Nonprofits replaced by single service provider
Questions surround new system for dealing with border crossers
Much has changed on the Southern border since the two-year surge brought more than a million people from poverty-stricken Central America and Mexico and into the United States in search of asylum.
The Trump administration enacted Migrant Protection Protocols in January 2019, which forced asylum-seekers to await immigration hearings in Mexico. In March 2020, under a Centers for Disease Control health initiative to curtail the spread of COVID-19 into the United States, Trump closed all U.S. borders under a policy known as Title
42. The effect was a drastic drop in the number of people attempting to cross from Mexico into the United States.
Early in the Biden administration, some restrictions were lifted. Biden also indicated a willingness to allow more entries along the Southern border. Eight months into the U.S. Border Patrol’s 2021 fiscal year has already seen 929,868 encounters with people trying to enter the United States at the Southern border, more than double the number of total encounters in 2020.
But dealing with the new wave of immigrants no longer falls to the cities, nonprofits and churches that had been providing services to them.
In late March ICE Acting Director Tae D. Johnson laid out a new plan for migrant support service in the area. He announced that ICE had signed “a short-term contract with the nonprofit division of Endeavors to provide temporary shelter and processing services for families who have not been expelled.”
ICE documents show that the contract is active for 199 days, from March 16 to Sept. 20, for 1,239 beds at $352.64 per bed per day. This totals nearly $87 million.
Endeavors was replacing the network of churches, nonprofits and volunteers in El Paso and New Mexico that assert they had developed a system to care for migrants for $17 per day. They said they were ready to provide help again, but were set aside.
“While Endeavors is trying to sell this as a humanitarian thing, it is not. It is for money — for a lot of money,” said Jessica Corley, coordinator for a collective of nonprofit agencies in the El Paso-New Mexico corridor that provided help to asylum seekers in the 2018-2019 migration surge.
U.S. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, in a March 30 letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE, expressed concern after she did some number-crunching.
“As the current contract stands, the cost to taxpayers for housing 1,200 migrant families for six months is about $71,000 per person. For a family of four, that amounts to a shocking $284,000 — enough to buy a small house,” she said in the letter.
She also noted that the Endeavors 2018 IRS filings show that nearly half of its income went to salaries. “This raises questions if half of the $86.9 million in ICE contract proceeds will likewise be allocated toward employee and executive compensation instead of migrant services or housing.”
The awarding of the nearly $87 million contract to Endeavors also caught the attention of the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Republicans’ Committee on Homeland Security. Both committees penned a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in April to express concerns over the size of the contract, the no-bid awarding of the contract, and Endeavor’s hiring of Andrew Lorenzen-Strait — a member of the Biden transition team — onto its staff shortly before the contract was awarded.
“These factors: the size of the contracts awarded to Family Endeavors, the manner in which they were awarded, that firm’s lack of equivalent experience, the timing of Mr. Lorenzen-Straight’s hiring, and his connections to the Biden administration combine to raise serious concerns of potential impropriety,” the April 21 letter states.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General has launched an investigation into the no-bid contract awarded to Endeavors Inc.
Endeavors, founded in San Antonio in 1969, has “provided essential services to marginalized populations for more than 50 years,” said Ben Miranda, director of operational impact and outreach for Endeavors.
“Endeavors responded to a request for assistance by the Department of Homeland Security to provide critical care, sheltering, staff and humanitarian services for migrants,” Miranda said.
It is public record that the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General is investigating the process that awarded the contract to Endeavors, but it is less clear if there is an investigation into Endeavors itself.
When contacted in early June about the details of its contract with Endeavors, Mary Houtmann, ICE Public Affairs, stated in an email: “ICE is unable to comment due to an active investigation.”
Tanya Román, director of Northwest Region/Spokesperson for the ICE Office of Public Affairs, was also asked if Endeavors was under investigation. She replied with an email that contained general information about the original contract, but did not address the question about the investigation.
When pressed for further details on the “active investigation,” — the phrasing used by Houtmann — Román said via email: “We have nothing further at this time.”
Endeavors wouldn’t say whether it was under investigation.
“We are in constant communication with the federal government. That’s all I’m going to share with you,” Miranda said.
Corley said her primary concern with the involvement of Endeavors in migrant support services is that it is a model based on apprehension and containment of people who are simply seeking legal asylum.
“They are really doing nextlevel detention,” she said. “Those of us who know, we call them ICE 2.0.”
Miranda disputed the term “detention” as a way to describe Endeavors’ services.
“We are a nonprofit social service provider,” he said. “We have been serving vulnerable populations for 51 years under an array of programs. We came at this knowing that we were going to continue to serve in that capacity .… in a way that is compassionate, and treating everybody with dignity and respect, regardless of what background or social economic standpoint. We are doing it because it is the right thing to do,” he said.
Endeavors is providing shelter in hotels for migrants in Texas and Arizona.
The ICE.gov website lists Endeavors on the “ICE Detainee Statistics” page, and also lists two El Paso hotels — Best Western Hotel and Comfort Suites — under the “Custody/AOR/ Facility” column, which are government terms for the handling of detainees.
The Comfort Inn and Suites, on the corner of Interstate 10 and Airways Boulevard in El Paso, sits about a mile from the El Paso International Airport, and immediately next to a Starbucks Coffeehouse. It appears to be a normal hotel, and at one point featured a popular nightclub at its ground floor.
The hotel today is surrounded by portable crowd-blockers, set up at each of the hotel’s entrances, which in a previous time were accessible by the public. Should you venture beyond that and approach the hotel lobby, you may be stopped by a security guard.
“This is private property and we are going to ask you to leave,” was the statement by a security guard with an Endeavors badge. When questions were asked on why the entrances were blocked, and whether anyone could enter, or if anyone inside could leave, an on-site police officer arrived within minutes. “You will be arrested if you don’t leave this property,” the officer said.
That is not a surprise to Corley.
“Endeavors is a detention model. And we don’t want that in New Mexico,” she said.
She was a part of a May 11 letter sent to a number of government agencies — including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security, and the New Mexico Department of Health. In the letter, the collection of New Mexico NGOs (nongovernment organizations) condemned the “partnership of ICE and Endeavors” as an “effort at providing order by way of detention.”
“We … want to express our clear desire to keep these types of ICE contracts out of our state. Migrant sheltering, as an act of welcoming, can have no part in supporting the detaining, criminalizing and traumatizing of migrant families and individuals,” stated the letter. “Please do not promote or consider any contracts with ICE to further detain asylum seekers who are exercising their right to a legal asylum process. Instead, we simply ask that you allow us to do what we have been preparing to do.”
The greater concern, Corley said, is that the criminalization of migrants becomes a permanent source of income for the government, and a lucrative venture for businesses that provide products and services for a migrant-detainment industry.
It is a concept known as the immigration industrial complex.
“Our biggest fear is that this is going to be the new model of immigration. That’s just not acceptable, on an ethical or moral level, to us,” Corley said. “That is our fear. We are trying as hard as we can to push back, having meeting after meeting after meeting, to talk strategy and advocacy points, and what we can do about it.”