a Better Bubble™
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In the past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.
Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.
Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.
While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year.
Pertussis Cases Surged in 2024Cases had been decreasing in the years before the COVID-19 outbreak and dropped further when schools were closed in response to the pandemic.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases, may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the country’s public health infrastructure.
National rates for four major vaccines, which had held relatively steady in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent federal kindergarten vaccination data. Not only have vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella fallen, but federal data shows that so have those for pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio.
In addition, public health experts say that growing pockets of unvaccinated populations across the country place babies and young children in danger should there be a resurgence of these diseases.
Many medical authorities view measles, which is especially contagious, as the canary in the coal mine, but pertussis cases may also be a warning, albeit one that has attracted far less attention.
“This is not just measles,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor in New York City and author of the book “Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health.” “It’s a bright-red warning light.”
At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.
“There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates,” said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah.”
Measles Vaccination Rates in Most States Were Below Herd Immunity in 2023 Data is for school year 2013-14 through 2023-24. The CDC recommends a vaccination rate of at least 95% to achieve herd immunity, to help prevent outbreaks and to protect communities. Montana is not categorized as "below herd immunity in 2023" because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica) Pertussis Vaccination Rates Decreased in Most States Between 2013 and 2023 Note: Decrease means that the rate in school year 2013-14 was higher than the rate in school year 2023-24. If no data was reported for 2013-14, data from the next earliest year was used. Montana is not categorized as a state where the vaccination rate decreased because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)But statewide figures alone don’t provide a full picture. Tucked inside each state are counties and communities with far lower vaccination rates that drive outbreaks.
For example, the whooping cough vaccination rate for kindergartners in Washington state in 2023-24 was 90.2%, slightly below the U.S. rate of 92.3%, federal data shows. But the statewide rate for children 19 to 35 months last year was 65.4%, according to state data. In four counties, that rate was in the 30% range. In one county, it was below 12%.
“My concern is that there is going to be a large outbreak of not just measles, but other vaccine-preventable diseases as well, that’s going to end up causing a lot of harm, and possibly deaths in children and young adults,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, a professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has spent her career studying vaccines. “And it’s completely preventable.”
The dramatic cuts to public health funding and staffing could heighten the risk. And the elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, to the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, several experts said, has only compounded matters.
The Trump administration has eliminated 20,000 jobs at agencies within HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s public health agency. And late last month, the administration also cut $11 billion from state and local public health agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks; the administration said the money was no longer necessary after the end of the pandemic.
Several city and county public health officials had to move quickly to lay off nurses, epidemiologists and disease inspectors. Some ceased vaccination clinics, halted wastewater surveillance programs and even terminated a contract with the courier service that transports specimens to state labs to test for infectious diseases. One Minnesota public health agency, which had provided 1,400 shots for children at clinics last year, immediately stopped those clinics when the directive arrived, court records show.
A federal judge temporarily barred HHS from enacting the cuts, but the ruling, which came more than a week after the grants were terminated, was too late for programs that had already been canceled and employees who had already been laid off. Lawyers for HHS have asked the judge to reconsider her decision in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Department of Education to terminate grants for teacher training while that case is being argued in lower courts. The judge in the HHS case has not yet ruled on the motion.
But in tiny storefronts and cozy homes, at school fairs and gas stations, many residents in West Texas, near where the measles outbreak has taken hold, appear unfazed.
“I don’t need a vaccine,” one man sitting on his porch said recently. “I don’t get sick.”
“It’s measles. It’s been around forever,” said a woman making her way to her car. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
When asked why they weren’t planning on vaccinating their baby, a husband walking alongside his wife who was 27 weeks pregnant simply said, “It’s God’s will.”
Seminole last month. Many residents in West Texas appear unfazed by the measles outbreak.In word and deed, Kennedy has sown doubt about immunizations.
In response to the measles outbreak, Kennedy initially said in a column he wrote for Fox News that the decision to vaccinate is a “personal one.” HHS sent doses of vitamin A alongside vaccines to Texas, and Kennedy praised the use of cod liver oil. Only the vaccine prevents measles.
About a week later, in an interview on Fox News, while Kennedy encouraged vaccines, he said he was a “freedom of choice person.” At the same time, he emphasized the risks of the vaccine.
