Nude selfies by sex-trafficking victims, slur against federal judge roil Texas’ child-welfare agency

Nude selfies taken by two teenage victims of sex trafficking who were living at a Bastrop County recovery center allegedly were taken by the girls at the direction of a staff member, using the employee’s “burner phone,” the facility’s founder testified on Monday. The $18-an-hour, nighttime worker at The Refuge “groomed” the two girls to agree to the nude photos, sold them online and, in turn, “rewarded” the minors with opioids and sedatives that are controlled substances, The Refuge’s founder Brooke Crowder and Jaime Masters, Texas’ top child welfare official, told the House Human Services Committee. Fallout from this month’s unusual revelation of details about incomplete criminal investigations involving vulnerable children continued Monday as Department of Family and Protective Services Child Care Investigations Division Director Justin Lewis resigned.

Emails sent to a federal court in Corpus Christi show Lewis in personal texts calling U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, who’s handling a suit against the state over foster care, a slur and saying he hoped she became a traffic-fatality victim. “She needs to get hit by a bus,” Lewis wrote. Lewis said Jack made sex-trafficking allegations at the state-contracted foster care facility, The Refuge, “political.” Four other state workers have now been fired, or soon will be departing from the protective services department, for failing to aggressively investigate and alert higher-ups of the problems at the 3½-year-old facility for girls traumatized by sex traffickers, Masters testified. In his resignation letter Monday, Lewis, a former police officer, said he was frustrated that, at last Thursday’s hearing about The Refuge by a hastily created Senate panel, Masters publicly chastised employees of his Child Care Investigations division. A supervisor and her manager in the investigative division had been terminated over failings related to The Refuge, Masters told senators. “Yet staff in other divisions — the actual divisions responsible for the placement and movement of the children in our care — sit quietly in the shadows while the public political flogging goes on,” said Lewis, who said his family and personal health have suffered from his five-year tenure at Child Protective Services’ parent agency.