The cost of housing tens of thousands of migrant children who have come across the southern border since President Joe Biden took office has reached $3 billion, according to a report.
The Biden administration dished out massive federal contracts to private companies and nonprofit groups in its first 100 days to house children in government custody after federal facilities were stretched to their limits.
Between January and March, more than 33,000 unaccompanied children were picked up at the border, which is more than the number of children who came across in the previous 12 months combined. Children are held an average of one month while the government searches for an adult sponsor in the United States to discharge them to as they go through immigration proceedings. As of early May, nearly 25,000 children are in government custody, separated from their parents.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HOLDING NEARLY 25,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN
But more than $2 billion of the taxpayer money awarded to care for and house the children was awarded to organizations without going through the bidding process, according to an Associated Press review of contracts. Federal law requires government money be fairly awarded through a solicitation process in which companies can make a proposal for services they can provide and at what cost. That never happened in the case of two companies and one nonprofit group, which received the majority of funding spent to date.
The Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement cares for children after they are initially encountered on the southern border by Border Patrol agents, also diverged from policies that mandate any child care facility be state-licensed, a measure in place to prevent abuse and neglect of minors in government facilities.
Two HHS-contracted facilities closed suddenly in April. HHS said the children in them had been moved to other emergency shelters. However, in one case, a Houston-based center operated by the National Association of Christian Churches was abruptly shuttered in what sources said was due to abhorrent conditions inside. Teenage girls were at times forced to use plastic bags as toilets because there were not enough adults to walk them to a bathroom. Stacks of boxes were used to create rooms inside, where the girls were packed into tight spaces amid the coronavirus pandemic. An NACC official told the Houston Chronicle that HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra had personally “begged” him to take the contract and that he had not sought out the work.
The $2 billion in no-bid contracts went to Deployed Resources of Rome, New York; Family Endeavors in San Antonio, Texas; and Rapid Deployment in Mobile, Alabama. Deployed Resources won a $719 contract to house 1,500 children at a time in Donna, Texas, and had been contracted during the Trump administration to set up immigration courts in tent facilities that were used in 2019 and 2020 to hear asylum claims. Rapid Deployment won two contracts worth $614 million to oversee the temporary child care center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
Family Endeavors was awarded two contracts totaling $667 million from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Family Endeavors put together a plan to rent out all rooms in seven hotels in Arizona and Texas for the purpose of holding migrant families between when they are in Border Patrol custody and before they are released into the U.S.
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However, in a media call with the White House on Thursday, Biden administration officials would not say if all hotels were in use or how many people were staying at the rented hotels. Additionally, Family Endeavors’s senior director for government relations is a former Biden transition team official who selected political appointees to HHS and worked on Department of Homeland Security policy matters, a significant conflict of interest given his role securing the contracts.
