CYFD denies license for youth shelter
Agency: Company looking to build migrant facility in Albuquerque misrepresented or falsified information in application
New Mexico’s child welfare agency announced Tuesday it has made a second and final decision to deny an Arizona-based company a license to operate a federally funded shelter for migrant youth in Albuquerque.
The for-profit VisionQuest has had facility licenses revoked in the past and misrepresented or falsified information in its application, the Children, Youth and Families Department said in a news release issued Tuesday evening. A spokesman for the agency said in the statement that VisionQuest declined to request a public hearing to appeal the license denial.
VisionQuest did not respond to emails or calls for comment.
The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement,
a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, had awarded the company nearly $2.9 million to run a center for shortterm housing of up to 60 boys ages 11 to 17 without legal residency status who are in U.S. custody. The company had planned to operate the center in at a facility near the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
In an August email to some Albuquerque
residents, Michael Vos of the Albuquerque-based consulting firm Consensus Planning said the facility would “provide educational services, health care services including vision and dental, community engagement, and recreation for the participating children … while they are transitioning to a more permanent home.”
CYFD first denied the operator’s license that month. In September, VisionQuest announced it would appeal the decision.
“An informal resolution conference was requested by VisionQuest and held on October 4th,” CYFD said in Tuesday’s news release. “In that conference, CYFD informed VisionQuest that the initial denial based on the license revocation of another facility remained sufficient grounds to deny the license.”
Founded in 1973, VisionQuest has faced multiple abuse allegations, including one at a New Mexico camp in 1984. Mario Cano, 16, died that year from a pulmonary embolism at the Silver City Wilderness Camp, which VisionQuest was operating at the time.
A New Mexico grand jury cleared VisionQuest of criminal responsibility in Cano’s death.
But a grand jury in San Diego found after a trial in a civil case over the boy’s death that staff nurses at the camp had discounted his pleas for medical help.
The Los Angeles Times reported the state later denied the company a provisional license to operate the camp because there were “no state standards by which to gauge such a program.”
A year ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story detailing allegations of both physical and verbal abuse by employees of a VisionQuest facility for troubled boys in North Philadelphia that shut down in 2017. Records show three workers were fired between 2011 and 2017 after hitting or “physically handling” children at the center, the paper reported.
The company was back in the news in October 2018 because it had planned to open a housing facility for unauthorized immigrant boys in the North Philadelphia space it had vacated a year earlier. The city sued VisionQuest to halt the project, but a judge ruled in June the facility’s opening could move forward.
Health and Human Services has given the company over $37 million in federal grants this year. Many of those are for operations of immigrant youth centers in states such as Arizona and California. The department has more than 7,600 unaccompanied and unauthorized immigrant children in 170 programs across the U.S.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond for comment regarding the allegations of abuse at VisionQuest facilities or the future of the company’s grant to operate a youth center in New Mexico.