The underlying story isn’t new. In fact the poor conditions at the Fort Bliss shelter for migrant children were reported last summer:
The concerned federal employees, who volunteered to work at the site, requested anonymity to discuss their time at Fort Bliss because they’re still employed by other government agencies. The contractors were hired to work at the base by private companies and fear they could be fired for speaking out.
The workers said the children’s restlessness and frustration has been largely driven by prolonged stays at Fort Bliss. The children long to be with families in the U.S. but many languish at the Army base for weeks and even months with no updates on their release.
“There’s very little communicated to these kids about the process and amount of time they’ll be here,” another federal government employee who volunteered at Fort Bliss told CBS News. “So they live in constant doubt, uncertainty and fear about what’s gonna happen to them.”
The people that were contracted to look after these kids came from ServePro, a company that does clean up and repair in the wake of natural disasters. The workers involved had absolutely no experience working with children.
The contractor’s staff told the whistleblowers “that they had received no training prior to beginning work and had little guidance about what their role was,” the whistleblowers said. They also said the contractors “seemed to view their job more as crowd control than youth care,” describing instances in which contractors woke children up at 6 a.m. with a bullhorn.
Last July, two more whistleblowers came forward claiming that the site, which at one time held up to 5,000 migrant children, had seen COVID and lice spread among the kids. Eventually the Fort Bliss center and similar temporary shelters run by HHS were shut down. Yesterday the HHS Inspector General released a report confirming that conditions at Fort Bliss were as bad as reported last year.
Migrant children housed by the U.S. government at a makeshift shelter inside an Army base in the Texas desert suffered distress and panic attacks last year because officials lacked the resources and training to release them in a timely and safe fashion, an internal investigation released Tuesday found.
Inexperienced and untrained federal employees and contractors assigned to a child migrant housing site inside Fort Bliss were ill-equipped to place thousands of unaccompanied Central American children with family members in the U.S., prolonging their stay at the Army base, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General concluded after a year-long review.
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The goal of the untrained “case managers” was to empty the site as quickly as possible by placing kids with family members around the US. But that work went slowly forcing many kids to be there as long as two months with little or no information about when they might get out. Even when they were placed with someone, the IG found those decisions weren’t always appropriate.
A Fort Bliss worker told investigators they witnessed a distraught migrant girl cut herself in front of other children after learning that case managers had not spoken to her mother about her release. The girl, the report said, was restrained by security guards and transported to a psychiatric facility.
“They had a sense that they had been forgotten,” one Fort Bliss youth care worker told investigators…
Beyond causing “unnecessary delays” in migrant children’s releases, the deficient case management undermined efforts to ensure the minors were not placed with adults who could harm them, according to the report, which relied on interviews with 66 Fort Bliss workers, a review of documents and a visit to the facility.
“In some cases, release recommendations made by these inexperienced case managers reportedly failed to consider children’s significant history of abuse and neglect or whether sex offenders resided in the potential sponsor’s household,” the report said.
The full IG report is here. The Biden administration’s handling of this was a disaster and while it has received some media attention last year it never got nearly as much coverage as the “kids in cages” story got back in 2018-2019. I wonder why that is?
Here’s a BBC report on the conditions from last year which also includes allegations of rape and sexual assault. I don’t see anything about that in the IG report except a passing mention that in future case managers should “receive training in ORR policies and procedures, including case management processes;…ORR field guidance; standards to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse and sexual harassment…”
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