A Single No-Bid Contract Built 2,000 Shelter Beds. The Whole System Holds 1,796 Children Today.

On March 13, 2021, a Texas nonprofit called Family Endeavors, Inc. emailed the Department of Health and Human Services an unsolicited proposal to run an emergency shelter for unaccompanied migrant children.▸ Three days later, with no competing bids, HHS's Administration for Children and Families (ACF) signed a $529 million contract for a 2,000-bed facility in Pecos, Texas — a number ACF had not yet checked against anything. According to a February 2026 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General, the agency's own price analysis — completed three months after the contract was signed — found that $529 million was more than double ACF's $245 million estimate of what the work should have cost. Five years later, the Office of Refugee Resettlement's own published data shows the entire national shelter network, every facility combined, holding fewer children than that one contract alone was built to hold.

The Unaccompanied Alien Children Program is HHS's legal obligation: when Customs and Border Protection refers a child traveling without a parent or guardian, the Office of Refugee Resettlement must feed, shelter, and provide medical care until the child can be safely released to a sponsor.▸ In FY2021, arrivals surged and ORR opened 14 temporary "emergency intake sites" — hastily licensed facilities meant to hold the overflow until permanent, state-licensed beds caught up. The Endeavors site in Pecos was one of them.

Federal contracting rules require a price analysis before a sole-source award, specifically to confirm the price is fair and reasonable.▸ The OIG audit found ACF could not produce documentation that any such analysis was done before the Endeavors contract was signed. ACF also skipped a required evaluation of whether Endeavors was even a "responsible" contractor capable of performing the work, and the contract file itself was missing required pre-award records. Before this award, ACF's total prior relationship with Endeavors was a single $4 million home-study grant. The $529 million contract was modified 15 times, stretching performance to May 15, 2022 and raising the ceiling to $795.4 million. As of February 3, 2025, ACF had recorded $713.9 million in actual expenditures against it — and as of March 14, 2025, nearly three years after the work ended, the contract still had not been administratively closed out.

The surge that justified emergency shelters in 2021 has not persisted.▸ ORR's own facts-and-data page, current as of July 7, 2026, reports that on the last day of June 2026 the entire national network — every state-licensed shelter, transitional foster home, and remaining influx facility combined — held 1,796 children in 7,006 operational beds, a 26% average occupancy rate. That is fewer children, nationwide, across every facility the program runs, than the 2,000 beds ACF contracted for at the single Pecos site alone. Average length of care has also stretched: ORR's data shows children who left care in June 2026 had waited an average of 194 days, and the FY2025 annual average length of care was 117 days — up from 30 days in FY2024 — meaning the network is holding fewer children for far longer, not fewer children because fewer need help.

Figures are drawn from two independent primary sources — an HHS Inspector General audit and ORR's own published program data — each cited at first use; see Sources for exact reporting periods.