The UAC shelter in Pomona, Calif., from a 2021 screen capture.
The Center has obtained the contract awarded in April 2021 to Cherokee Nation Management and Consulting, LLC (CNMC), of Catoosa, Oklahoma, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to stand up, manage, and then demobilize a facility near Los Angeles to process and house 2,500 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who were apprehended crossing the border illegally and who by law must be placed with parents or sponsors in the United States. We obtained the contract through the Freedom of Information Act process.
The document provides insight into why the problem of unaccompanied minors persists despite repeated, scandalous reports of lost, abused, and exploited children in this system – because there are enormous sums of taxpayer money flowing freely to the organizations that sign up to participate in administering the Biden-Harris mass migration programs.
The total dollar value of the contract was $706,894,848.17 for work spanning eight months (or about $3 million per day). Cherokee was to provide “direct care and supervision, intake processing, clothing, hygiene kits, interior security, case management, and medical services at the Pomona Intake Site.” Cherokee was to hire youth care workers, supervisors, and managers, and ensure that medical care personnel were available to meet the health care needs of the children, to include vaccinations and pregnancy tests.
This is the infamous facility – touted as a “model” facility by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra – that knowingly handed unaccompanied children in its care over to known gang members and traffickers, as exposed by whistleblower Tara Rodas.
The combination of open-borders zealotry and incompetence was a disaster waiting to happen. The Biden-Harris White House was desperate to find places to shelter an unprecedented surge of kids arriving after the decision to exempt UACs from being immediately turned back under the pandemic-related Title 42 expulsion authority, as had been the policy under Trump. Following the policy change, the number of UACs crossing illegally quadrupled in one year, rising from about 30,000 in 2020 to 140,000 in 2021. The Border Patrol facilities were overwhelmed and unsuitable, reviving complaints about “kids in cages,” and the number of traditional, suitable shelters that previously had contracts to house UACs were either shuttered or operating under reduced capacity due to the pandemic.
White House officials had reached out to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to allow a processing facility to be set up at the Pomona Fairplex, a 500-acre complex that prior to the pandemic had been the site of the Los Angeles County Fair, among other activities. And they needed to find someone to set it up and run it, and fast.
With no time for a competitive bidding process that might have attracted contractors with experience in child welfare services, instead they awarded the Pomona Fairplex contract to CNMC -- despite its apparent lack of human services expertise, or experience operating any type of facility. CNMC is part of a larger government contract group wholly owned by the Cherokee Nation, whose stated business mission is “to promote the economic wellbeing of the Cherokee Nation by delivering tremendous value to our customers, communities, and markets we serve.” CNMC, one of the 21 subsidiaries, is mainly a project management company, providing “advisory and assistance services in research, experimental development, technology implementation and project management.” Other branches of the conglomerate were involved in the hotel and gaming business, aerospace projects, manufacturing, construction, and medical staffing.
The contract called for staffing the facility with youth care workers who needed to have just a high school degree and one year of experience in a child welfare field, and who ideally were bilingual in English and Spanish.
At the time, many observers raised concerns about the huge cost of this endeavor, the unqualified contractors, the opaque process of giving away such huge sums of public money, and the lack of state licensing or appropriate standards for the facilities.
Over the course of the contract, CNMC processed and sheltered about 10,000 children before releasing them to sponsors. From numerous whistleblower reports, hearings, audits, and investigations, we know that the government has lost track of hundreds of thousands of these kids. Some were released to parents and many others were released to human traffickers, criminal gangs, and abusers.
As this document reveals, the Cherokee contract was terminated two months earlier than expected, and the government stopped sending UACs there in October 2021, after just six months.
The Biden-Harris White House told the public that the large intake centers were being “demobilized” because the number of UACs arriving had declined noticeably. In fact, that year the number of UAC arrivals continued to grow through the 2022 fiscal year.
Rather than launch initiatives to slow the flow of kids to the border, or implement a more protective placement process, the administration returned to paying smaller, specialized child welfare and refugee resettlement contractors to process the kids, and directed them to speed up their release by relaxing the sponsor vetting process and paying for the transportation of kids to sponsors. This has not gone well either. A grand jury empaneled in Florida found that the contractors are receiving millions of taxpayer dollars to administer policies that actually facilitate organized child smuggling and trafficking, with little transparency or oversight, resulting in an alarming surge in child victimizations.
There is a profound moral imperative for the federal government to reverse the laws, decisions, and practices that created this problem. If that is not enough of an incentive for lawmakers, then they should be motivated by the millions of dollars in savings to taxpayers that could be achieved as well.