A federal judge in San Diego will hear an update today on the government's effort to reunite young immigrant children who were taken from their families at the U.S. Mexico border. Many of those children are being held in privately run shelters detaining immigrant children in the U.S. has grown to a billion dollar industry. According to an analysis by The Associated Press here's some numbers for you. More than 11000 800 children are currently housed in 90 facilities operating in 15 states. Among the operators of those facilities Southwest Key is the largest recipient of taxpayer funds. It operates at least two detention centers in El Cajon and lemon grove. Over the past decade the organization has received one point four billion dollars in grant funding to operate its shelters across the country according to the analysis AP data journalist Larry Finn joins me now with more on this story. Larry welcome. Hello Larry. All of this funding comes from federally awarded grants through a program that's run by the Department of Health and Human Services. How does this program work. The Department of Health and Human Services puts out a public call for grants under a specific program code unaccompanied alien children. There are five grants at least in the last proposal period. And they are announcements for a variety of child welfare services. So each particular grant that you can apply for depends on what responsibilities you think your organization can do. They include long term foster care secure shelter services and regular shelter services. In addition to therapeutic services each grant sort of uses its funding budget and then awards those funds to all organizations to operate and provide these various child welfare services. And since the program's creation there's been sort of this overall long term increase in the amount of money that they've had to award to operate is to provide all of these services. What can you tell us about some of the organizations that have received this funding. A lot of them are faith based organizations or similar nonprofits. They operate in charity. A lot of them actually already operate in this space you know providing maybe foster care or child welfare services. And you know sheltering these unaccompanied migrant children is simply one part of their responsibilities that they already do a lot of these organizations also operate in sort of almost a federated model where you know you will see social services from a larger faith organization and then there's a specific one that will maybe be in charge of handling unaccompanied migrant children. Are there also for profit companies in this space. They are eligible. I don't think that we've focused on the distinction in our reporting about for profit versus non-profit. The biggest ones that I've looked at tend to be nonprofits. Now there are two shelters for migrant children that KPP has reported on in El Cajon and lemon grove and they are operated by a group called Southwest KY. What can you tell us about this organization Southwest Key as you've noted is one of the largest recipients of grant funding for this program. In fact in fiscal year 2018 over 500 million dollars to them compared to 20 and 86 million the year before. So you can already see that a lot of the money that they have received is coming from recent times from some data that we've collected. They now operate at least 28 shelters throughout the Southwest. So you can sort of see that they have become the biggest player and a lot of that is from recent years. Now you write that this program has morphed into a billion dollar industry over the last decade. Some of that is due to the Trump administration perhaps but some of it is also some of this growth happened under President Obama. Give us a sense of how this funding has grown over the years. Right. So actually starting from the very beginning the amount of money flowing into this program wasn't nearly as high as it is now. But the last clear signal was actually in 2014 during the you know the crisis back then when there was a large surge in unaccompanied children and woman from the Northern Triangle El Salvador Guatemala and Honduras and they're pretty much every organization and in total the grant funding numbers show that you know that was a huge surge in funding for these services. Clearly now in recent years we're seeing you know just now the latest version of this crisis where we're seeing these funding numbers exceeding pretty much every year before. Now Larry we know from reports that some of these shelters have been shut down following charges of abuse. What can you tell us about how the government investigates these organizations to make sure that they're operating safe facilities for children. The grant application procedure makes it clear that only providers who are already licensed by state licensing agencies are eligible. So I don't actually know any of the details of specifically how the government investigates. But in principle the only people who are allowed to be acting in this space are people who have already been certified. Now the government is preparing to award even more grants later this year isn't that right. I believe so. The most recent period grants have been closed out. So you know the app they're no longer receiving applications for that period of grants. But I believe it is expected that they will then issue a new round of grant proposals. Do we know why this industry has grown so much over the past decade. Is it because more immigrant children are coming to the United States illegally. That's hard to say. What I do know is that Steven Wagner the acting assistant secretary for the Administration of Children and Families has already told us that. This system was never intended to be a massive foster care system that the way it is now. You know at this point it is de facto acting as this extremely large foster care system that as we know costs you know a billion dollars per year to operate. Larry Fehn is a data journalist with The Associated Press. Larry thank you. Thank you.
Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.
Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.
Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
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They are being held while their parents await immigration proceedings or, if the children arrived unaccompanied, are reviewed for possible asylum themselves.
In May, the agency issued requests for bids for five projects that could total more than $500 million for beds, foster and therapeutic care, and "secure care," which means employing guards. More contracts are expected to come up for bids in October.
HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said the agency will award bids "based on the number of beds needed to provide appropriate care for minors in the program."
The agency's current facilities include locations for what the Trump administration calls "tender age" children, typically under 5. Three shelters in Texas have been designated for toddlers and infants. Others — including in tents in Tornillo, Texas, and a tent-and-building temporary shelter in Homestead, Florida — are housing older teens.
Over the past decade, by far the largest recipients of taxpayer money have been Southwest Key and Baptist Child & Family Services, AP's analysis shows. From 2008 to date, Southwest Key has received $1.39 billion in grant funding to operate shelters; Baptist Child & Family Services has received $942 million.
RELATED: Lawmakers Battle Over Migrants Crossing Border Illegally
A Texas-based organization called International Educational Services also was a big recipient, landing more than $72 million in the last fiscal year before folding amid a series of complaints about the conditions in its shelters.
The recipients of the money run the gamut from nonprofits, religious organizations and for-profit entities. The organizations originally concentrated on housing and detaining at-risk youth, but shifted their focus to immigrants when tens of thousands of Central American children started arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years.
They are essentially government contractors for the Health and Human Services Department — the federal agency that administers the program keeping immigrant children in custody. Organizations like Southwest Key insist that the children are well cared for and that the vast sums of money they receive are necessary to house, transport, educate and provide medical care for thousands of children while complying with government regulations and court orders.
The recent uproar surrounding separated families at the border has placed the locations at the center of the controversy. A former Wal-Mart in Texas is now a Southwest Key facility that's believed to be the biggest child immigrant facility in the country, and First Lady Melania Trump visited another Southwest Key location in Phoenix.
Advocates on both sides of the aisle criticize the growing number of kids housed in government shelters, but they have different reasons — and they blame each other.
"You can't put a child in a prison. You cannot. It's immoral," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has been visiting shelters.
Gillibrand said the shelters will continue to expand because no system is in place to reunite families separated at the border. "These are real concerns that the administration has not thought through at all," she said.
But President Donald Trump says cracking down on immigration ultimately can lead to spending less money and having fewer immigrants in government custody.
"Illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars," he said at a recent rally. "So imagine if we could spend that money to help bring opportunity to our inner cities and our rural communities and our roads and our highways and our schools."
In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance policy" directing authorities to arrest, jail and prosecute anyone illegally crossing the border, including people seeking asylum and without previous offenses. As a result, more than 2,300 children were turned over to HHS.
In a recently released report, the State Department decried the general principle of holding children in shelters, saying it makes them inherently vulnerable.
"Removal of a child from the family should only be considered as a temporary, last resort," the report said. "Studies have found that both private and government-run residential institutions for children, or places such as orphanages and psychiatric wards that do not offer a family-based setting, cannot replicate the emotional companionship and attention found in family environments that are prerequisites to healthy cognitive development."
Some in the Trump administration describe the new policy as a "deterrent" to future would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers fleeing violence and abject poverty in Central America, Mexico and beyond.
RELATED: Immigrant Parents Happy But Traumatized After Kids Returned
But Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families — an HHS division — said the policy has exposed broader issues over how the government can manage such a vast system.
"It was never intended to be a foster care system with more than 10,000 children in custody at an immediate cost to the federal taxpayer of over $1 billion dollars per year," Wagner said in a statement.
The longer a child is in government custody, the potential for emotional and physical damage grows, said Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"The foundational relationship between a parent and child is what sets the stage for that child's brain development, for their learning, for their child health, for their adult health," Kraft said.
"And you could have the nicest facility with the nicest equipment and toys and games, but if you don't have that parent, if you don't have that caring adult that can buffer the stress that these kids feel, then you're taking away the basic science of what we know helps pediatrics."
A judge in California has ordered authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days — and the government has completed more than 50 of the reunions of children under 5 by Thursday.
