Human trafficking: Kyle Seraphin speaks with “migrant hotel” NGO whistleblower Carlos Arellano

Transcript.

Kyle Seraphin Show

“Human Trafficking: NYC ‘Migrant Hotel’ Whistleblower Speaks Out”

Wednesday, July 26, 2023 (Carlos Arellano)

Rumble (video): https://rumble.com/v32dld0-nyc-migrant-hotel-whistleblower-carlos-arellano-speaks-out.html

Apple podcast:

 

Show note: “A long conversation with Carlos Arellano who helped manage the largest NYC migrant hotel under government contract. Carlos spoke with our friend Savanah Hernandez and joins us for a long form discussion of WHAT he saw under Trump and Biden escorting unaccompanied minors around the country.”

(Carlos Arellano was employed by an NGO, worked at a processing intake center for Border Patrol, then worked as an escort for unaccompanied alien children, and later was a manager at a “migrant” hotel.)

(5:10)

SERAPHIN: So ladies and gentlemen, we have on the show today Carlos Arellano who is a whistleblower from a … non-government agency … that he was working with. He spent some time working on the border and dealing with migrants who came in and were being transported under the Biden administration….

(Arellano, 31, describes growing up in the Rio Grande Valley area, Spanish is his first language, has extended family members in Mexico he has never met due to the cartel violence there.)

(9:30)

SERAPHIN: Let’s talk about the day-to-day work, what kind of things you were involved in doing, and then we can get into the whistleblower stuff at the end of this. What kind of work did you start doing, and how did you start working in these non-governmental agencies?

ARELLANO: So, I’ve worked in this for a while, under the Trump administration I worked as a detention officer — that’s what the title was but basically it was, ‘hey, sit in the chair, make sure no one walks out the front door, make sure no one comes in without you getting the cleared say-so from the B[order] P[atrol] agent.’ 

That job was at a processing intake center for Border Patrol, in Donna, Texas. I’ve worked as a youth care worker, what it means is you’re a babysitter for all the unaccompanied migrant children. I’ve worked in shelters where — the smallest shetler I worked at was 200 kids, and the largest shelter I worked at was 8,000 kids. 

SERAPHIN: Eight thousand?

(10:50)

ARELLANO: Yeah, eight thousand. And in these shelters you’re basically a babysitter for the migrant children. Meaning, you show up to your shift, they assign you about 8 to 10 kids. You gotta wake them up, and be like, ‘hey guys, breakfast is here, you gotta eat.’

The you gotta get them ready for school. They have teachers who either come in person, or during the Covid era it was through ipads. And you go between math class to science class to reading class. 

And then at a certain time of the day, it’s like, ‘alright, now you guys can play with the PlayStation.’ At these shelters they have PlayStation 5s, Nintendo switches, the latest soccer game, FIFA soccer game.

They have ipads, so they can go on Facebook. And once they got done with class, they could use all those things…. We’d walk them to the outside area, where they could play soccer, basketball, football…

You’re basically a babysitter. You’re just there to make sure they’re not fighting with each other. Cause a lot of the time there was fights. And there was a lot of chaotic situations…. I did that job, that job led me to escorting migrant children which a lot of us finally saw on the news when they captured a few planes on camera in the upstate New York area. I wasn’t on those flights. But they got on the media. They were transporting, I think it was 300 kids that were going to upstate New York.

(12:50)

For that job it’s, you pick up kids on the border and you transfer them …. So my day-to-day there was, you show up to the office, you get a manila folder. The manila folder has files, and it has: child A is going to Florida, child B is going to New York, child C is going to Pennsylvania, and the drop-off point is New York but you’re going to get off, get a rental, drive around to all these states, spread out all these kids where they’re going, get back on the plane, come back, and then do it again.

SERAPHIN: Whoa. I got a couple questions, let me cut in if you don’t mind…. Number one, you just described a lot of technology, you said ipads, up to hundreds of kids in these facilities, all these video game systems, who pays for all that? Where was that money coming from?

(13:48)

ARELLANO: Well, it’s taxpayer money, but the government is doing things where they hand it out to NGOs, and they … wash their hands by saying ‘hey, we’re not doing this,’ because technically they’re not. Because they hand all these large contracts to the NGOs.

And the NGOs, because they don’t want any issues with the kids, they buy them everything they want just to keep them entertained while they’re in custody of the NGO.

So they kids are requesting, ‘hey I wanna see a movie that just came out,’ say they want to see the Barbie movie. The NGO will approve it, and they’ll give the youth care worker a card to purchase it through the iPad, and on the iPad all the kids watch the movie.

Basically anything the children want, they can put in a request for it, it will get approved. Because if you don’t keep the kids entertained, they try to run away. And if they run away, usually these shelters are out in the middle of nowhere, out in the desert area. 

For example, I was in Midland, Texas, I was in Pecos, Texas, out in the El Paso area, and you know if they run away, there’s nothing nearby, they're going to get bitten by a snake or something….

Usually these shelters for these children, they’re somewhere where there’s no one living, they’re in the middle of nowhere, out of sight from everybody. When you go to work, to these shelters, you gotta get on a bus, and the bus takes about an hour to drive all the way inside. There’s no … basically no way for anybody to see them. Unless you’re working there.

(15:35)

SERAPHIN: The obvious question that I have is, where are all their parents?

