a federal court monitor that initially broke news of the situation. Besides the incident involving naked photos of two resident minors “for the alleged purpose of selling them for cash and/or drugs,” the letter also reported a second incident, on Feb. 20, when two residents fled the facility. The letter says Refuge employees are accused of facilitating the escape.
At the end of the Thursday hearing, committee members concluded that clearly defined guidelines regarding nepotism at agency-contracted facilities and a more coherent interagency data system could have helped protect children at The Refuge Ranch by removing them from a potentially harmful environment weeks earlier. (Masters added that simply putting together a timeline for her presentation to the committee took seven hours because her staff had to check three different data systems for information).
“Naked pictures of children in our care should have rang every bell.” – DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters
Despite the new information, Democratic challengers to Texas’ GOP leadership stand by criticism that longstanding mismanagement of state resources enables misconduct. Gov. Greg Abbott “has been in charge of this problem for two decades as the attorney general for 13 years and now governor,” said state Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, in a press conference on March 16. “This sits squarely at his feet.” Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke – who spoke at the press conference alongside Johnson, state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, and several Texans with firsthand experiences in the state’s child welfare system – described the root of the problem as “twisted priorities.” This latest DFPS scandal comes just weeks after Abbott ordered the DFPS to investigate reported instances of “abusive gender-transitioning procedures” on Texas children. “Instead of using the resources of those who work here in this building behind us to address the issue that we just found out about,” O’Rourke said, “this governor is asking them to go after the parents of transgender children.”
In 2017, the Texas Legislature passed reforms in response to the crisis of the state’s struggling child welfare system that decentralized the state’s foster care system and gave private and nonprofit charities, including The Refuge Ranch (run by a nonprofit called The Refuge for DMST, or Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking), primary responsibility for care and management of foster care. “Why are we privatizing the care for the most vulnerable in this state?” O’Rourke asked. “You are bound to have problems like this when you outsource the state of Texas’ responsibility.” Speakers suggested prioritizing placement of foster children with members of their extended family. According to the Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services, Texas could have received up to $50 million from the Family First Prevention Services Act, a 2018 law that intended to encourage such placement. According to Will Francis of the National Association of Social Workers, Texas also did not accept funds that would have gone toward qualified residential treatment programs, which cater to youth with specialized treatment needs, such as victims of sex trafficking. “There was a lot we left on the table,” Francis told the Chronicle. “Texas has not done anything close to the job they could have done with federal Family First funds.” According to the DFPS website, the department deferred accepting large portions of that $50 million to give the Lege time “to weigh-in on the policy and fiscal changes driven by this federal legislation.”
According to a statement about the Thursday hearing by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, problems at DFPS aren’t a result of flawed policy, but of DFPS failing to follow the Legislature’s lead. “If the agency is not implementing those reforms, nothing has changed,” Patrick said. “This committee will also be tasked with looking at all of the issues at DFPS relating to past legislative reforms, implementation of these reforms, and all ongoing work at the agency.” State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who authored a major piece of legislation as part of 2017’s reforms, is chairing the committee conducting the hearing.
Nileh Irsan, 25, aged out of Texas’ foster care system after living in a group home run by a private organization. Irsan was not a victim of sex trafficking or abuse, but said she knows how easily lines can blur within the system, and how difficult it can be to know whom to trust. “They will spend the rest of their lives figuring out, a) what [their caretakers] did and, b) why the people around them let that happen,” Irsan said at the Wednesday press conference. “It’s disgusting.”
This article appears in March 25 • 2022.