The Vera Institute of Justice secured the contract amid an escalating border crisis
A left-wing nonprofit working to end mass incarceration landed a $171.7 million taxpayer-funded government contract that could potentially hit $1 billion to help unaccompanied minors avoid deportation, Fox News Digital has discovered.
The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based group that supports defunding police and views immigration enforcement agencies as a "threat" to civil liberties, was awarded a Health and Human Services-funded contract in March to provide legal assistance to unaccompanied minors, according to a federal database.
The arrangement lasts until March 2023 but can reach as high as $983 million if renewed until March 2027, the agreement shows. This appears to be the largest federal contract Vera has secured for immigration-related services for any single year dating back to the mid-2000s.
The lofty nine-figure contract came amid an escalating border crisis that saw more than 239,000 migrant encounters in May alone -- a historic high. There were 14,699 encounters of unaccompanied minors in May, an increase from the 12,180 encountered in April and slightly higher than the 14,052 encountered in May 2021.
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there was an average of 692 minors in the agency's custody during May. So far, there have been more than 100,000 unaccompanied minor encounters in fiscal year 2022, which started in October, compared to 147,925 for fiscal year 2021 and 33,239 in fiscal year 2020.
Unaccompanied minors are not being removed under the Title 42 public health order -- which has been used to expel a majority of migrants coming across the southern border due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, they are typically transferred into the custody of Health and Human Services -- and moved across the country to parents or sponsors already in the country.
The Biden administration has scrambled to deal with the massive surge of unaccompanied children, as well as adult migrants and family units, coming across the border. Most recently, the Biden administration signed a five-year contract to start leasing a...
