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The Trump administration is looking to pay up to $2.3 billion for a follow-on to its scandal-hit self-deportation scheme that will include stipends for unaccompanied migrant kids who “choose” to remove themselves and “rover” teams roaming the country to enlist detainees on demand, PunchUp can reveal.
“It looks and feels a lot like human trafficking,” Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an award-winning immigration lawyer, told us of the new deal’s terms. “That might sound controversial,” she went on, “but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably not a car horn.” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, a ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, told PunchUp that the contract going after children is “gross and un-American,” and that the wider scheme’s “ballooning cost” is “extremely concerning.”
DHS slipped a 52-page draft of the contract, dated Friday, Aug. 7, into a low-profile notice issued via the federal government’s procurement portal. It’s two-and-a-half times more expensive than the last contract, which topped out at $915 million. DHS walked potential bidders through it last Wednesday, at a 45-minute virtual “industry event” that wasn’t open to the press.
There’s only one mention of kids in the entire draft. “For unaccompanied children,” the document reads, the contractor should “issue stipends only to Government-designated adult recipients.” That’s it. No other rules, standards, or safeguards for minors anywhere else across the 52 pages, much less an explanation of how a child’s departure could count as “voluntary” at all.
