An independent auditor within the Department of Homeland Security will launch an investigation into the Biden administration awarding an $87 million contract to house in hotels migrant families who illegally crossed the southern border.
The DHS Office of the Inspector General will examine how Texas-based Endeavors was given a massive federal contract by DHS agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement following the Washington Examiner’s report that exposed the nonprofit group’s potential conflicts of interest, including how its senior director worked on President Joe Biden’s transition team.
“The decision to award a massive, no-bid contract to the nonprofit Endeavors raised many questions including how an organization with no experience working with ICE could win a non-compete contract,” House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko, a New York Republican, said in a statement Monday. “It’s bad enough that this administration has created a self-inflicted border crisis. Its response should now be focused on reversing the misguided policies that got us here — not engaging in activity that raises significant ethical questions.”
Last month, the Washington Examiner reported that the Biden administration did not solicit bids for the contract in its rush to stand up facilities to hold families that come over the border from Mexico. Instead, the Biden administration signed a deal that people with knowledge of the matter said prompted ethical questions and made waste of existing government facilities that are meant to hold migrant families.
REPUBLICANS DEMAND ANSWERS ABOUT BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S NO-BID CONTRACT TO HOUSE MIGRANTS
The contract in question was signed in March and gave Endeavors the equivalent of $352.64 per hotel bed per day to house approximately 80,000 migrant families through September. Exactly 1,239 beds at seven hotels located in Arizona and Texas were rented for more than six months. The federal contract dubs the hotels as “emergency family reception sites” where families will be held up to three days before being released into the United States, with or without documents mandating they appear in immigration court.
Each hotel was nicknamed “casa,” the Spanish word for house. The agency shuffled 600 people into hotels in El Paso, Texas, and Chandler, Arizona, as part of phase one, which started in early April. Phase two began April 30, and 600 beds were supposed to be made available in Pecos, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Cotulla, Texas. The administration’s use of the rooms is an emergency measure to respond to the surge of families illegally crossing the border and being taken into custody.
A former senior official on the Biden transition team is an executive at Endeavors, Andrew Lorenzen-Strait. On Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, Endeavors hired Lorenzen-Strait as its senior director for migrant services and federal affairs, meaning that he would be the organization’s liaison to the federal government. Lorenzen-Strait was previously on the Biden-Harris transition team working on the DHS policy team, vetting political appointees for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care that unaccompanied migrant children are provided while in government custody.
Lorenzen-Strait worked starting in 2008 through May 2019 at ICE, where his last responsibility was overseeing the 45,000-person-capacity detention facilities, including the family residential centers that now sit empty as families are instead held in hotels before being released into the U.S. His immediate boss at ICE at the time was Tae Johnson, who is acting director of the agency and would have had the final say on the $87 million contract. Another ICE official, Claire Trickler-McNulty, used to work for Lorenzen-Strait before he left ICE. Trickler-McNulty was given full authority over acquisitions and contracts despite working outside that office, a move that one source told the Washington Examiner in April was “extremely unusual.”
ICE’s $87 million contract was awarded without the normal competitive process, and the government did not solicit bids from other organizations. ICE cited “unusual and compelling urgency” as the reason for not complying with federal contract law.
Endeavors had contracts with several other federal agencies, though all but one were valued at less than $1 million. Endeavors took in $43 million in 2018, according to tax documents from that year. Its $87 million contract is more than double the money it took in last year. Despite its nonprofit status, its seven top executives made six-figure salaries in 2018, as much as $312,000 that year.
After being awarded the contract, Lorenzen-Strait posted on his personal LinkedIn account in April asking for public donations to cover the travel costs of families’ flights and bus fares from the hotels to where they planned to live in the U.S.
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House and Senate lawmakers have contacted ICE and the Department of Health and Human Services with questions about the connections between Endeavors and the Biden administration, as well as a $530 million contract with HHS to house unaccompanied children.
