Houston shelter officials say feds removed girls with no warning
Robert Erwin got a call from an EMT worker outside the temporary shelter for migrant girls around 11 a.m. April 17. Three buses had arrived.
He called his bosses at the National Association of Christian Churches, which had set up the emergency shelter in north Houston, asking if more children were expected. They said no.
With minutes, a chaotic scene unfolded, NACC officials said, with girls crying in panic as they were told to pack up and then moved to buses. On a digital recording supplied by NACC officials, young voices can be heard crying and asking in Spanish what is going on.
Erwin, an NACC staff member who was in charge that Saturday, called around and asked representatives of government agencies working at the facility for an explanation. He said that none was provided as new federal workers moved in to the shelter.
“It was a chaos for the children; they were scared and crying and screaming.”
Jose Ortega, the president of NACC, was notified by a federal department of Health and Human Services email at 12:11 p.m. of the removal, which was already taking place, according to his lawyer, Dean Hoover.
Federal officials reiterated an earlier statement that they moved expeditiously to reunite many of the children with family members and move others to other facilities. They refused to comment on questions about whether the transfer was spurred by a dispute with NACC over contract issues.
“Contractural matters are between the government and vendors,” the HHS statement said.
“At every step of the way, the entire Administration is working together to reduce the length of time children are in Federal custody by making unifications our top priority,” the statement said.
The Houston shelter opened in early April to house around 500 unaccompanied girls ages 13 to 17, who had been transferred from Custom and Border Protection to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, as required by law.
Ortega said he agreed to set up the shelter at the urging of officials at HHS, including Xavier Becerra, head of the agency. Ortega’s organization has worked on disaster relief, but did not have previous experience in shelters for children. He said in interviews that HHS officials took control of the shelter, insisting he hire specific service providers and setting the rules of the shelter. This was just three days before the shelter was to open, he said, and he’d already spent hundreds of thousands upfront to set up the facility.
Ortega said he signed a contract for $4 million for the initial costs of setting up the shelter. He said details of a six-month contract were a source of problems between NACC and HHS.
On April 16, he informed HHS that he had hired attorneys to address the financial issues.
The next day, officers arrived at the NACC facility unannounced, according to NACC officials and workers who were there at the time. The federal officials rushed the approximately 450 girls present at the time, by government count, to pack and prepare to move out without providing any explanation.
In the digital recording, young voices are heard crying.
“What is happening?” one person asks. Another voice responds: “We are very afraid; nobody tells us anything …” Her words are then drowned out by crying.
“At least they (could) tell us where we are going (but) nothing, nothing! That's not fair; that’s not fair,” another girl says.
Another girl is also heard in the background of the digital recording crying and saying, “I just want to be taken to my dad.”
Angelica Ortega, one of the NACC directors and wife of the pastor, said that the organization and her husband were very negatively impacted by the situation. Jose Ortega was hospitalized the next day and put in an ICU for several days with health complications, she said.
Both Ortega and his lawyer said they don't blame Becerra or President Joe Biden for the situation.
“But most of all, we were very concerned about the girls,” said Angelica Ortega. “They came here, not in the best situation, and we opened our hearts to them. They told us that they felt they were in a safe place with us.”
Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas, said that children in these situatons need stability. “They need consistency; adults coming and saying, ‘tomorrow we are doing this,’ to give them a chance to anticipate what’s going to happen to them. They have gone through so much! What they need at this point is stability and the agencies must work together to provide that stability.”