Only after the second measles death in Texas did Kennedy post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
But even that is not the unequivocal message that the head of HHS should be sending, said Ratner, the infectious diseases doctor in New York. It is, he said, a tepid recommendation at best.
“It gives the impression that these things are equivalent, that you can choose one or the other, and that is disingenuous,” he said. “We don’t have a treatment for measles. We have vitamin A, which we can give to kids with measles, that decreases but doesn’t eliminate the risk of severe outcomes. It doesn’t do anything for prevention of measles.”
In the past, Kennedy has been a fierce critic of the vaccine. In a foreword to a 2021 book on measles released by the nonprofit that he founded, Kennedy wrote, “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”
A spokesperson for HHS said, “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency and pro-accountability.” Kennedy, the spokesperson said, responded to the measles outbreak with “clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles” and under his leadership, the CDC updated its pediatric patient management protocol for measles to include physician-administered vitamin A.
Kennedy, the spokesperson added, “is uniquely qualified to lead HHS at this pivotal moment.”
Late last month, leaders at the CDC ordered staff to bury a risk assessment that emphasized the need for vaccines in response to the measles outbreak — in spite of the fact the CDC has long promoted vaccinations as a cornerstone of public health. While a CDC spokesperson acknowledged that vaccines offer the best protection from measles, she also repeated a line Kennedy had used: “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”
Among the approximately 2,400 jobs eliminated at the CDC was a team in the Immunization Services Division that partnered with organizations to promote access to and confidence in vaccines in communities where coverage lagged.
The National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, recently ended funding for studies that examine vaccine hesitancy. In early April, researchers, the American Public Health Association and one of the largest unions in the country sued the NIH and its director, Jay Bhattacharya, along with HHS and Kennedy, alleging they terminated grants “without scientifically-valid explanation or cause.” The government hasn’t filed a response in the case.
The NIH cancellation notices stated that the agency’s policy was not to prioritize research that focuses on “gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.”
“These grants are being canceled in the midst of an outbreak, a vaccine-preventable outbreak,” said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor at George Mason University who has spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. “We need to better understand why people are not accepting vaccines now more than ever. This outbreak is still spreading.”
That vaccines prevent diseases is settled science. For decades, there was a societal understanding that getting vaccinated benefited not only the person who got the shot, but also the broader community, especially babies or people with weakened immune systems, like those in chemotherapy.
An investment in public health and a sustained, large-scale approach to vaccines is what helped the country declare the elimination of the measles in 2000, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
But she has watched both deteriorate over the last few months. Nearly every morning since notices of the federal funding cuts began going out to local public health agencies, she has woken up to texts from panicked public health workers. She has led daily calls with local health departments and sat in on multiple emergency board meetings.
Freeman has compiled a list of more than 100 direct consequences of the cuts, including one rural health department in the Midwest that can no longer carry out immunization services. That’s vital because there are no hospitals in the county and all public health duties fall to the health department.
“It’s relentless,” she said. “It feels like a barrage and assault on public health.”
Vaccines were available at the health department in Lubbock, Texas, last month.More than 1,600 miles away from Washington, D.C., in Lubbock, Texas, the director of the city’s health department, Katherine Wells, sighed last week when she saw the most recent measles numbers. She would have to alert her staff to work late again.
“There’s a lot of cases,” she said, “and we continue to see more and more cases.”
She didn’t know it at the time, but that night would mark the state’s second measles death this year. An earlier death in February was the country’s first in a decade. Both children were not vaccinated.
Kennedy said he traveled to Gaines County to comfort the family who lost their 8-year-old daughter and while there met with the family of the 6-year-old girl who died in February.
He also visited with two local doctors he described as “extraordinary healers,” he said in his post on X. The men, he claimed, have “treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children” using aerosolized budesonide — typically used to prevent symptoms of asthma — and clarithromycin — an antibiotic. Medical experts said neither is an effective measles treatment.
State health officials have traced about two-thirds of the measles cases in Texas to Gaines County, which sits on the western edge of the state.
Seminole, one of the county’s only two incorporated towns, has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak, with Tina Siemens acting as a community ambassador of sorts.
Seminole has become the center of the measles outbreak.Siemens, a tall woman with glasses and a short blonde bob, runs a museum that combines the area’s Native American history and Mennonite community with traditional skills like calligraphy and canning fruit.
