The Obama administration paid a Texas-based group more than $182 million to provide shelter services for illegal immigrant children at two military facilities for four months this summer.
The Department of Health and Human Services paid the group, BCFS, nearly $76,000 per child to provide shelter at two 1,200-bed facilities maintained at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Fort Sill Army Base in Oklahoma, according to the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, which received documents laying out the expenses through a Freedom of Information Act request.
An estimated 90,000 UACs entered the U.S. this year, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Federal law requires that — rather than immediate deportation — minors from countries that do not border the U.S. be turned over to the federal health department while they work through the immigration court system.
Expenses for the 1,200-bed Fort Sill facility totaled $104,215,608. Another $77,914,178 was spent to maintain the 1,200-bed Lackland Air Force Base unit.
That works out to $86,846 that American taxpayers paid per bed at the Fort Sill facility, which operated between June 12 and Oct. 18.
According to the documents Judicial Watch received, 30 “Incident Management Team” employees were paid a total of $2,648,800 in total compensation over the four month period. That works out to $88,293 per worker.
Taxpayers paid $64,928 per bed for the Lackland facility between May 18 to Sept. 18.
According to Judicial Watch, BCFS expensed $18.2 million to provide three meals and two snacks per day to the 1,200 UACs and 822 staff at the Fort Sill facility. That comes to $75 on meals per day over the 120-day period. As Judicial Watch notes in their press release, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs around $10 per day to feed the average American teenager.
According to the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System, HHS paid BCFS a total of $288,801,735 in fiscal 2014.
As The Daily Caller found in an investigation earlier this year, BCFS, which was formerly known as Baptist Child & Family Services, failed to properly disclose $210,000 in lobbying expenses it has incurred since 2006. Much of the lobbying activity has been directed at programs to provide services to unaccompanied alien children. BCFS also appears to be the only group providing UAC services that has lobbied the federal government. (RELATED: Group Given Nearly $300 Million To House Child Immigrants)
“It is outrageous that the Obama administration spent nearly $200 million of taxpayer funds to provide illegal alien children with the types of extravagant high-tech equipment and lavish benefits many American families cannot even afford for their own children,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement.
“And very few American workers are bringing home the $80,000 the Obama administration pays the BCFS’s Incident Management Team for just four months’ work. Obama’s lawlessness resulted in an illegal alien “surge” that has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in 2014,” Fitton continued.
Fitton said that because of Obama’s new amnesty plan, which was announced last month and is expected to grant reprieve to up to five million illegal immigrants, he expects similar surges of unaccompanied children and other illegal immigrants in the future.