ARELLANO: So, all these children, they call them UACs, they’re unaccompanied minors. Either their parents are already in the country, or their parents are back in their home country. In a lot of situations I used to get children tell me, “my mom told me she didn’t want me there any more. To come to the U.S. to live with my aunt. She kicked me out of the house.” There would be a kid that was like 13 years old, 12 years old … I’ve heard it all.

A lot of times the child will say, “my mom got held back by the cartel, they’re going to hold her ransom until I pay off for the trip. And the longer I take to pay off, the longer, they’re going to do something to her.” That was … often….

You spend all day with these kids. Even if you’re going to go drop them off to a family member in another state, you’re still at the airport with them, waiting for the connections. And the kids start talking….

It was very common [to hear], “my mom got held back by the cartel, my sister got held back. My sister died along the way here. Something happened to her.” It was always a tragic story. Lately. 

Back then, before the Biden administration, it wasn’t so common. Now it’s crazy situations every day….

(17:45)

SERAPHIN: That’s horrific stuff. Where are these kids coming from, that they’re showing up without parents and their parents are being held up from cartels? What is home to them? What countries?

ARELLANO: When I first started it was the Central American countries… I did the escorting for the Afghan kids, when they took people out of Afghanistan, that was us who took care of that….

We moved unaccompanied Afghan children. It was the weirdest situation ever because the language barrier is there, there’s no way to communicate with them. A lot of times they were crying. It was a mess, to where eventually you would find out that the child from Afghanistan did have their parents come to the country, but somehow they were in Germany still, and somehow the child made it to the U.S. before the parents did. It was a mess. It was a mess….

(19:00)

We started seeing kids … coming from the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, so we would get a lot of kids from China…. 

(Discusses escorting children on flights to Hawaii and California; during COVID-19 restrictions, few flights from Hawaii and restrictions on travel meant escort trip would last 5-6 days)

(23:00)

Usually the escort is the last line of communication that a child has with anyone sort of related with the government. Once the child is handed off from the NGO at the shelter to the escorting person, that’s the last time they talk to anybody. There’s no — there is supposed to be a follow-up call once they’re reunited with their sponsor or family member, but it doesn’t happen. 

It doesn’t happen. Which goes back to, you know, all the kids that are missing.

(23:40)

SERAPHIN: We just showed the article about the bus. Can you tell people what that’s all about? They were left on the bus for five days. What’s the situation on that bus? Who’s there? Who’s in charge? And why were they stuck there for five days.

(23:55)

In 2021, they opened up the emergency influx shelters … as soon as Biden came into office, the numbers just tripled. It used to be, alright guys, today you have 5 kids you’re going to reunify.

When the Biden administration showed up, that year, it became, you guys have 20 kids, or [working] with two other coworkers you’re gonna reunify 30 kids…. It got so out of hand that they had to open up these shelters that they started calling the emergency influx shelters. They started putting kids in stadiums, in convention centers. You’re from Texas, I don’t know if you remember seeing it, but Governor Abbott showed up to the Alamo Dome I believe, in San Antonio. Cause there was a lot of bad situations going on there.

The numbers were so crazy that convention centers in San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio … the Army base in El Paso had to take kids in, and there are still kids in there. The same thing happened in Arizona. Convention centers, stadiums where football, soccer, baseball games were being played. Kids started being put in there, they were in there in the thousands. 

(25:36)

It’s impossible to move all these kids, to get enough staff members to move them….

The rule was, “do not let them off the bus, no matter what, because there are reporters lurking, we don’t want them to take pictures of you all, any kind of video of you guys.” …

(NGO would keep children on busses for long periods because they did not have enough staff to move them, but didn’t want to bus the children back to the influx centers and admit they had too few staff because they feared losing their contract.) ….

That got on the news in Dallas. We had situations like that in San Antonio, California, it was just insane. Twenty migrant children ran away from the stadium in San Antonio, there was reports of staff inside the stadium in San Antonio hooking up with these kids, like having romantic relationships. I think that one in San Antonio, Governor Abbott himself showed up, I couldn’t find reports of it but if I’m not mistaken he showed up. Someone showed up from the State of Texas and shut it down. The situation there got out of hand….

(28:50)

You would hear rumors, and you’d tell yourself, no, there’s no way that’s true. And you would find out things later on, you could put two and two together and be like, well, that did happen, it sucks, what am I doing here, what am I being a part of? … It started messing with my head…. Morale was really low, at an all-time low in 2021 and so forth.

SERAPHIN: Here’s a question, and I don’t know if you have access to this information. Were the contract dollars being paid to the NGO going up with the number of people they were agreeing to move. In other words, did they make more money when more kids came in?

(29:40)

ARELLANO: Yes, yes. And especially in the holidays. In the holidays it was sort of like a bonus type of thing. “You guys move this many children in time for Christmas, in time for New Years,” — and we knew this because they would tell us they’d pay an extra two or three dollars for working this week … if you accept a call for Christmas Day, we’re gonna add another eight hours to you guys’ check.

And when they start telling you that, you put two and two together, it’s like, you guys are giving us eight hours, who knows how much the government is paying you guys, for us to move these kids for you?

SERAPHIN: A hundred percent. Do you think the fact that you were understaffed was because they were cutting costs, trying to keep more in their pockets? Was that your instinct?

