Migrant Kids Face Danger, Trauma, and Separation at ‘Hellhole’ Border Tent Camp

This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Kaitlin Hess, and was originally published here.

Last spring, Kaitlin Hess paused her day job as a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency to answer the Biden administration’s call for volunteers at the border, where thousands of migrant children were arriving unaccompanied, without adult relatives to care for them.

Hess, a 34-year-old who normally helps clean up hazardous waste sites, was deployed to Fort Bliss, a military base in the desert outside of El Paso where the kids were packed into massive white tents, hastily erected at a cost of more than $600 million by a disaster relief contractor. Hess was assigned to help get the kids processed into the immigration system and united with family members or sponsors in the U.S., but almost immediately she sensed trouble.

“This feels like a prison,” Hess told VICE News she recalled thinking. “That was after a week of being there, I was just like, ‘This is absolutely not right.’”

She saw kids crying and depressed, stuck in the tent city for weeks on end, lost in the system that was supposed to find them safe homes. Hess says children got separated from their relatives amid the confusion, including twin brothers who were split up, with one placed on a bus headed off the military base and the other left behind. The twins were eventually reunited, Hess said, but...

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