This is how crimes against humanity occur: one monster at a time, in places beyond the spotlit places where the other monsters live. This is the Katyn Forest, the hills of Cambodia, the clearings in Rwanda, the dark sites in Poland and Thailand, Birkenau. This is how it happens, one monster at a time, working for other monsters, who are rarely called to account. From ProPublica:

The allegations against Levian D. Pacheco, who is HIV-positive, include that he performed oral sex on two of the teenagers and tried to force one of them to penetrate him anally. The other six teens — all between 15 and 17 — said Pacheco had groped them through their clothing. All of the incidents are alleged to have taken place between August 2016 and July 2017, according to a court filing last week that laid out the government’s case. The case, initially investigated by local police, is now proceeding through U.S. District Court in Phoenix. Pacheco had worked at Southwest Key’s Casa Kokopelli shelter, one of eight the company runs in Arizona, since May 2016.

Casa Kokopelli was cited by the Arizona Department of Health Services in 2017 for failing to complete background checks, including fingerprinting, to ensure that employees hadn’t previously committed sex offenses and other crimes, records show. Pacheco worked for nearly four months without a complete background check, according to documents and an agency official. Those records did not show any previous arrests or convictions for sex offenses, they said.

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There is no question that this administration* which, as we know, is headed by a man who doesn’t know anything about anything, devised this inhuman “no tolerance” policy at the border without the faintest goddamn idea how it would work. That is made more obvious daily by stories a lot less horrible than this one is, although this one is horrible enough to represent the whole misbegotten bunch of them.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly asserted that the shelters are safe, even fun, places for kids. But there has been increasingly intense scrutiny of the federally funded, privately run shelters after the administration separated some 3,000 children from their parents at the border and sent them to shelters and foster homes across the country. Last week, ProPublica reported that police nationwide have responded to hundreds of calls reporting possible sex crimes at shelters that serve immigrant children. One of those calls resulted in the conviction of a Tucson shelter worker for molestation.

Fun! Like Chuck E. Cheese, except with perverts.

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In addition to Pacheco, two other cases involving abuse at other Southwest Key shelters have recently surfaced. On Tuesday, an employee at a Southwest Key facility in Phoenix, Fernando Magaz Negrete, was arrested on allegations that he sexually abused a 14-year-old girl by kissing her and rubbing her breast and crotch, according to Phoenix news outlets. And The Nation reported Friday that a 6-year-old girl who had been separated from her mother was allegedly fondled by a boy at another Southwest Key facility in Glendale, Arizona in June. At other Southwest Key facilities, police reports and call logs from the last five years detail inappropriate relationships with staff, dozens of runaways, sexual contact among kids at the shelters and other allegations of molestation by employees. In one case, ProPublica found, a 46-year-old youth care worker in Tucson was convicted of groping a 15-year-old boy who had just arrived in the United States five days earlier.

They didn’t care enough to plan for the safety of the children they were planning to rip from their families and imprison. That’s not merely because they are an administration* of ignorant sadists led by the most ignorant of them all. It was also because this policy was designed not to solve the immigration problem, but to satiate the bleachers full of screaming yahoos that are the president*’s only source of political sustenance right now. This is the policy manifestation of all those twisted, angry white faces at the rallies. This is “Fuck Your Feelings” in physical form. The only real constituents this president* has are slobbering, hateful gossoons whom he can terrify. That is the greatness of the peculiar America they honor.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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