Parent Of Private Company That Charges Taxpayers $750 A Day For Housing Migrant Children Wants $100 Million IPO

The company lists as a risk the fact that it derives about 88 percent of its revenue from contracts with the federal government.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The legendary Waldorf Astoria in New York is closed right now for renovations, but you can get a damn fine hotel room at its New Orleans counterpart, The Roosevelt, during the height of Mardi Gras season for just $405.62 a night, including taxes. That even comes with a $50 voucher to spend on-property (where I’m told the best Sazerac in town is available). Harvard Law’s annual tuition for the 2018-2019 academic year comes out at the comparative bargain of $174.79 a day when you divide by 365 (and hey, you get the summers off). If you include what Harvard projects you’ll run up during the school year for room, board, a personal allowance, loan fees, the mandatory HUHS student health fee, the Harvard University Student Health Insurance Plan fee, your books and supplies allowance, and a travel allowance, you’re still only averaging $262.47 a day. But you want to lock up a non-violent foreign child in a tent city? That’s going to run you $750 per day.

Yes, that’s right. For the price the U.S. taxpayer is paying a for-profit company to house one migrant child in a temporary tent city, we could just about send three of them to Harvard Law School instead. This, obviously, is very dumb.

Reuters ran a great story last week on the only temporary quarters the government currently has for migrant youths. The facility has about 1,600 migrant children in it, but its population may boom to as many as 2,350 in the coming months. Although the site is situated on federal property located about 35 miles outside of Miami, it is operated by a private for-profit company, Comprehensive Health Services. While it’s not exactly Oliver Twist in there, it’s no Waldorf Astoria either (not a Sazerac in sight, I’m sorry to report). For the teenagers, ages 13-17, school is held in giant white tents. Younger kids sleep in rooms furnished with six sets of bunk beds each, and the separately housed 17-year-olds sleep in what Reuters’ fine reporters diplomatically refer to as “large, long ‘bays’ with 144 beds each” (I believe a building set up to accommodate this type of sleeping arrangement is referred to as a “barracks” in the Queen’s English).

A child who winds up at this facility spends an average of 67 days there, according to officials, before being released. When the kids are released, most of them go to loving family members who want them and have accordingly filed to be their sponsors.

So — let’s do the math on this — at $750 a day, each migrant child who passes through this facility is costing the U.S. taxpayer an average of $50,250. When was the last time the U.S. government spent $50,000 on your kid over the course of two months?

Comprehensive Health Services doesn’t just do unnecessary migrant child detentions — it’s important to diversify. And you (almost) can’t blame this company for raking up all the money the government is virtually spraying at it. You can blame them for the $3,818,881 they agreed to repay the United States in 2017 to settle allegations of double-billing the government and mischarging for medical services on an IRS contract, but that’s another story.

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Anyway, in another little interesting twist, the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, Caliburn International, has filed a Form S-1 Registration Statement and preliminary prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (aided by some of our Biglaw friends) indicating an intention to pursue an initial public offering of Class A common stock. Caliburn has applied to list its common stock under the ticket symbol CLBR on the New York Stock Exchange. The company seeks to raise up to $100,000,000.

Under the risk factors section of its preliminary prospectus, Caliburn lists as a risk the fact that it derives about 88 percent of its revenue from contracts with the federal government. Yeah, no shit. Again, Comprehensive Health Services and Caliburn do things other than operate a migrant child detention facility for profit, but can you imagine that place staying open at $750 a head per day under a Kamala Harris or a Beto O’Rourke administration? Right now, Comprehensive Health Services is getting tens of millions in gross revenue per month just from its Florida facility for migrant children. That might not be so easy if rather than chanting about draining the swamp and then marinating in it for four years like it’s a hot tub, the next president actually does something meaningful about immigration policy and wasteful spending.


Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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