Earlier this month, Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, accused his opponent — Xavier Becerra — of directly handing out $4.8 billion in taxpayer money through a deeply questionable no-bid contracting scheme that allegedly left migrant children vulnerable to sex and labor trafficking.

It sounds like Pizzagate, or worse, but the accusation isn’t totally unfounded.

The American taxpayer did, in fact, fund what was essentially the most expensive — and nightmarish — sleepaway camp for immigrant kids in American history.

Pirate Wires dug into one of these “camps.” It cost American taxpayers a grand total of $782 million.

The Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site was a 2,500-bed facility the Department and Health and Human Services (HHS) opened at the Los Angeles County Fairplex in May 2021 to shelter unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the southern border. The children stayed there while HHS processed them for release to vetted “sponsors”— typically relatives or other adults meant to care for them while their immigration cases proceeded.

The whole operation ran for just 203 days, was managed under a no-bid contract (awarded directly, without competition) by Cherokee Nation Management & Consulting (CNMC) — which is owned by the Cherokee Nation, a tribe headquartered in Oklahoma. According to Pomona whistleblowers, CNMC may have released children into the hands of labor and sex traffickers.

Breaking the $782 million down: CNMC received around $707 million through a no-bid contract to set up and run Pomona. HHS then paid the Fairplex another $75.65 million for the site itself. Roughly 8,450 kids passed through the facility, where they each received a cot, meals, clothes, a medical screening, case management, some schooling and recreation, and a ride to their sponsor. Divide the CNMC contract alone by the number of children that passed through the facility, and it comes to $83,656 per child — or $92,608 if you include the separate Fairplex payment. HHS said children at its emergency intake sites spent an average of about two weeks in care, which would put Pomona’s implied cost at roughly $6,615 per kid, per day — or $3.85 million for every day Pomona operated.

“In California, every child goes to sixth grade camp,” Herb Morgan, the Republican candidate for California State Controller, told Pirate Wires in an interview. (For those outside the state: this is a common California rite of passage.) “You get on a bus, you go to the camp with all your classmates. There are adults there that supervise. You do crafts, you shine a rock, you make a wood box, you shoot a bow and arrow.” The two weeks costs $800 to $1,100 total, food and lodging included.

“So the question is,” Morgan asked, “what is this money for?”

And how the hell did the government end up spending nearly $4 million a day on a migrant-child shelter?

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