Cash piling up at PACs
New York’s Cayuga has tripled its budget by caring for migrant children
With the rapid approach of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, super-wealthy donors are sending huge gifts to PACs. About $120 million came in this spring in amounts of $1 million or larger, according to campaign reports.
For example, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, gave $30 million. Democratic backer Tom Steyer, a California billionaire, has sent $29.4 million.
The leader of one fund favoring the GOP vows that its candidates will not be outspent. But despite the river of money, candidates know there are no guarantees. A Democrat in Pennsylvania won a special election this spring even though groups spent $10 million to defeat him.
NEW YORK – The children arrive in groups, sometimes many hours after even an adult’s bedtime.
Without their parents, often knowing no English, they’re brought by federal agents on journeys as long as 2,000 miles from the southwest U.S. border to social services programs operated by nonprofit, religious or private agencies and companies.
Since 2014, thousands of children and their siblings have made the crossing.
Coming mainly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, some were sent by their parents to escape purported violence or other threats. Their illegal trips were aided by smugglers and typically ended with the children in U.S. custody.
Officially classified as unaccompanied alien children, thousands of the young migrants have been brought to the New York City facilities of a company called Cayuga Centers.
The nonprofit has received millions of dollars from the federal government in the past several years to place the children in foster care until they can rejoin parents or other relatives.
This year, a new and different wave of undocumented migrant children has joined the federal caravans travel-
ing to Cayuga Centers and other social services providers. They were separated from their parents at the border by immigration agents for weeks as President Donald Trump’s administration enforced a “zero tolerance” policy against illegal immigration.
These children also went into foster care at Cayuga Centers, often with their parents having no idea that the youngsters had been transported thousands of miles away.
A federal court filing late last week said 364 of 2,551 children between ages 5 and 7 who had been identified for reunification had rejoined their families.
The latest young migrants included a 9-year-old Honduran girl and her 5year-old sister. They were separated from their mother, Denise Santos, at the southwest border in June after the three crossed into the U.S. Santos asked for asylum and was detained at the Port Isabel Detention Center, near Los Fresnos, Texas.
“We’re trying to get them back together,” Ricardo de Anda, a Texas attorney helping the family, said in a recent telephone interview.
Amid nationwide protests and court battles over similar family separations, the federal government faces a court-ordered deadline Thursday to complete reunification of all the families.
As that process unfolds, Cayuga Centers, like similar social services agencies, has become the focus of an unwelcome spotlight as Americans debate potential solutions for illegal immigration.
“We have nothing to do with the separations. When we take the kids, the kids are already in federal custody,” Cayuga Centers’ CEO and President Edward Myers Hayes said in a recent telephone interview.
David Connelly, who chairs the nonprofit’s board of trustees, said he initially feared some might blame Cayuga Centers for the separations or accuse the company of “abetting” the government’s policy.
He said Hayes satisfied his concerns by asking a question: “If we don’t take care of these children, who will?”
If Cayuga Centers is doing good by serving migrant children, it also is doing well for itself.
Last year, the nonprofit group said that it had become “the largest provider of transitional foster homes for Central American children taken into custody while crossing the U.S. southern border.”
Federal contracts more than tripled Cayuga Centers’ annual budget in recent years as the company provided foster care, physical and mental health screening, and schoolteachers and made efforts to return the children to their families.
That income, accounting for what Connelly said was roughly half the nonprofit’s budget, has made Cayuga Centers a major provider and financial beneficiary in what has become a nearly $1 billion annual U.S. industry caring for migrant children.
Since 2002, youngsters detained after illegal U.S. border crossings have been placed in the Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, which is managed by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Some children have been placed in a network of more than 100 shelters in 17 states that are operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The youngsters stay there pending release to relatives in the U.S. as they await immigration hearings.
Others have been placed with social services contractors such as Cayuga Centers.
In all, 4,215 migrant children who crossed the southwestern border illegally were sent to the company’s New York City facilities from mid-2014 through mid-2017, before the family separations began, a review of the nonprofit’s annual reports shows. More have followed since last summer.
The federal government has awarded Cayuga Centers nearly $92.5 million in contract awards to fund shelter services for unaccompanied migrant children, contracting records show.
The awards started in 2014 and are scheduled to continue through the start of 2020.
The federal funding powered Cayuga Centers’ total annual revenue from $15.6 million in the nonprofit’s 20122013 fiscal year to nearly $48.7 million in 2016-2017, according to its most recently available federal tax returns.
As the nonprofit’s revenue rose, Hayes’ total annual compensation increased from $186,632 to $244,743, a 31 percent jump.
His total income is comparable with compensation for the highest-paid executives at similarly sized nonprofits, said Daniel Borochoff, president of Charity Watch, a nonprofit sector watchdog.