A Texas center tasked with caring for migrant children didn’t conduct required stringent FBI background checks for staff and didn’t have enough staff for providing mental healthcare, a government watchdog said Tuesday.
Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General issued a memo that found major problems with a youth detention center in Tornillo, Texas, tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors crossing the border.
Instead of using required FBI fingerprint background checks, the facility was “using checks conducted by a private vendor that had less comprehensive data, thereby heightening the risk that an individual with a criminal history could have direct access to children.”
Tornillo was quickly created in June to house a massive influx of minors attributable to a “zero tolerance” policy by the Trump administration that separated families at the border and detained kids and their parents separately instead of together.
The center’s intake has ballooned since June and now holds more than 2,300 migrants, according to a report in the Associated Press, which first reported the memo.
The facility used a private contractor to conduct background checks on the more than 1,000 staff members, instead of the FBI fingerprint background checks required under federal law, the agency said.
The OIG found that Scott Lloyd, the controversial former director of Office of Refugee Resettlement, did not know that the facility was not doing the fingerprint background checks.
However, the watchdog found that Lloyd signed off on a waiver that exempted the facility staff from having to do background checks on child abuse and neglect. The check involves looking into whether an individual has a record of child abuse or improper treatment, OIG said.
Lloyd granted the waiver a few days before the facility went online and ORR, a division of Health and Human Services that takes care of unaccompanied illegal minors, gave several reasons for the waiver. Chief among them is that they did not have time to complete the checks before going online and that Texas may not be willing to perform such checks for a federal facility, the agency said.
Lloyd has since been transferred to HHS’ Office of Civil Rights. His tenure at ORR was marked with controversies that included seeking to prevent an undocumented teen girl from getting an abortion.
The inspector general also found that the facility did not have enough staff to provide adequate mental care. Generally, ORR requires centers to have a staffing ratio of one clinician for every 12 children. But influx centers are generally exempt from the requirement for regular mental healthcare.
However, the watchdog was worried about the ratio at Tornillo of one clinician for every 55 children as of Oct. 3.
“The disproportionately high number of children to clinicians is especially worrisome in light of the continued increase in the number of children and length of stay at Tornillo,” the inspector general’s memo said.
It said that, as of Oct. 9, the average stay at Tornillo had gone from 20 days to 27 days.
The inspector general asked HHS to put together a response to the report including how it will ensure that all staff at the facility get the appropriate background check.