On a recent Tuesday, atop the museum’s dark coffee table, notes scrawled onto white paper listed the latest shipments of vitamin C and Alaskan cod liver oil.
The supplies, Siemens said, were for one of the local doctors who met with Kennedy.
As measles tears through the community, Siemens said families have to decide whether to get vaccinated.
“In America, we have a choice,” she said, echoing Kennedy’s messaging. “The cod liver oil that was flown in, the vitamin C that was flown in, was a great help.”
Tina SiemensDr. Philip Huang, director and health authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, is working to keep the measles outbreak from reaching his community, just five hours east of Seminole. He wrote letters to the public school superintendents and leaders of private schools that had large numbers of unvaccinated or undervaccinated students offering to set up mobile vaccine clinics for them.
“Overall, the rates can look OK,” he said, “but when you’ve got these pockets of unvaccinated, that’s where the vulnerability lies.”
Huang has had to lay off 11 full-time employees, 10 temporary workers and cancel more than 50 vaccine clinics following the HHS cuts. The systemic dismantling of the CDC and other federal health agencies, he said, will have a grave and lasting impact.
“This is setting us back decades,” Huang said. “Everyone should be extremely concerned about what’s going on.”
Across the country, pediatricians are petrified, said Dr. Susan Kressly, who serves as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the country.
“Many of us are losing sleep,” Kressly said. “If we lose that progress, children will pay the price.”
She’s carefully watching the spread of several vaccine-preventable diseases, including an increase in whooping cases that far outpace the typical peaks seen every few years. Although the whooping cough vaccine isn’t as effective as the ones for measles and protection wanes over time, the CDC says it remains the best way to prevent the disease.
Babies under the age of 1 are among the most at risk of severe complications from whooping cough, including slowed or stopped breathing and pneumonia, according to the CDC. About one-third of infants who get whooping cough end up in the hospital. Newborns are especially vulnerable because the CDC doesn’t recommend the first shot until two months. That’s why experts recommend pregnant mothers and anyone who will be around the baby to get vaccinated.
The number of whooping cough cases dropped significantly during the pandemic, but it exploded in recent years. In 2021, the CDC reported 2,116 cases; last year, there were 35,435.
The numbers this year appear set to eclipse 2024. So far in 2025, 7,111 cases have been reported, which is more than double this time last year. Cases tend to spike in the summer and fall, which adds to experts’ concern about high numbers so early in the year.
States on the Pacific Coast and in the Midwest have reported the most cases this year, with Washington leading the country with 742 cases so far, more than five times as many as at this time last year.
The Washington child who died of whooping cough had no underlying medical conditions, according to a spokesperson for the Spokane Regional Health District. The death was announced in February but occurred in November.
While Washington’s overall vaccination rate for whooping cough has remained relatively steady over the last decade at around 90%, pockets of low vaccination rates have allowed the disease to take root and put the wider community at risk, said Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, a pediatrician and chief health officer of the Washington State Department of Health.
This is the time to strengthen the public health system, he said, to build trust in those areas and make it easier for children to get their routine vaccines.
“But instead, we’re seeing the exact opposite happen,” he said. “We’re weakening our public health system, and that will put us on a path towards more illness and shorter lives.”
Washington was one of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued HHS and Kennedy following the $11 billion cuts, which rescinded approximately $118 million from the state. Doing so, the state said in court records, would impact 150 full-time employees and cause an immediate reduction in the agency’s ability to respond to outbreaks.
Washington’s Care-A-Van, a mobile health clinic that travels across the state to provide vaccinations, conduct blood pressure screenings and distribute opioid overdose kits, was a key element in the department’s vaccination efforts.
But that, too, has been diminished.
An alert on the department’s website cataloged the impact.
“Attention,” it began.
As a result of the unexpected decision to terminate grant funding, “all Care-A-Van operations have been paused indefinitely, including the cancellation of more than 104 upcoming clinics across the state.”
The department had anticipated providing approximately 2,000 childhood vaccines as part of that effort.
The frustration came through in Kwan-Gett’s voice. Many people think that federal cuts to public health mean shrinking the federal workforce, he said, but those clawbacks also get passed down to states and cities and counties. The less federal support that trickles down to the local level, the less protected communities will be.