ARELLANO: I believe so. Which is one of the reasons why I spoke out. Because with everything going on, the NGOs get lost in the media. All the focus is on the government, the city, state, federal government. But no one is paying attention to the NGOs. Which is one of the main reasons why I spoke out. … 

(31:25)

The government will hire a first-party contractor, and that one will outsource and hire another four or five contractors to work under them. So the money is just being passed around. And the NGOs, no one thinks of them because not many people are paying attention to [the NGOs] the way they should. …

(31:45)

SERAPHIN: How many levels do you think were going on between who was paying you and the government that was paying the original contract. Any sense of that?

…

ARELLANO: The NGOs, there’s a lot of them. There’s major players. The top ones you see a lot. You work in this field for a while, you start to recognize which names are bigger than the other ones…. There’s NGOs that run shelters and they do the escorting themselves too, but when their numbers are too high, they outsource and hire other companies.

The company I worked for directly, that I spoke out against last year, they have the largest contract when it comes to escorting in the United States. …

MVM Inc. is directly paid by the government, they don’t do any outsourcing…. That was who I spoke out against last year because that company, my area manager sent out a company email, where he stated, we were messing up, we were handing off kids to the wrong people. This is really bad. There’s reports that you guys have accepted wrong documentation. The person you handed the kids off to does not look like the person on the ID…. The email goes on and on. It’s on Savanah’s video. They admitted that, and that was the breaking point for me. The manager who sent that email out has a Mercedes, he would show up in a Tesla … he would show up with jewelry, the nicest watch. 

And it would kill me to think here you are gladly accepting this money, this taxpayer money from the government, but you’re not making sure that my coworkers are not doing the right job of handing off the kids to the right people. So that was my breaking point. I provided the email to Sav, and I spoke out….

(35:05) 

SERAPHIN: Some of the questions I have relate to what you just shared with us. This is pretty atrocious, these are taxpayer dollars. But the real thing is, these are little kids. These are kids. What’s the youngest age you’ve moved, do you think?

ARELLANO: Three months, four months, five months. The reasons were always different…. A lot of times the mom would be around, but the mom would be thirteen years old, fourteen years old, so that’s why they needed an escort. Because the mom was underage.

SERAPHIN: Whoa.

ARELLANO: Yeah. When there was a mom and a baby, there would be male and female staff. So I would fly with the mom and the baby, but there would be a female coworker with me. And there were even times when it was just a baby on its own. The mom, something happened to her along the way. Got kidnapped, anything you can think of. Any bad situation.

If I may, there was this one story where … they talk about a train in Mexico City that they get on. The kids shared that there was a baby in the group because the mom fell off the train and went under the train tracks. And the baby just — the kids get passed with the groups that are coming up north, and they just start traveling with other groups. And, it was all ages. Any ages, I saw them all.

(37:00)

SERAPHIN: I’m kind of shell-shocked at some of this stuff. I have little kids, so I know about how much work it takes and how much care goes into raising little kids. You’re talking about teenage mothers, thirteen, fourteen years old, I guess that just had never sunk into me before, I had never even thought about them being that young, I just imagined grownups having kids. We’re talking about young teenagers running up here, as mothers. No father. Where did these kids come from? Where are the fathers?

ARELLANO: We weren’t given the rundown…. We would just hear … whatever they would tell us. We would hear everything from the dad was a gang member who raped the mom in El Salvador or Guatemala, it was a cartel member in Mexico, it was a police officer from Mexico City, it was someone along the way. Majority of times it involved rape, and it involved somebody along the way from their trip to the U.S. On the way to the U.S.

SERAPHIN: We hear these stories, but you were meeting the faces of these stories.

ARELLANO: You finish the trip, you go home, you can’t get the faces out of your head…. It messes with your head. You start to look at things differently. For example, I used to think differently… I used to say yeah, bring the people here, they want a better life, let them come. Then I started to hear their stories. It’s like, you do that, you’re putting people in danger because a majority of time something happens to them along the way here.

(40:00)

There was one story of … if I can share, I don’t know how much I can, on your podcast, it’s —

SERAPHIN: You can say anything you want, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not gonna, I don’t have any censorship, so, if you’ve got a story and you wanna share it and you think people should hear it, then please do.

ARELLANO: Yeah. So there was this, I think he was 12, cause it’s been a while, I wanna say his age was 12. He was very quiet. We tried everything. We tried giving him an iPad, we tried giving him pizza, we tried giving him candy. Everything, because he would not talk. With a kid that small, you know, you feel for these children, while you’re working in this job. You wanna make the kids happy. Cause at the end of the day children are innocent, they shouldn’t be involved in issues that adults are having.

We tried everything possible with this kid. By the end of the day, when we finally got to where he was going, the sponsor — this is what they call them, sponsors — the sponsor was the aunt of the child, and the aunt of the child told us that the kid saw his older sister be raped by multiple men. And the sister passed away on the way to the U.S.A. And that’s why he wouldn’t talk. And that story stuck with me. That was another thing where I was like, I gotta say something, I gotta speak out. You see these faces and you hear the stories, and you just can’t get them out of your head.

The movie The Sound of Freedom, I don’t want to watch it. I don’t want to watch it…. It’s just gonna bring back memories …I don’t want them to resurface. I’m slowly getting past that part of my life…. You know, seeing a movie that directly involves child trafficking … something’s gonna trigger inside of me where … I don’t want to see it. It’s just horrifying stories that you hear.

