How Family Separations Brought Down a Migrant Mogul
AUSTIN, Texas—Juan Sanchez, the founder of America’s largest network of shelters for detained migrant children, greeted his employees at the company’s Thanksgiving potluck last November. “How you doing, brother?” he asked. “Como estás, mija?” The employees seemed preoccupied. Their company, Southwest Key, had been in the national spotlight for months. Since the Trump administration began separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border last year, Southwest Key has been integral to housing the thousands of children split from their parents and other relatives.
“I saw you on TV yesterday,” a worker told Sanchez in Spanish.
“Y que estaban diciendo?” Sanchez replied—“What were they saying?” “About Casa Padre,” she said, referring to a Walmart Supercenter that Sanchez had converted into a cavernous shelter. “This year has been long,” another employee said with a sigh.
“Crazy,” Sanchez replied.
Lean and still boyish at 71, a former Golden Gloves champ raised in a border barrio who came of age in the Chicano-rights movement, Sanchez was in the middle of his fiercest fight yet. His Walmart facility had become a symbol of Trump’s industrial-scale separation policy, and he’d weathered months of criticism: that he was complicit in the destruction of migrant families, that his $1.5 million salary was unseemly for the operator of a charity, and that he’d failed to prevent sexual abuse in his shelters as Southwest Key grew into a massive operation. Within months of our interview last fall, he would leave the company he built from scratch.
All along, however, Sanchez maintained that he didn’t change—the political climate did. For decades, civil-rights leaders had lauded him as a champion of social justice who was providing migrant children excellent care. By the time we sat down in November, former allies—including his own employees—had abandoned him, arguing that the moral meaning of his shelter empire had changed as the Trump administration weaponized the country’s immigration bureaucracy.
As if to rehabilitate his image, Sanchez had invited me to tour one of the shelters and to introduce me to his childhood confidants in South Texas. But the week after my first visit, Sanchez abruptly canceled my next trip when of financial mismanagement at Southwest Key. He did not respond to further requests
