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CV NEWS FEED // A Catholic-run facility in Pennsylvania forced migrant children to live in “deplorable” conditions, according to internal Biden administration emails obtained via a Freedom of Access to Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF).
On Saturday, April 10, 2021, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Acting Director Tracy Renaud forwarded a message alleging that children in a Pittsburgh-area facility were living in horrific conditions and being refused basic medical care. USCIS operates under the Department of Homeland Security (HHS).
“We received the message below from one of our detailees who is working at the HHS facility in Pittsburgh,” Renaud wrote. “Is there some way to raise this with your POCs at HHS to see if we can get some assistance in improving conditions?”
The message Renaud shared in the email read in full:
I’m on deployment for the border force. We were first at the hub that’s been on the news in Donna Texas. There are no words for that situation. But then we got shipped out to Pittsburgh to help an HHS facility get set up ahead of gov contracts being written. We are supposed to go somewhere new every two weeks. This place in PA is deplorable. They only have 68 kids but I’d rather be in Donna with the 5,000. They haven’t cleaned a thing in the time it’s been set up. There is shit smeared on the floors. We have begged their admins to have a cleaning service come in but they refuse. Say the 5 year olds can clean themselves. Half the kids on my floor have covid and it’s spreading. They aren’t sectioned off anymore. They are sharing oral thermometers. Everyone on my floor has lice. They treated them then out them back in the same dirty sheets. List goes on. I heard they sent a report up to DHS saying all the measures and precautions they are taking and none of them are true. I don’t know who to complain to. All 16 of us here from DHS have voiced these concerns here and they ignore us. It’s bad. It’s a sesspool and they are making us work in it too and exposing the kids. I thought one of the girls was pregnant. The clinic refused to see her. Kids have 100 fever and aren’t seen by anyone. It’s bad. But HHS is working with holy family institute which has this place Journey of Hope. Literally lice and covid and not one surface has been cleaned in more than two weeks.
And they are furious we won’t complete a ‘spirituality log’ regarding the children’s Christian faith and daily prayers.
I literally walked through flooded toilet water of a covid kid to serve dinner to the kids.We are in this 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. We work 12.5 hour shifts. Every day
I only get one ppe mask and I can only get a new one every 15 days but I’m caring for covid kids for 12.5 hours a day everyday.
One of the recipients of the forwarded message was MaryAnn Tierney, Biden’s acting deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Within minutes, Tierney forwarded Renaud’s message to a number of other Biden administration officials.
“Hello: Please see below,” wrote Tierney:
I believe they are referring to the site run by Sister Linda. The description below is pretty dire. Suggest HHS look into this ASAP as we are also sending children to another facility run by her — PIA.
The facility Tierney referred to is Journey of Hope, operated under government contract by the Holy Family Institute (HFI). Sister Linda Yankoski, a Catholic religious sister, is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and serves as HFI’s CEO.
The initial message suggested that conditions in Yankoski’s facility were worse than in a facility in Donna, Texas. The Texas facility was the subject of a national scandal in the days leading up to the email exchange about HFI’s Journey of Hope program.
As CatholicVote reported at the time:
Many are expressing disgust and anger at the Biden administration after a pool of journalists were finally allowed to tour and report on a migrant facility in Texas Tuesday.
“Reporters toured the temporary border facility in Donna, TX today,” reported CBS’s Nicole Sganga on Twitter. “The Biden admin allowed pooled coverage for the first time. We saw a ‘pod’ designed for 32 migrant children under CDC guidelines now holding 615. The facility is at 1700% pandemic capacity.”
In a series of tweets, Sganga went on to reveal that the conditions in which migrants — including children — are being held are far more inhumane than the Biden administration would have the public believe.
Cindy Huang was one of the officials CC’d in Tierney’s email. Huang “served as the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the end of April 2022,” according to the HHS website.
Huang passed Tierney’s urgent message along – again, within minutes of receiving it.
“Please see this report on HFI run by Sister Linda,” wrote Huang. “Jallyn (head of safety & wellbeing for Artemis) & Ops (Mike/Chris), please call Sister Linda asap to discuss how to remedy this situation.” Huang asked her colleagues to “please report back on the actions needed to address” the situation.