(42:20)

They weren’t so bad, when I first starting doing this, they were not as bad. It wasn’t as bad. It wasn’t until the current administration that it started to get so out of hand. And the bad stories turned into something you would hear daily. Every day. When I decided to speak out on this, I got text messages from past coworkers who were very upset at me because people got fired, they lost their jobs, and they were telling me they had a family to provide for, how could you, you just wanted the attention on you….

And I was like, all those kids, that had family members who got raped, who got murdered along the way, too, they have family as well…. It got into a mess…. I don’t want to be any more part of this.

…

(44:03)

SERAPHIN: Did they provide mental health services for any of the unaccompanied minors or any employees like yourself?

ARELLANO: Zero. Zero. There’s no following up with them. The moment they get a sponsor to say, yes, I will accept a kid, that’s it. There’s no more. Get ‘em a plane ticket, tell them to pack their things, the travel escorts, which is what I would do, will be by to pick them up…. Not our problem any more.

To the staff it was, suck it up, you guys are adults, be grownups about it, get over it, that’s life. The words I’m saying now, are the words that were told to us directly, whenever somebody would complain. “You’re just an escort.”

For example, if we would get to a sponsor, and the sponsor was, a lot of times they were really drunk, they were messed up, they were high on something, drunk, you could smell it on their breath. We would sometimes call back to management, and we would tell management, hey, the sponsor’s here, but he’s messed up. In many different ways he’s messed up. Can we bring the kid back? I don’t feel safe dropping off the kid here.

When the Biden administration happened, the rule was, you’re just an escort, don’t get involved, don’t get personally attached to the kids, you have no say, you cannot bring the child back. You bring the child back, you’re gonna get fired. 

(46:00)

And in the previous administration, we were allowed to do things like, if the sponsor was drunk, we were allowed to say, we’re not turning the kid over to you. We’ll try again next week. And the next week, if you show up drunk again, you’re not gonna get this kid. You need to not do that, because you’re accepting a child that you’re going to be responsible for — show up without under any substance. We would take the kid back.

The moment the new administration came in, it was, you have no right, you’re just an escort, you’re just a contractor, you’re not a federal employee. You’re no one of any power. You’re no one of any reach. Don’t come at us…. And if you’re not ok with that, you can leave … we’ll hire someone in your place next week.

It angers me because, I see now people saying, Trump had four years to expose this … No, under the previous administration, speaking for myself, as an NGO contractor, we did [under Trump] have more power to prevent kids from ending up in a bad situation than in the current [Biden] administration.

The company I worked for, there was two separate contracts. There was a contract to move kids around the country, and there was a contract to deport people, to send them back to their country. The NGO was allowed to help out with the removal of people who are here illegally.

The moment the new administration came in, that contract got canceled. It became zero. So before this administration, there was deportation flights every day that the NGO would help out in. And then the moment the new administration came in, there was zero deportation flights for the NGO. Everybody who was on the deportation contract just carried over to the contract with the ones with the children. That contract was gone. Everybody just carried over to just help escort the children around the country.

(48:45) 

SERAPHIN: Are you a political guy?

ARELLANO: I wasn’t. But as the years have gone on, it has gotten my interest more and more.

SERAPHIN: When did you understand that there was a political nature to this?

ARELLANO: Well, before, I was one of those where, oh, I’m hispanic, the color of my skin is brown, I can’t vote for Trump, I can’t vote for anybody on the Republican side…. I voted for Beto O’Rourke when he ran against Ted Cruz in the Senate race…

Then I started getting older, and getting involved in the NGO contracts, and for example, on the news you see, oh there’s Border Patrol agents whipping migrants, there’s kids in cages.

When I started working there, I would see the Border Patrol agents buy soccer balls, they would buy all these toys from Walmart, they would buy snacks out of their own money to bring to the kids at the intake center. And I just saw a whole other side of things, where, it opened up to, hey, you’ve been wrong about it the whole time.

I do have a bigger interest in politics now but … the moment you start being vocal about [immigration] you get fired.

…

(51:45)

SERAPHIN: It doesn’t sound like you were out there looking for Trump to be the good guy, or Biden to be the bad guy. Sounds like you just experienced it. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.

ARELLANO: Exactly, what you just said. I was never into taking a side or this side is more right than the other. It was just, I want to do some good, I want to be in a line of work where I want to make a kid’s day better. I speak the language so I might as well … do this.

Exactly. The way you worded it is the way it was. As time went on, I started seeing everything. It was never like, oh, here comes Biden, it’s going to be really bad. No, it was never like that. It was never about politics. It was just, here’s another day of humanitarian work, another day of helping out people in need. 

Because believe it or not, a lot of people on the border are Hispanic, and a lot of people still don’t speak Spanish.

SERAPHIN: I’m familiar with that concept too. Especially when someone speaks Spanish to them and they can’t answer, it’s always a difficult situation.

(53:17)

It wasn’t a political decision for you, you’re seeing all this trauma, you’re experiencing this all, it’s changing the way that you’re looking at the job that you’re doing. What was the straw that broke the camel’s back that you … couldn’t stay silent and keep collecting a paycheck?

