DID TRUMP'S FAMILY SEPARATIONS DESTROY JUAN SANCHEZ?

His Walmart facility had become a symbol of Trump’s industrial-scale separation policy, and he’d weathered months of criticism: that he was complicit in the destruction of migrant families, that his $1.5 million salary was unseemly for the operator of a charity, and that he’d failed to prevent sexual abuse in his shelters as Southwest Key grew into a massive operation. Within months of our interview last fall, he would leave the company he built from scratch.All along, however, Sanchez maintained that he didn’t change—the political climate did. For decades, civil-rights leaders had lauded him as a champion of social justice who was providing migrant children excellent care. 

By the time we sat down in November, former allies—including his own employees—had abandoned him, arguing that the moral meaning of his shelter empire had changed as the Trump administration weaponized the country’s immigration bureaucracy.

As if to rehabilitate his image, Sanchez had invited me to tour one of the shelters and to introduce me to his childhood confidants in South Texas. But the week after my first visit, Sanchez abruptly canceled my next trip when The New York Times exposed a pagttern of financial mismanagement at Southwest Key. He did not respond to further requests for comment.

At the potluck, however, Sanchez was bullish. In his office, decorated with framed quotations from Che Guevara and Martin Luther King Jr., he explained to me that critics were jealous of his success and would prefer to see him laboring in the cotton fields, as he had in his youth.

“Not many Latinos I know of run a half-billion-dollar company,” he told me. “That pisses people off.”