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Last month, NBC News reported that the Trump administration was exploring warehouses that were designed for clients like Amazon, turning them into detention facilities for immigrants being deported.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was looking at locations in the south, near airports where immigrants are most often deported.
- The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation canceled a nearly $30 million DHS contract for immigrant detention centers after community backlash.
- Tribal Chair Joseph Rupnick apologized and vowed transparency while exploring options to exit the controversial detention facility deal.
- The contract was awarded without open competition and increased from $19 million to nearly $30 million within a month.
The creation of these was assigned to a Native American tribe, until tribal members and Native communities gave them immense backlash for it.
A Native American tribe canceled a DHS immigration facility contract after receiving backlash
Image credits: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation
The tribe, based in Kansas, cancelled a nearly $30 million federal contract linked to immigration detention facilities thereafter.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas confirmed that a newly formed tribal business entity signed the contract in October with the DHS.
The agreement included an early design for immigrant detention centers across the U.S.
Many Native Americans accused the tribe of profiting from policies tied to forced removals. The Prairie Band Potawatomi ancestors were forced from the Great Lakes region to Kansas in the 1830s by the U.S. government.
Tribal Chair Joseph ‘Zeke’ Rupnick addressed the controversy in a video message to tribal members.
He apologized for the “concern, frustration and confusion.” He stressed the tribe is “looking at all options” to exit the contract.
Image credits: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation
“We met with legal counsel immediately, and the process is still under way,” Rupnick said. “We know our Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centers. So we must ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and trauma once done to our people.”
Rupnick promised “full transparency” about the “evolving situation.”
Leaders confirm that the economic development officials who brokered the deal have been fired.
Ray Rice, a 74-year-old tribal member, said many feel betrayed. “We are known across the nation now as traitors and treasonous to another race of people,” Rice said, adding that he and other tribal members were blindsided. “We are brown and they’re brown.”
The contract draws further scrutiny because it was awarded without open competition, which is usually required for large federal contracts. The tribal business involved, KPB Services LLC, was formed earlier this year and is not widely known.
The company was established by a retired U.S. naval officer, Ernest C. Woodward Jr., who is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
His website described him as an entrepreneur and tribal adviser on mergers, capital access, and federal contracts. His consulting firm, registered in Florida in 2017, was delisted two years later for failing to file an annual report, The Daily Mailreported.
The agreement originally carries a value of about $19 million for unspecified “due diligence and concept designs” for processing detention centers. In a month, it was increased to $29.9 million.
Economic development officials who brokered the deal were fired
Image credits: Alon Skuy/Getty Images
Under federal contracting rules, contracts above $30 million require additional justification.
Levi Rickert, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, said he did not know about the plan.
“Native people know oppression. We were forcibly removed from our homelands, locked in Indian boarding schools, confined to reservations,” he wrote in an opinion post for Native News Online.
“Our history is one of systematic attempts by the federal government to erase our culture, our language, our existence. We cannot—we should not—profit from the oppression of others.”
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