11. There were 2,301 children sheltered at Fort Bliss on Aug. RDI’s contract was most recently extended through Sept. The Biden administration didn’t declare a national emergency, but the administration selected Fort Bliss and a dozen other locations for so-called “emergency intake” shelters to respond to a sharp increase in the number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border seeking asylum or refuge. Its past government contracts and delivery orders totaled $336 million, many of them garnered during the pandemic. It would build a campus of tent dormitories for up to 5,000 boys and girls, house, feed, supervise and care for them and find their adult sponsor in the U.S.įor the job, it would be paid almost a billion dollars.įederal records show a contract that ballooned to $996 million - a deal now worth nearly three times all of RDI’s previous federal work, ever. It would care for children who had surrendered to Border Patrol, without their parents or a legal guardian, at the U.S.-Mexico border. It wouldn’t be housing hurricane first responders or sheltering cruise ship tourists sick with COVID-19. It supplied mobile morgues to hold the dead.īut from the trailer parked near sprawling white tents it erected on the El Paso Army base, RDI was taking on a task unlike any that appeared in its 106 other federal contracts in the public record. In 2020, it set up quarantine shelters for Health and Human Services, providing meals, laundry service and bus transportation.

It put up base camps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The company, Rapid Deployment Inc., had a history of doing business with the U.S. There was little that showed who managed a Fort Bliss shelter for migrant children but a sheet of paper taped to a trailer with three letters in black type: RDI. This article features Government Accountability Project’s disclosures and was originally published here. Fort Bliss migrant children shelter contractor receives nearly $1B contract despite mismanagement allegations

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