How Migrants Enjoyed Lush Hotel Perks at Your Expense
The U.S. government not only put illegal aliens in hotels at taxpayer expense, but it signed lucrative no-bid contracts to provide migrants with five-star treatment, including laundry service, in-room meal delivery, mattress choices and security attendants.
Under the discontinued program run by a private contractor, hotels were taken over in El Paso, Pecos and Cotulla, Texas, and Chandler and Phoenix in Arizona as the Biden administration scrambled to accommodate a record influx of border crossers.
Migrants got three meals a day via room service (complete with several meat options), 24-hour access to drinks and snacks, babysitting services and other perks.
Family Endeavors Inc. landed no-bid contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite Endeavors having no experience with ventures of such scale.
FAIR reported last year that the Texas nonprofit had previously put a Biden transition team official on its payroll. A mere coincidence?
The details emerged from a 2021 public records request by America First Legal (AFL), a conservative advocacy group. “This is a small window into how the Biden administration is conducting itself,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, senior counselor and director of investigations.
While Texas and Arizona have nearly 40,000 homeless residents, including 3,000 veterans, AFL noted that Endeavors’ lodgers received comfortable accommodations, had “unfettered” access to lawyers and were effectively shielded from the general public. Security guards were assigned not to keep migrants in, but to keep others out.
As a condition of its contracts, Endeavors promised ICE it would never refer to its illegal alien charges as “detainees” or “aliens” — even though they were, legally, both of those.
Some key contractual provisions, such as the prices paid for specific services, were redacted from the records. Room rates were also blocked out, as officials called that sensitive proprietary information.
If recent reports out of New York are any guide, price was no object. Operating a similar program, New York City is housing some of its migrants at a Times Square hotel where rooms run $400 a night.
Bienvenidos! Or whatever.