The Rivertowns Dispatch

CV contends with allegations of abuse

By Julian Michael c aldwell April 24, 2026

Following allegations that migrant teens were abused at the Children’s Village (CV) residential treatment center in Dobbs Ferry, the facility’s director told the Rivertowns Dis-patch in an exclusive interview on April 20 that there’s “no evidence” of the abuse thus far. Jeremy Kohomban, who has served as director of CV for 21 years, talked about claims — including beatings, excessive restraints, and extended isolation — that made national head-lines last week and led to the relocation of 47 migrant teens who had been at CV.

The allegations were reported by CNN on April 16; Kohomban said he was first alerted to the claims when CNN reached out to him two days prior. The report states that some of the migrant teens, brought to CV after arriving in the U.S. alone, or being separated from their families by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), were the subjects of the abuse, sometimes out of view of cameras. It also alleges that on one occasion a teen was kept locked in a room for four days without a shower or bath, and with little access to food. “If there was a room where a child was held for four days with no hygiene, no food, that would mean all my physicians, my psychiatrists, my lawyer, me, my social workers — hundreds of people — would have to be complicit in such a strategy,” Kohomban told the Dispatch. “I don’t know if I could survive that kind of a finding, personally. When you are the leader, you are responsible for the tone at the top. That means while I was doing all of these other things, something very important about what we believe about how we treat children who need treatment was missed, and I should be held accountable for that.”

The Westchester County District Attorney’s Office is also investigating a claim that a male migrant teen was sexually abused by a female employee who no longer works for CV, according to a source familiar with the case. The case was reported by CV to a New York State law enforcement agency called the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs, and was referred to the DA’s office in March. It was not referenced in CNN’s report. The Justice Center conducts investigations into abuse and neglect. Kohomban said he has not heard from the Justice Center regarding the allegations in the CNN report.

“Most of the allegations that get reported to the Justice Center actually come from us,” Kohomban explained. “We see something, we hear something, we have a suspicion and we report it to the Justice Center, and they investigate and come back and say it’s either substantiated or unsubstantiated.”

The DA’s office could not share whether or not an arrest has been made in the sexual abuse case. The only confirmed arrests of CV staff in the past year were for a case of theft in 2025, according to Kohomban. Those two employees were not with the migrant program.

“Upon receiving an allegation related to this facility, ORR acted immediately to transfer all unaccompanied children to other locations and referred the matter to the appropriate federal investigative authorities.”

Office of Communications for the Administration for Children and Families

The alleged beatings, excessive restraints, and isolation allegedly involved male teens who at some point were in the Heightened Supervision Treatment program, which is for individuals separated from the general population because they have what Kohomban described as “complex problems” and “significant psychological needs”. CV operates simi-lar programs for both migrant and domestic residents. Kohomban emphasized that the program is not a punishment, but a safety mea-sure for the children and others around them. The alleged abuse was allegedly carried out by members of the campus security department, known as Special Children’s Services, which CV describes as a specially trained therapeutic crisis response team called on when a teen is at risk of harming themselves or others. Kohomban said he doesn’t know the source of the allegations, but thinks they were introduced by “well-intentioned people” who learned of them from one or more migrant teens.

“I also think to some degree we got caught in the whole immigration conversation,” Kohomban said. “I think some people probably think we are an extension of ICE and not a treatment center. They forget that we are medical professionals, we are psychiatrists, we are social workers, and that some young people are referred to a program like this because they have real treatment needs that don’t make it safe for them to be in the community.”

While CV, founded in 1851, exists primarily as a treatment center for domestic children, the claims of abuse are tied to a program that brought migrant children to the facility via the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). ORR places migrant children in facilities throughout the country. Since 2005, more than 12,000 migrant children have stayed at CV before being reunited with their families. At its height, Kohomban recalls as many as 200 being on the campus at one time. There were 47 migrant children there in January, before they were relocated. This is the only time that ORR has moved migrant children from CV, according to Kohomban.

“We have no evidence [of the abuse]; we’ve looked at video,” Kohomban noted, adding that there are hundreds of cameras on the campus monitored by auditors who work with CV to ensure that staff follow protocol. “If there was a name or a date, we could look deeper, but our position is that the Justice Center and the chief of police in Dobbs Ferry have full access to all of

our records, and they could investigate anything.” CV staff are trained to employ legal therapeutic restraints, utilizing the body and no external tools, for teens deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, according to Kohomban. The Justice Center has been investigating three complaints of questionable restraints between September and January, after CV’s auditors called the center to investigate. Some of the results began coming in in November, while others are still pending. To date, the Justice Center has found no wrongdoing in the cases, according to CV’s chief program officer David Collins. When the ORR decided to remove the 47 teens at the end of January,

Kohomban believed those cases may have been a factor in the decision.

ORR monitors made an unscheduled visit to CV from Jan. 21–23. Routine scheduled visits in June, September, and November raised no red flags, according to Kohomban. Shortly after January’s visit, ORR called for all 47 migrant teens at CV to be removed, and shared a statement that Kohomban says cited child safety concerns, but didn’t go into more detail. Transfers to other facilities began on Jan. 29, and all children were transferred within a week. Children’s Village’s ORR grant supporting the program, which operates on three-year cycles, ended on March 31 and was not renewed.

ORR is a program underneath the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) division of HHS. ACF’s Office of Communications wrote the Dispatch: “Upon receiving an allegation related to this facility, ORR acted immediately to transfer all unaccompanied children to other locations and referred the matter to the appropriate federal investiga-tive authorities.”

“As much as it hurts me, I don’t fault them for their decision to remove the children,” Kohomban said. “We have a lot of empty beds in our system [nationally], and very few kids, so why keep kids in a program where you have some questions, when you have all of these empty beds elsewhere?”

The monitors also identified concerns about their communication with CV staff during their visit. Kohomban determined the concerns were significant enough that he terminated three senior leaders with the migrant program. As of April 23, Kohomban had not heard of any law enforcement investigation into the allegations of abuse detailed in the CNN report, besides the sexual abuse allegation flagged by CV.