Profit found in kids shelters

Contracts for young migrants’ care shifted to private sector

SAN BENITO, Texas — Sheltering migrant children has become a growing business for Comprehensive Health Services Inc., the Florida, private, for-profit company paid by the U.S. government.

A joint investigation by The Associated Press and Frontline has found that President Donald Trump’s administration has started shifting some of the caretaking of migrant children from mostly religious-based nonprofits to private, for-profit contractors.

So far, the only private company caring for migrant children is Comprehensive Health Services, owned by a contractor in the Washington, D.C., area, Caliburn International Corp. In June, the company held more than 20% of all migrant children in government custody. And even as the number of children has declined, the company’s federal funding for their care has continued to flow. That’s partly because the company is still staffing a large Florida facility with 2,000 workers even though the last children left in August.

Administration officials say Comprehensive Health Services is keeping the Florida shelter on standby and that they’re focused on the quality of care contractors can provide, not about who profits from the work.

“It’s not something that sits with me morally as a problem,” said Jonathan Hayes, director of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. “We’re not paying them more just because they’re for-profit.”

Asked during a White House visit Thursday about the AP and Frontline investigation, Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, pushed back and said the findings were “misleading.” But he did not address the government’s ongoing privatization of the care of migrant children.

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly joined Caliburn’s board this spring after stepping down from decades of government service. He earlier had joined the administration as homeland security secretary and had backed the idea of taking children from their parents at the border, saying it would discourage people from trying to immigrate or seek asylum.

Critics say this means Kelly now stands to financially benefit from a policy he helped create.

Houston’s police chief, Art Acevedo, said Kelly, a retired general, told him firsthand that he believed enforcing a zero-tolerance policy would serve as a deterrent.

AP/BRYNN ANDERSON Protesters, who marched to the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Fla., left these toys for detained migrant children in this photo from June 2018.