“It really breaks my heart,” he said, “when I see children suffering from preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles when we have the tools to prevent them.”
Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Update, April 11, 2025: After this story was prepared for publication, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted on a federal procurement website that it had awarded a new contract worth up to $3.8 billion to Deployed Resources to operate a migrant detention camp on Fort Bliss. It is the largest contract the company has received and the first time ICE is moving ahead with plans to detain thousands of people arrested in the U.S. on military bases in tents before they are deported.
In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasn’t there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.
The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.
In Trump’s second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.
Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to shifting government policies and priorities in immigration enforcement.
Starting in 2016, to help respond to spikes in immigrant crossings that had periodically overwhelmed border stations, Deployed began setting up tent encampments to ease the overcrowding. These temporary structures served as short-term emergency waystations, which several former officials said provided flexibility that the U.S. needed. Many of those arriving — including families and unaccompanied children — were turning themselves in, hoping to be released into the U.S. to apply for asylum. In all, the company has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents, according to an analysis of contracting data by ProPublica.
Since taking office in January, Trump has cracked down on asylum, pushing border crossings to record lows. Last month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it no longer needed the tent facilities run by Deployed.
Instead, ProPublica found, the military will now be contracting with Deployed to use one of those border facilities to house people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In March, one of the company’s tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the president’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasn’t posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the “incumbent contractor,” the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site — which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults — on March 10.
As immigration raids escalate, detention space in the country’s existing network of permanent ICE prisons is filling up. There are currently around 48,000 immigrants locked up across the country, levels not seen since 2019. Deportations are happening at a slower pace than ICE arrests, according to data shared with ProPublica, so the administration is turning to companies that can quickly set up facilities.
As it looks to expand its capacity, the agency “is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements,” said ICE spokesman Miguel Alvarez.
Yet using tents to house thousands of people arrested by ICE is fundamentally different from using them to house recent border crossers, many of whom weren’t supposed to be held for more than a few days, seven current and former DHS officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations told ProPublica.
They said it would be the first time these tent camps would be used for ICE detainees in the U.S. and that it was unclear how they could be constructed to meet the agency’s basic health and safety requirements. These include separate areas for men and women and dedicated zones for families, as well as space to segregate those who are potentially violent, and private meeting areas for lawyers and their clients. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved in the contracts.
“People that you’ve ripped out of the community, people you’ve arrested, people who want to get back to their children, people who are scared, are going to behave differently than the border crossing population,” said one former ICE official. “You have a lot more fear in the population.”
“It would take a remarkable degree of innovation from a contractor,” said another former DHS official, adding, “It would also be incredibly expensive.”
At a border security conference this week, ICE Acting Assistant Director for Operations Support Ralph Ferguson said that Deployed Resources was modifying the CBP tents in El Paso by adding more rigid structures inside, which he said would make them more secure. Deployed got an additional contract for up to $5 million to provide unarmed guards at the El Paso facility, according to a public notice posted in late March.
The company did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, Deployed says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere” and describes itself as “the first-choice provider” for government contracts.
Deployed was also one of the companies interested in operating an immigrant detention camp on the nearby Fort Bliss military base, according to government documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the contracting process. ICE was seeking proposals from vendors last month for a 1,000-bed camp that could grow to 5,000 beds, housing women and men, including those deemed high security risks, as well as families with small children. The contractor would be responsible for separating those groups and preventing escapes, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.
The plans are “a recipe for disaster,” said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.
“All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones — the list goes on — all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel,” Cho said.
Connections and ContractsSince 2016, Deployed Resources has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on providing CBP with immigration tent structures to help with sudden influxes of immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the contractor set up temporary tent courts for people forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. The company also earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the Biden years operating emergency detention facilities for unaccompanied minors that were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Though the value of Deployed Resources isn’t publicly known, county real estate records attest to the wealth its owners, Stapleton and Napior, have amassed in the detention business.
In the spring of 2019, shortly after the company landed what was then its biggest immigration contract — a $92 million no-bid award to run two tent facilities in Texas — Stapleton purchased a $5.7 million condo in Naples, Florida. Nearly three years and more than $1 billion in contracts later, he upgraded to a $15 million home a block away from the shore. Napior snapped up a $9 million beachside property near Sarasota, Florida, in 2023. Stapleton did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Napior said he did not comment to the press and then hung up.
