Immigration worker charged with sexually abusing 8 migrant children at detention facility: report

An immigration detention center worker is reportedly facing 11 sex offense charges after he allegedly abused at least eight unaccompanied immigrant boys.

According to ProPublica, Levian Pacheco, a youth care worker at a detention center in Arizona, is accused of multiple cases of sexual abuse on at least eight different boys, including six teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17 that allege Pacheco groped them over their clothing.

Pacheco, who is HIV-positive, had been working at Southwest Key’s Casa Kokopelli shelter in Arizona since 2016, with the shelter being cited by the Arizona Department of Health Services in 2017 for not completing background checks on employees.

ProPublica reports that he had worked at the shelter for more than three months without a background check and his records did not include any past convictions on sex offenses or past arrests.

The debate over the treatment of undocumented immigrant children has been a heated topic under the Trump administration, and, despite the president signing an executive order in June to end family separations, there have been nearly 3,000 children who were split from undocumented adults entering the U.S.