Several other officials replied within an hour of the initial message. One of those in the email chain was Patrick Hernandez, listed on the HHS website as “the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Program Support Center, in the office of the Assistant Secretary for Administration at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).”
Less than an hour and a half after Renaud’s first message, Jallyn Sualog, deputy director for Children’s Programs at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, reported back with a response from an HFI staffer.
Sualog wrote that she had “just spoken to Marnie Weston,” program director for HFI’s refugee facility Journey of Hope, “about the allegations below.”
According to Sualog, Weston’s response was a mixture of admissions and attempts to cast blame on federal workers like the one who sounded the alarm about HFI’s “deplorable” treatment of migrant children.
“Here is what [Weston] has indicated,” Sualog wrote:
- It is part of their expectations of their staff that they clean the children’s bathrooms and the staff bathrooms as well as empty the garbage. Because the site is manned by DHS who has refused to do janitorial work, they’ve had to have their maintenance guy do this. They admit that they need to do a better job of this.
- DHS staff only does light cleaning and does only [sic]
- They do not supply N95 masks for daily use. They provide staff N95 use to be used 20X but provide gowns, gloves, face shield for daily.
- The DHS staff do not do any bathing, changing or cleaning up after young children. They also do not enter bedrooms to assist young children to the bathroom.
- DHS does not do physical care of children with COVID. The program has helped them get access to vaccination (last Thursday) through the County.
- DHS staff have refused to even witness (stand outside and observe interaction with children in rooms)
“DHS staff has been there for almost two weeks (Tuesday),” Sualog explained at the end of her email. HFI’s Journey of Hope program “has requested that they have staff that can provide direct care to these tender age children because they do not have adequate state cleared staff to do so.”
“We need to backfill these staff on Monday as they will be done on Tuesday,” Sualog concluded. “The program has indicated that they have tried to give these volunteers a day off, but there is not enough staff.”
Sualog also personally requested “28 staff who can and will do childcare to be deployed there.”
The newly-revealed emails appear amid mounting public scrutiny of the Bidan administration’s handling of unaccompanied migrant children, tens of thousands of whom have gone missing.
In a hearing before the U.S. House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations last July, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra struggled to explain the administration’s failure to account for an estimated 85,000 unaccompanied minors who had entered the country since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s administration.
“The federal government reports that over 130,000 minors crossed the border in 2022 without parents or guardians,” CatholicVote reported at the time.
In another report, CatholicVote noted that unaccompanied migrant children who go unaccounted for by the federal government
often face trafficking, forced child labor, or simply dropping off the map entirely…
Based on the fate of children who have been found so far, many are probably working underpaid jobs instead of attending school, being exploited by their sponsors for profit, and in danger of being seriously injured or killed in their workplaces.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which in turn is directly responsible for the children. Becerra has frequently described himself as a committed Catholic, despite supporting abortion.
Thomas Jones, president of the AAF (the organization that obtained the emails above) decried the “heartbreaking” treatment of migrant children under the current administration.
“Joe Biden’s border policies have caused an unconscionable explosion of human suffering,” Jones told CatholicVote. “These heartbreaking descriptions of children in horrific conditions highlight consequences of the Biden administration’s radical leftist vision of chaos at the southern border. This humanitarian crisis is worsening daily and must end.”
In September 2021, the same year the above communications about Sister Linda Yankoski’s migrant facility took place, CatholicVote filed a FOIA request for communications between the Biden administration and Catholic-affiliated organizations working with migrant children.
When the Biden administration’s Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security refused to respond, CatholicVote joined with the government watchdog group Judicial Watch in filing a lawsuit against the agencies in February 2022.
“The Biden administration has refused to provide copies of communications between Catholic-affiliated charities and organizations at the border,” CatholicVote President Brian Burch said at the time:
Their lack of transparency and obstruction forced us to file these federal lawsuits. American Catholics deserve to know the full extent of the U.S. government’s role in funding and coordinating with Catholic Church affiliated agencies at the border, and what role these agencies played in the record surge of illegal immigrants over the past year.
The Biden administration has only provided two records productions in response to CatholicVote. Customs and Border Protection released 36 pages with redactions in February 2023, and HHS released 10 pages late the next month.
CatholicVote does not believe the administration has addressed the matter in a timely, comprehensive, or transparent manner.