ARELLANO: The emails. The email where our manager admitted we were handing off kids to the wrong people. And the reason why the email did that was — coworkers talk, you know? And I would hear so many stories of coworkers telling me, ‘I dropped off a kid who said they didn’t know the sponsor.’ That they were told the sponsor was their uncle but they had never met them, had never spoken to them. And the only time that they did have some sort of communication apparently was when they were way too young and they don’t remember it.

And the coworkers would say things like, ‘oh, the kid was crying, the kid was saying they didn’t want to go to the sponsor. But I didn’t care, I wanted to drop her off already so I could go party.’

Because the way it works is, as soon as you drop the kid off with the sponsor, you can go out there and do whatever you want. So, if you’re in LA you can go to the club, go to the bars. As long as you — because the return flight was never the same night, it was the next day…. 

(55:15)

And there were other stories too where … they call it reunification. And these reunifications were sometimes made in groups. So … we would get calls saying, hey, there’s 200 kids who are past the limit of their stay at a shelter in West Texas, if they’re not moved from that shelter they’re going to get deported. They’ve reached the max days they can be there. So you guys have to go get on the private planes with them, and you’re going to spread them out on the east coast.

So we would have government phones, where the government phones would tell us, you’re delivering these kids in North Carolina, you’re going to deliver these kids in South Carolina. Deliver these kids in Florida and Georgia.

SERAPHIN: Where were they going?

(56:15) 

ARELLANO: So it was different shelters, different NGOs who would call the shelter in West Texas and say, hey, we have room for six kids, we have room for eight kids, we have room for ten kids. Send them over. We’ll work on their cases, we’ll work on reunifying them. We’ll give them another chance to stay in the country.

(56:38)

SERAPHIN: You’re just shuffling kids around to basically hit the metric, so they don’t go over a certain time limit. Not solving the problem, is that — they’re just getting pushed off to another person?

ARELLANO: Yes, and I’m glad you’re asking this. Because this is a whole — you see, this is a whole mess…. When these situations would happen … a lot of these kids in West Texas when we went to pick them up, the kids start talking among themselves. And then they start talking to us. 

And sometimes the topic would be, ‘which shelter have you liked the most?’ Kid A would ask that to Kid B. And B would say, ‘I enjoyed the shelter in Seattle the most, because in Seattle, we were allowed to leave if we wanted, if we’re 15 or older, we were allowed to leave and come back in, and explore the city.’

(57:50)

And the other kid would say, ‘no way, I’ve only been to the shelter in Philadelphia, or Pittsburg, or New York City.’ So a lot of these kids who are being escorted around on private charter planes in the middle of the night, they’re kids who have been in the system 2 years, 3 years, sometimes we would see as far back as 4 years. And it’s like, what the hell. That’s something I can’t answer, like, cause I would wonder that myself. You would hear this.

I would hear this and I would ask the kid, how long have you been here. And the kid says, ‘I’ve been here for two years, but it’s been a year since I haven’t seen my sister. I got separated a year ago in the shelter in Chicago. We were both in a Chicago shelter, and I never saw her again. After the Chicago shelter, I ended up in a shelter in California. In San Diego, and from San Diego I ended up in Texas.’

(59:00)

SERAPHIN: So you’re moving them off the Texas border with the assumption that they’ve just got in from the border. But in reality, they’re bouncing around the country like some kind of musical chairs for unaccompanied minors.

ARELLANO: Exactly. Exactly. So a lot of these kids, the ones that you see on the charter flights, like the one that got in the media, about — I want to say there were probably 300 kids, half of those kids have been in the system for more than a year, and they’ve been bouncing around from shelter to shelter.

So, the trips that I went on, I would sometimes deliver them to, for example, the Catholic Charity in New York City, and … they would have all these different names. It was so shady. Because they would have names that I did not recognize. And then the address to drop the kids off would be a home in a sort of, you know, in a neighborhood in the suburbs. And it would look like a family home. And the person who would open the door was not like, ‘hey, how are you, thank God you guys are here, we’ve been waiting for you.’ No, none of that. 

(1:00:15)

It was just, hand me the paperwork, ‘here’s my ID, where do I sign.’ The minimal contact. Really shady. Really off-putting. No, ‘are you guys tired, you’ve been traveling all day.’ None of that. It’s just, ‘gimme the kids, get out of here.’

It would be actual homes, you would think a family lives there, and it’s no, they’re accepting migrant kids. It was a lot of weird situations like that. It was like, hey, I gotta speak up because the longer I do this the shadier it’s getting.

SERAPHIN: All these things sound so alerting, so troubling. Especially if you’ve worked with kids. Which I have as both a medic and I’ve done it in law enforcement. There’s so many oversight mechanisms built in, domestically, for this to be going on is crazy.

(1:01:20)

You mentioned money, earlier. You mentioned $35 for a janitor. What kind of money are we talking about? And are you guys on per diem when you were traveling, like most government employees would be? How did that all work? What was the compensation like?

ARELLANO: There was per diem. The pay was different depending what office you were at, but the per diem was the same from every office. So, say I would go to New York City. The per diem could be $60 going there, $60 coming back. It would vary. The more expensive the city, the higher the per diem. Some random small town city in the midwest, it was really low, like $40. But the per diem was still there.

I was getting paid $21 an hour. But the amount you would be expecting at the end of the week was way more, because the per diem would kick in…. Just in two trips alone, you would hit like $200. 

There were times when I was getting on 9 to 12 different planes a week. 

SERAPHIN: Did you say twelve planes a week?

