The Biden administration abruptly closed a Houston-based warehouse where government contractors were reportedly holding nearly 500 unaccompanied children in conditions described as abhorrent.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced over the weekend that it was shuttering one of a dozen emergency facilities where its Administration for Children and Families's Office of Refugee Resettlement had contracted the National Association of Christian Churches nonprofit organization to hold nearly 20,000 boys and girls who came across the southern border without a parent.
The teenage girls held inside were at times forced to use plastic bags as toilets because there were not enough adults to walk them to a bathroom, according to ABC News. Girls spent most of the days on makeshift cots and rarely got outside. Stacks of boxes were used to create rooms inside, where the girls were packed into tight spaces, risking their safety, given the coronavirus pandemic.
"[The girls] were more treated like merchandise rather than treated as human beings, as people who just went through a very traumatic experience," said Cesar Espinosa, the executive director of Houston-based immigrant civil rights group FIEL. "I would not allow my 15-year-old sister to go and volunteer in a place like this because I don't know what she's going to see."
Espinosa said he saw a look of "desperation" on the faces of the girls during a recent tour in the warehouse after the NACC opened it in early April.
NACC was given a $4 million contract to hold the children despite never having been given a government contract to hold children in the past. Jose Ortega, the Houston-based nonprofit group's founder and president, claimed in an interview with 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.
"I'm a humble pastor that was thrown into this mess without asking for it," Ortega told the Houston Chronicle. "We were not looking for a contract. We were not applying for a contract for us to make money — this was thrown on us."
A White House spokesperson told ABC News that the site was shuttered because it "did not meet the Biden administration's very high standard for child welfare."
NACC spokesman Dean Hoover insisted on Sunday that top Biden administration officials pushed the organization to take the children.
"NACC officials were personally requested by HHS Secretary Becerra and President Biden to open the doors of their large Houston facility to refugee children on an emergency basis," Hoover told ABC. "It is deeply hurtful and unfair to the folks at NACC that anyone would now think of criticizing them when all they were trying to do is be good Samaritans and help the HHS help these children."
The children were moved out of the warehouse over the weekend, though it was not immediately clear where they were taken.
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Espinosa said the government needs to answer why NACC was chosen when other better-suited and experienced entities in Houston were available but not selected.
