5/23/21

By Josh Rubin

Very, very late tonight, as tomorrow’s sun dawns on the child detention tents at Fort Bliss, all of the so-called youth care workers assigned to that prison in the desert will leave for the last time. Every last one of them is being fired. They will go for the last time to the intake tent and they will turn in the barcoded badges they wear around their necks. The badges that say they can have contact with the thousands of child prisoners.

The subcontractor these people worked for is also out the door. A different company will substitute their own workers for these, and these workers, the ones that the children expect to wake up to in the morning, will be gone from their lives forever. This new company made it clear that they will not for one moment entertain the possibility of hiring the current workers. Not a chance.

The old company was a logistics and health contractor based in Alaska. The new one is a bit of a mystery to us, so we are not sure. They appear to be a company that specializes in getting rid of the mold in your basement. Can that be right, we ask ourselves?

What we can be sure of is this: something went wrong. Very wrong. This kind of massive operational shift would never be simply strategic. This kind of disruption has something big behind it.

Something bad happened. Will they tell us what it was? Or will they cover it up?

We are watching.