Op-Ed: Chaos at Fort Bliss Refugee Camp
This article features our clients Arthur Pearlstein and Lauren Reinhold and was originally published here.
One would think that $1,000,000,000 paid to contractors would result in gold-star treatment! But it didn’t. This bottomless pit of taxpayer-dollar-at-waste paid for “organizational chaos.”
Both reports I read described the living conditions at Ft. Bliss like a third world poverty-stricken community.
There were riots in the boys’ tents at the facility which resulted in security guards surrounding their tents; bullying, major depression and suicidal thoughts among the children, extreme noise pollution, widespread COVID-19 (which detailees were told to downplay), lice were so serious a girls’ tent with “hundreds of occupants were on lockdown.” A lockdown within a lockdown?
Children were told they were going home and put on buses only to be asked to get off the bus, it was a mistake, they weren’t going home; or taken to the airport, boarded the plane, then asked to deplane and told they made a mistake, they weren’t going home either.
One detailee said these children were “inconsolable.”
If this is happening at Ft. Bliss, it may be happening at other refugee resettlement facilities throughout the U.S. Throughout the detailees’ stay at Ft. Bliss and prior to leaving, they were told “make everything sound positive…and play down anything negative.”
In a conversation with Congressman Gonzales, I asked if some of these children would end up in our foster care system and he indicated that would be the case.
According to Attorney General Ken Paxton, on any given day in Texas, there are 79,000 children in foster care. There are a total of 500,000 minors living in foster care throughout the U.S. According to Jaco Booyens (NGO), some of these children are vulnerable to sexual exploitation during their stay in foster care.
These helpless, desperate and destitute unaccompanied illegal minors that end up in foster care may also be vulnerable, once again, to exploitation.
During the campaign, then candidate Biden stated that the United States could take in 2M immigrants (illegal). Some say Biden promised a home for every child coming into the U.S. If that’s the case, then how can he explain we can’t provide for our American-born children, but we can provide for illegal unaccompanied minors?
At what point in time will this administration, our congresswoman and advocates of open borders, recognize that the aftermath of their decisions have had a devastating impact worldwide and the impact on a generation of illegal unaccompanied minors has yet to be determined.
We’ve all heard the term “the wheels of justice turn slowly.” Well, the wheels of this administration are rapidly sinking in quicksand and because of their failure to stay the course, thousands of innocent illegal unaccompanied minors are paying the price for their mistakes.