(1:02:56)

ARELLANO: Nine to twelve planes a week. So, it was a lot of like, you go drop off the kids, you come back, go to your hotel, go shower, get something to eat, come back in two hours cause you’re going to go out again with more kids. It was just crazy amount of trips.

There were times where I was owed … they would back pay me for per diem trips. And I would get hit, in a per diem check alone, the highest I once saw, I saw 5K for a per diem check once. Just the one check, just per diem trips. You would add that on top of my regular pay. For that week alone, I cleared 7K. Just depending on the contract, the area, the pay varied but it was a well paying job.

In New York City I was making $43 an hour.

SERAPHIN: Let’s talk about New York City if you don’t mind, we can kind of dig into what was going on. What was your role in New York City for the most part?

ARELLANO: In New York City my role was site administrator. But it was the first time that I went in there with a management type of responsibility. New York City, we’ve all seen it in the news, the East Coast is new to the immigration stuff. So they started calling a bunch of people like me, saying, ‘hey, we’re going to open up hotels in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. We’re gonna open up these migrant hotels. And the people on the East Coast don’t have any experience in this. So we need you guys down south, who do have experience in this, to lead. We want you guys to lead a team of 200 staff members for 5,000 people.’

And that was my job, was to — it was me and three other people with my same job title. So the four of us were in charge of 200 staff members in a hotel of 5,000 migrants.

(1:05:21)

And that was my job, was to run, anything you can think of. Whether it be, a baby’s missing medication, we don’t know what to do … It was just a headache because I would go to the hotel and at two in the morning I would get a call saying, hey, a fight happened between a couple, we don’t know what to do.

And I would say, what do you mean you don’t know what to do, call the police! And I would try to call the police but then the people above me, who would show up to the hotel, once they would show up for like three days every other month, and then they would go back to where they were from.

So … there were managers above me, and these managers would keep in contact with us through chatting, through imessage, through FaceTime videos, through Microsoft Teams. And they would tell us how to run these places.

So, I would try to do the right thing and call the police. But my management would say, ‘hey, if you call the police, you’re risking us losing the contract.’ Doesn’t matter if the husband raped the woman, doesn’t matter if the husband stabbed the wife. Doesn’t matter if the husband kicked the baby and the baby’s bleeding from his head. Don’t call the police.’

SERAPHIN: Are those actual examples that were given to you? Or that you actually saw happening ion the hotel?

(1:07:19)

ARELLANO: Actual examples, yes.  Actual examples. All these are actual things that happened in the hotel. And you’re starting to see it. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but a bunch of migrants killed somebody in New York I think yesterday or two days ago, they pushed him through a glass door.

It’s starting to happen. Like the riots in France. To where, and the thing is, the migrants are mad because the money is running out in New York. So the migrants there are telling their family and friends, ‘hey, come now, when you come here get on the bus to New York, because look at the room I have.’ And with the phone they’re showing the room and they’re showing the view of Times Square.

But when the migrants are getting there now to New York City, the rooms, they’re all gone, they’re full. And if they’re not full, the money’s just not there any more.

SERAPHIN: What kind of hotels are these, by the way? I feel like the hotels outside of Times Square are pretty nice.

ARELLANO: Yeah, yeah, so, the hotel that I worked at … was known as a four star hotel. It’s called the Row NYC. This hotel, just tell you how nice it is. During New Year’s Eve, the migrants would tell us, ‘oh hey, Carlos, we got a great view of the ball drop from our window, you wanna come see it?’

And I was like, there’s no way you got a view of the ball drop. And I would go up there, and there it is, they got a view of the ball drop. That’s how crazy…. A block away from Times Square.

SERAPHIN: How were the migrants treating these properties? Keeping them nice?

ARELLANO: No, no. The infrastructure of the hotel is falling apart because … we would tell the migrants, ‘hey, these hotels are not made for you guys to plug in frying pans, for you guys to be plugging in air fryers. Because there’s five thousand of you. And five thousand of you trying to plug in all these things together at once is gonna cause a blackout, it’s gonna cause all these situations that are going to cause the hotel to go down.’

(1:10:00)

And of course they don’t believe it. The migrants are like ‘no you guys are just,’ — even though I’m Hispanic — they’re like, ‘you’re a racist, you’re a traitor to your race, you don’t want me to plug in my frying pan because you hate people of my color.’

And I’m like, ‘excuse me, do you not see that my skin is brown? Like, what do you mean, I hate people of your color?’ …

The way it is here in the U.S., it’s the same with them, they play the race card right away. And you try to tell them, there are certain rules, and it’s not because we’re trying to be jerks to you. It’s for the well-being of the hotel. Because someone in New York City thought it was a good idea to put five thousand of you in here all at once.

And it’s not a good idea. I’m gonna end up without a job, you’re gonna end up without a home, because the hotel is going to go down. They still didn’t care. Everything from doing drugs to bringing in weapons, to … I had a machete swung at me in that hotel. It was because we had kicked out a guy who had just beat his wife up. And he had came back with a machete looking for the wife. And since my job was to be sort of like a management type, my job was to address these situations head on. I had to approach the guy, and the guy swung the machete at me.

