Undercover videos obtained by Townhall Media expose chaos within the Joe Biden administration, while a scandal of their own making affected hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children (UACs) who came across the southern border.
Nearly 450,000 UACs came into America during Biden’s four years in office, an astounding surge that federally funded groups were not equipped to handle. Groups got money but allegedly never received a child to process. Nearly half of the calls to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) were unanswered or dropped.
“In the Biden administration … it felt political,” Natasha Wright, supervisory senior oversight advisor for ORR, said, “versus like, I’m truly here to help kids and do what we need to do.”
Wright alleged a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jesse Boyer, “had her hands in all this stuff and would clear language.” Wright said she would push back on how Boyer would reframe reports. “And I’m like, ‘Changing that is an outright lie,’ or, ‘That’s not correct, but…’”
“Just outright like, trying to spin, completely, the narrative,” Wright alleged. She claimed Boyer manipulated reports about sexual abuse in facilities.
Boyer is now vice president of policy and strategic initiatives for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, according to the group’s website.
Boyer did not respond to a request for comment.
According to former Children’s Home of Kingston Chief Human Resources Officer Angela Cacciola, JCCA – a Jewish group whose motto is “Repair the world, child by child” – “They stayed open for two years, funded by ORR, and never took in a kid because they couldn’t fill one particular position.”
In the video, Cacciola estimated “$12 million they had to burn through of government money.”
JCCA did not respond to a request for comment.
“Some of the workforce was crappy because we were hiring ‘Oh, you’ve got a pulse. Come on in and be a call agent,’” Yolanda Gonzalez, a project manager for The Providencia Group, which handled incoming calls for ORR, said in the video obtained by Townhall Media.
Gonzalez said some of the workers “just got out of high school.”
“Okay, you’re a call agent, but we’re not tracking a lost package here with Target. … We’re really holding people’s lives in that 20 minutes in our hands,” she said, adding that some reporting to Child Protective Services was not done because “we didn’t train properly or they didn’t know, or they didn’t care.”
Darleen Sealey, Senior Administrator on Duty for Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth in New York, said the agency’s IT security was breached, and the perpetrator was able to access information about the children.
“The call volume was unbelievable,” Gonzalez said in the video, adding that the abandonment rate was as high as 50 percent. That is, calls went unanswered, or the callers, who were parents, sponsors, or children themselves, were dropped. The Providencia Group was handling as many as 55,000 calls a month on behalf of ORR.
Carlos Nova, a former lead case manager for Rising Ground, said his agency received a $524 million contract.
“I remember when we first got approved, and we were the pilot program, so we were the first program TPG was taking on to try to get their feet wet and get a sense of what works, what doesn’t,” Nova said, according to the video.
“They said they were going to give us X amount of time to really get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Within three months, we got notified that they were going to expand throughout the entire nation,” he said, indicating the testing phase was incomplete.