The federal government has typically paid religious nonprofits to care for migrant children. But an AP/frontlinepbs investigation finds that the Trump administration is shifting some of the growing business to a for-profit company.
Migrant teens line up for a class at a "tender-age" facility for babies, children and teens, in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, Thursday, Aug. 29, 2019, in San Benito, Texas. The facility offers services that include education, nutrition, hygiene, recreation, entertainment, medical, mental health and counseling, according to a U.S. Health and Human Services official.
Trump administration officials say CHS is keeping the Florida shelter on standby in case they need to quickly provide beds for more migrant teens, and that they’re focused on the quality of care contractors can provide, not about who profits from the work. “What’s really the motivator, the deterrence or the dollar?” said Acevedo, who signed an Aug. 14 letter with dozens of law enforcement leaders asking Trump to minimize the detention of children. “I would question that if he’s getting one dollar for that association.”
“It looks like a camp, but sometimes it seems like a jail because you feel very trapped,” said the girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for her safety. Overall, the federal government spent a record $3.5 billion caring for migrant children over the past two years to run its shelters through both contracts and grants.
The government doesn’t disclose the names of individual shelters, nor how many children are in each one. But confidential government data obtained by the AP shows that in June nearly one in four migrant children in government care was housed by CHS. That included more than 2,300 teens at Homestead and more than 500 kids in shelters in Brownsville, Los Fresnos and San Benito, Texas. For each teen held at Homestead at that time, it cost taxpayers an average $775 per day.
After 18 years in federal service, he recently quit in frustration over concerns about government actions including the treatment of migrant children. He went to work for nonprofit Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service which places migrant children in foster homes. “We do a little bit of verbal, ABCs, colors and months,” a veteran teacher explained. “They’ll come in here, some of them with no English.”
“We’re doing the best that we possibly can,” she said, dodging a passing stroller as she led a reporter down a hallway. “The children are borrowed. They’re borrowed for our purpose, right? So a lot of times when something is borrowed, you take care of them better than you would something that is your own.”
After Kelly stepped down as leader of the U.S. military’s Southern Command in January 2016, he joinedthat studied ICE’s continued use of privately operated immigration detention facilities for adults. Later that year, the federal government announced plans to phase out privately run prisons and further study immigration detention.
The government’s justification for the no-bid contract said there could be increased “industry participation” in bidding for migrant child care contracts going forward. The prospectus warned of “negative publicity” surrounding care of migrant children, past and future. Nonetheless, it said the work presents a financial opportunity.
“They had promised they will have this many by this date, and we don’t have very flexible standards,” said Cancian. “We had expectations around how quickly we were going to be able to ramp up and we were unable to do that.” Those undisclosed risks include a proposed law in Congress that calls for stricter background checks for childcare workers and increased federal oversight of shelters.“There is a profit. There is a price incentive, but it’s not a detention incentive. The question about, ‘Is there incentive to detain children?’ Absolutely not, because that will close down the moment that there’s no children,” Aguilar said.
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