There was other situations where we had weapons in the building. And there was migrants were upset that they weren’t accepted into the hotel or they were kicked out of the hotel, they would come back with hand guns and … it would be kids who would go out there and get their hands on a gun. And they would come back and hide it in their rooms. We were not allowed to go inside their rooms. The rules were always: respect their space. Under no circumstances were we allowed to search a room, even if there’s a weapon in there, tough shit, deal with it, don’t go in there.

(1:12:20)

And a lot of times staff, myself, I saw weapons with my own eyes, too. Aside from the machete. And it’s attracting a lot of bad situations, to the point where, I just found out the contract for my previous employer at that hotel, has not been lost, the company is leaving the hotel. When the company leaves the hotel, it means the money is running out. And the next contract to be lost is the one with the hotel itself. So the migrants in that hotel are going to soon be out on the streets. So five thousand of those people, if they don’t go somewhere else soon, if they don’t go to a family member across the country, you’re going to see them out on Times Square in a tent.

(1:13:20)

SERAPHIN: It’s so wild to think about. Does it seem like there’s a game plan, that if we can just wait long enough they’ll just solve this problem — or are they doing musical chairs with them too?

ARELLANO: No, they’re doing musical chairs with them too, but I think Mayor Adams is having a meltdown. Every time he’s on camera he seems broken down, he seems like he wants — he doesn’t know what to do….

The mistake there, it’s irreversible. Because you give them all these free things, give them a free room in Times Square. Who’s going to say no to that? I wouldn’t say no to that … You give that, and you take it away saying we have no more room for you, the migrants are not going to be like, ‘ok, we understand, the money is running out.’ No.

A lot of the times the migrants get in your face, and they say, ‘we know the federal government gave you this money to take care of us, that money is ours and not yours. You’re telling us there’s no more money … because you’re keeping it for yourselves….’

If you guys gave my mom a free hotel room. If I just got here from Central America, and you gave my mom a hotel room two months ago, I expect a hotel room when I get here.

And that’s why you’re seeing the migrants …who killed that one guy two days ago in New York. You’re starting to see them get angry. Because New York City — you can’t advertise yourself as a “sanctuary city” and say we’re going to give you all these things, and then take them away. You’re messing with people’s lives.

(1:15:30)

Like I shared earlier, these people go through a lot of things on their way to the U.S. The last thing they want to hear, when they finally do make it to the U.S., it’s everything that we promised, everything that’s been given out, it can’t be given out to you.

They’re gonna be mad. They’re gonna be angry. I don’t know how New York City can fix it. They messed up big time.

SERAPHIN: It definitely sounds like that. You know, we hear a lot about people coming in from the border, that they came to the United States because they’re looking for a better life, I think we’ve all heard that kind of story, and I think a lot of that’s true, and that people want to come here and work hard. 

But you’re describing people that sound very entitled. Are people here to work really hard? Is that what they came here to do? Or did they come for the free stuff? What is your experience with the mindset? What are they, looking down the line, here, to achieve in the United States?

(1:16:30)

So, when I first started working in this, you would hear a lot of good — you would meet a lot of good people. 

You would meet people saying, I made it through the process, I’m here, they would be really grateful, and they would tell us things like — there’s a couple of things I want to share. Because that’s a great question.

In the shelters … I used to be a babysitter of those kids, there was kids who would tell us, for example when I would try ... to get them, after they were done eating breakfast, I would try to get them to pay attention in class, they would tell us, ‘in my country I never went to school. And I never went to school not even for an hour. What makes you think I will go to school for eight hours a day, five days a week?’

They would flat out tell you, ‘sir, you’re stupid if you think I’m going to be going to school here. I didn’t come here for school.’ And it’s not because they’re bad people, bad kids. It’s just their culture, where they come from. It’s what they know. They don’t know school. They don’t know the system of 911. 

A lot of times the kids would fight over the ipads, they would fight over the Nintendo Switches, and they would get violent. Kids would say, ‘you’re lucky we’re here, you’re lucky there’s these rules, because if we were back in El Salvador I would cut your hand off right now. In El Salvador I cut someone’s hands off, my uncle was there with me, and my uncle and I would laugh in that guy’s face after we cut his hand off, and you’re just lucky that we’re here now and there’s a teacher here’ — they would call me teacher….

It’s just the culture that they’re used to. It’s hard to get them to understand that that’s not the way things are here. I would try to explain these things to them. Where, in Texas, truancy, if you don’t go to school, you’re missing from school, they’re gonna come looking for you. 

(1:19:15)

And I would try to explain that to the kids. And the kids would say, ‘then I’ll just leave. I’ll run away. I’ll go to the next thing. I’m not gonna stay here, I’m not gonna go to school. I need to make money.’

And it’s the same thing with the adults. The adults are, they, they’re violent. Because things like the 911 system don’t exist where they’re coming from. They don’t understand that here, you call 911, the police are gonna show up. And they want to get violent right away.

And they think getting violent is the solution to everything. Back then when I was first escorting kids, there was this one kid who made me cry. We were in the airport in Dallas. He asked me, ‘hey, sir, I haven’t spoken to my mom in three weeks. Can you FaceTime her for me?’ And it was through WhatsApp. So I let him use the WhatsApp on my phone to call his mom. The mom started crying, the mom started cheering, because the kid told her, ‘I’m already on my way to see my aunt, I’m on my way to see your sister. I’m out of the shelter, I’m finally gonna be with my aunt, I’m no longer in the shelter system.’