After the meeting at Bonnaroo in 2005, Deployed later hired the former FEMA employee who had checked out its facilities there and to win emergency management contracting work at the agency before moving into immigration detention. In court filings, Deployed said that the meeting did not lead to its FEMA work.
Deployed went on to hire additional former DHS officials over the years, expanding its connections to the federal agencies with which it does business. With a second Trump administration poised to crack down further on the flow of immigrants to the southern border — a potential threat to Deployed’s core business — the company hired several former ICE leaders, according to online searches and current and former officials.
A month after Trump’s victory, former ICE field office director Sean Ervin announced he was joining Deployed as a senior adviser for strategic initiatives. He had previously overseen removal operations across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The head of field operations for ICE Miami, Michael Meade — an 18-year agency veteran — also joined Deployed that month, according to their profiles on LinkedIn. Meade and Ervin did not respond to requests for comment.
Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the company’s contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.
A review by Congress’ Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the company’s 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didn’t need to feed people it wasn’t holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.
A separate whistleblower lawsuit in New Hampshire brought by a former DHS official who worked for Deployed accuses the company of cutting corners on training its staff to detect and report sexual abuse of children in facilities it set up to house unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. In court filings, Deployed said it “vigorously disputes the allegations” and has moved to dismiss the suit.
Construction crews work on an immigrant holding facility in Tornillo, Texas, in 2019. Deployed Resources was contracted to build and provide support services for the 2,500-person detention center, but it closed in 2020 after months of low occupancy. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.
Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.
“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.
Now, with even more money to be spent on immigration detention, Deployed is just one of the companies hoping to benefit. In addition to Fort Bliss more than 10 military sites around the country are being considered for ICE detention facilities, according to a DHS document shared with ProPublica. The New York Times previously reported on elements of the plan.
The Fort Bliss contracting process has proceeded mostly out of public view, and it’s not clear if the project would go forward or fall under the larger $45 billion plan to expand immigration detention. In March, representatives from at least 10 companies, including Deployed Resources, toured Fort Bliss with DHS officials to survey the site, said two people familiar with the visit. Also there were private prison giants The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the sources said.
The GEO Group’s leadership and allied political action groups donated more than $1 million to Trump’s reelection effort, according to a review by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington watchdog group. On its most recent earnings call, GEO’s CEO said Trump’s immigration agenda was an “unprecedented opportunity” for the firm. CoreCivic — which donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee — has also spoken about the business opportunities. After Trump’s election, stock prices for both companies jumped.
CoreCivic said it is in “regular contact” with government agencies “to understand their changing needs” but said that it does not comment on contracts it is seeking. Its contribution to inauguration events was “consistent with our past practice of civic participation” supporting both parties. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Deployed Services has largely eschewed political donations, sticking to its strategy — also used by GEO and CoreCivic — of hiring former high-ranking government officials.
A few weeks ago Deployed scored another high-profile ICE hire: Marlen Pineiro joined Deployed after 40 years in government, including more than a decade in ICE’s Senior Executive Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. At a border security conference this week, where several former high-ranking DHS employees hired by Deployed were gathered among industry vets and Trump immigration officials, Pineiro declined an interview request from a ProPublica reporter.
But on LinkedIn, the congratulations rolled in. The acting head of ICE under Trump, Todd Lyons, posted: “Great news.” Two other senior ICE officials who had also recently joined Deployed commented: “Welcome aboard.”
“Let’s sail away,” Pineiro replied. “Woohooo see you soon.”
Note: ProPublica analyzed transaction-level contract data from usaspending.gov for this story. Contract amounts reported are federal obligations over the life of a contract or group of contracts. In the case of the recently announced Department of Defense award to Deployed Resources, the contract is new and worth up to $140 million.
Perla Trevizo contributed reporting and Kirsten Berg contributed research.
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Upended, a sculpture installation by multi-disciplinary artist Judith Shaw. This is Shaw’s second solo exhibition with Bruno David Gallery. ‘Upended’ is part of […]
The post Judith Shaw: Upended appeared first on Explore St. Louis.
stLouIST