January 14, 2019
Mr. Orlando Martinez, Chair
Mr, Anselmo Villareal, Vice Chair
Ms. Rosa Santis, Treasurer
Mr. Victor Garza, Director
David Marshall, Jr., Director
Dear Southwest Key Board Member:
We write to you today as gravely concerned, interfaith clergy moved strongly by the plight of the thousands of children being held in internment camps across this country. We have been very thankful that the leadership of an agency similar to yours, BCFS, has announced they are ending their government contract to manage the tent city at Tornillo. Nonetheless, we remain profoundly concerned with BCFS and Southwest Key and all the other agencies that are continuing to administer similar detention facilities to the detriment of innocent children.
Your website states: Southwest Key is committed to keeping kids out of jails and prisons and home with their families, in their communities.
We feel it is our sacred duty to speak up about your work in the several detention centers you administer, which seems directly opposed to your articulated mission. Rather than alleviating it, your actions are actually contributing to the current suffering of youth and their families. It has become public knowledge, through news reports and through the violations reported by the Texas Inspector’s reports, that under your oversight, Southwest Key’s capacity to ensure the safety and appropriate level of care of the children has been so severely compromised that, in fact, children have been directly harmed and abused while in your care.
We believe strongly that children seeking asylum in this country should not be imprisoned. They should not be kept from their family members who are waiting for them; and, it is clearly in the best interest of every member of the family to be reunited as quickly as possible. It is our fervent prayer that you end every contract that results in any asylum seeker, let alone children, being kept from their families. By ending your management and oversight of these facilities, you can help drive the administration to reverse its policies that are so damaging and traumatic to people who are seeking refuge in our country. To leave is not to abandon the children; it is to expedite their fair and just treatment by ending their imprisonment. It is to end your complicity in that imprisonment.
The reputation of Southwest Key (and your reputation as one of its Directors) is being stained by its relationship with children imprisonment and by the series of decisions your organization has made to place the interests of the children far behind agency earnings. As a person of conscience, you must find this troubling. As people of faith, it troubles us deeply as well.
As a member of the Board of Directors of a non-profit agency, one of your duties is to ensure that the agency adheres to all legal and ethical standards and that your work upholds the agency’s goodwill in the community. Clearly, whatever public goodwill Southwest Key has enjoyed in the
past is being severely damaged through your support of this unconscionable treatment of innocent children.
The sacred texts of every religion call upon people of faith to serve a holy purpose in this life by speaking out for the voiceless and coming to the aid of the vulnerable. As a member of this Board, you have the power to insist upon change and to refuse to perpetuate this cruel system which is inflicting life-long damage on these young people and their families.
As the new year begins, we urge you to expedite this long-overdue action on behalf of the children. We are poignantly and urgently aware that the eyes of history are upon us all.
In peace,
Rev. Dottie Mathews (dmathews@uuma.org)
Rabbi Bruce Elder (rabbi@hakafa.org)
And the Following Co-Signers
Thomas Cusack, FCM President
Thomas Stricker, FCM Chairperson