Casa Padre, a shelter run by Southwest Key Programs, houses roughly 1,500 immigrant children in a converted Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Tex.
CreditTamir Kalifa/The New York Times

HARLINGEN, Tex. — The business of housing, transporting and watching over migrant children detained along the southwest border is not a multimillion-dollar business.

It’s a billion-dollar one.

The nonprofit Southwest Key Programs has won at least $955 million in federal contracts since 2015 to run shelters and provide other services to immigrant children in federal custody. Its shelter for migrant boys at a former Walmart Supercenter in South Texas has been the focus of nationwide scrutiny, but Southwest Key is but one player in the lucrative, secretive world of the migrant-shelter business. About a dozen contractors operate more than 30 facilities in Texas alone, with numerous others contracted for about 100 shelters in 16 other states.

If there is a migrant-shelter hub in America, then it is perhaps in the four-county Rio Grande Valley region […]

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