A nonprofit watchdog group has sued the Biden administration for its failure to turn over documents that explain how massive government contracts to detain migrants at the border were awarded to a former Biden transition team member.
The Washington-based American Accountability Foundation on Wednesday filed two lawsuits against the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security for not releasing documents about contracts each department gave to the nonprofit organization Endeavors last spring. The AAF submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests 11 months ago for all communications in an effort to determine if there was a “quid pro quo” between government officials and a former Biden official, Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, following the Washington Examiner’s investigation in March 2021.
“Aside from the efforts at DHS and HHS to cover up the crisis at our southern border with this housing contract, they also displayed the worst type of government cronyism,” AAF founder Tom Jones, a former Trump White House official, said in a statement. “Instead of ignoring our FOIA requests, DHS and HHS need to come clean to the American people about the clear conflict of interest with this contract, and prioritize sound policy over political favors for their friends.”
The AAF submitted each FOIA request in late April 2021. HHS in October requested clarification on the request, and the AAF responded. In January, HHS disclosed that it had 5,700 pages of materials but has not released them. The DHS confirmed receiving the request in July. In that time, it has not shared any information.
In its rush to respond to the surge of migrant families who came across the southern border shortly after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the administration signed two deals for more than $600 million with Endeavors, an organization that had never received a contract from HHS or the DHS before but was well connected to top government officials.
In March 2021, the Washington Examiner first reported that the DHS’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed an $87 million contract with Endeavors to acquire and oversee the detention of migrant families across half a dozen hotels in Arizona and Texas for six months.
The Washington Examiner reported in April 2021 that HHS awarded Endeavors another contract without letting other organizations compete for it. The $530 million HHS contract paid for additional housing for migrant children in Pecos, Texas.
Government contracts are supposed to be awarded through an open, competitive process outlined in the Federal Acquisition Regulation. ICE later cited “unusual and compelling urgency” as the reason for not going through the normal steps. Additionally, existing ICE facilities meant to hold migrant families went largely unused, as the government opted to spend millions of dollars to house detainees in facilities that were not run by for-profit detention companies, though the hotels that housed people were for-profit.
Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who has been tracking the contracts, said in 2021 that the deals needed to be investigated because of questionable ties between the government agency officials, the Biden administration transition team, and Endeavors. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, launched an investigation in April 2021.
Lorenzen-Strait became Endeavors’s liaison to the federal government in January 2021 and secured the $600 million in contracts within three months. He joined Endeavors after working on the Biden-Harris transition team that handled the implementation of DHS border policies, and he also chose which political appointees would get top jobs at HHS.
Endeavors previously had contracts with several other unrelated government agencies. However, the contracts were valued at less than $1 million, except for one that was $1.4 million. Endeavors took in $43 million in 2018, compared to receiving two government contracts worth more than $600 million in 2021, according to tax documents from that year.
Another ICE official, Claire Trickler-McNulty, used to work for Lorenzen-Strait before he left ICE in 2019. Trickler-McNulty was given full authority at the start of the Biden administration over contracts.
The AAF sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