… And the family would gather around the phone. And all of them were yelling and crying. And the kid would start crying, and the kid would tell me, everybody pitched in, everybody back home gave me all the money they had so I could use that money for food on the way up here….

That’s the story I heard when I first started working here. But those stories started to go away when there was no more structure. When there was no more — who can you let in, who needs what requirements to come into the country.

Which brings me to the article with you, over the person who posed as a child. (Ulloa)

(1:22:00)

So this article, this is another situation that we started to see with the current administration. Under the Biden administration. The kids would tell us, ‘I threw my papers before I crossed the border from Mexico. And I threw my papers because I stand a better chance of entering the country without them.’

I don’t know how it works, but a lot of the time, when I was last there, you could see certain kids who looked like adults. But somehow they got through the cracks and we escorted them.

And the one in this report, that you guys are showing, I know a coworker who escorted him to Florida. Because, you see the stuff on the news and you talk about it at work the next day.

So, I heard from a coworker, say, I escorted that guy, I took him to Florida. And turns out the guy was not a child….

SERAPHIN: I think it said 24.

(1:23:15)

ARELLANO: Wow. So, a coworker admitted to escorting him. And he ended up killing his sponsor. And that is not an isolated situation. 

There’s a lot of times where the kids would tell us, ‘hey teacher, do you see the guy up front? He’s not a kid, he’s a gang member, he’s been threatening a lot of us in the shelter. Be very careful with him. If you escort him, be very careful, don’t turn your back to him.’

He has gang affiliated tattoos, and he just hides them from everybody. But we know, in the shelter, the kids would tell each other…

And the reason why I’m sharing all this is because you asked me what do I see with the adults and the migrants, in general, who are coming here. The bad outweigh the good now. Because there’s not a structure anymore as to who can come in. 

When the structure is gone, the numbers go up and it’s impossible to hire enough people to vet these people properly, they’re going to get away. They’re going to get in the shetlers, and they’re going to be escorted around the country under the mindset that they’re a child, and they are not.

So, the bad outweigh the good now. There’s no more good stories. It’s more bad stories of bad people who are coming here. It’s people who don't want to work, it’s people who are not kind people, they’re not good people…. They just outweigh the good. You see more of the bad than you do of the good. 

(1:25:18)

SERAPHIN: Sure. I think that makes a lot of sense, although it’s awfully sad. 

One of the worst things I’ve heard, I don’t know if you have any experience with this, but, I’ve been hearing people kind of rumbling, about when children show up, especially female children but also male children, that they are being so sexually abused that they have to have medical examinations, when they get there, in the intake stations? They’re finding them pregnant, they’re paying for abortions. Did you have any experience seeing any of that stuff in the sites you were able to be part of?

ARELLANO: All the time. All the time. It was another thing where, it was, she’s here, but you can’t talk to her just yet because she’s still being processed, because she was just raped.

A lot of time theres was Border Patrol agents that you would see, say ‘I can’t handle — I’m done with this,’ they would get up and leave.

The reason being, that they would, I would witness that, it was because a lot of the times the person who raped the little girl, who raped the teenager, who raped the older woman — they were right there, they were next to them. They would either be next to them, or they would be in a separate area in the detention center, in the intake center, or they would be on the bus, and you would ask the person, who did this to you, ‘oh, the guy is on the bus he raped me four times.’ And they would take the girl to the bus and would point him out. It was something you would hear all the time. 

(1:27:05)

SERAPHIN: That’s horrible. I can imagine that was probably really infuriating for people in law enforcement. Not being able to do anything about it. What happened to these people that were accused of rape?

ARELLANO: Oh, man. The ones I can speak on are the ones in New York City. And the ones in New York City you would think — because the decision would fall on me. And when the decision falls on me, I have to ask my higher ups what to do. And I would say, hey, this is where I want to go, but in the end I can’t do it without getting the clear, the go ahead….

More than once, more than once, it was, this guy raped this woman, this guy beat this woman. Can I report them? Can I call NYPD, can I call ICE, can I do something?

(1:28:00)

It was, no, just kick ‘em out of the hotel, send them to Port Authority, and at Port Authority is where they would get processed for another hotel.

There were a lot of these guys who raped women, who beat up women, who were on their second or third hotel in New York City. They were not kicked out of the city, they were not sent to the proper law enforcement authority, they were just given another hotel. Because our NGO —

SERAPHIN: So your contractors are essentially covering up these crimes. They’re doing the musical chairs routine, and, the motivation is what? Keep the contract? Not cause any stir?

ARELLANO: Keep the contract. Keep the contract because it’s, I forget how much it was worth, but in my initial, when I first spoke out I talked about it. I think the number is $267 million every three months, just to renew the contract.

SERAPHIN: Whoa. Every three months?

ARELLANO: Yeah. Every three months.

SERAPHIN: That’s a billion dollars a year.

(1:29:15)

ARELLANO: Yep. They lost the contract, and they have to get out of the hotel this week, the staff, the NGO. But it got renewed, I wanna say five times, if I’m not mistaken.

SERAPHIN: Five quarters?

ARELLANO: Yeah. Yeah.

SERAPHIN: That’s incredible.

ARELLANO: Because this NGO has been there since Randall’s Island — since the first, because before the hotels it was tent cities in New York. It’s been going on for a while. Yeah, it’s that much money. All the NGOs, they cover each other, they all know each other. Which is why I can’t go back, after sharing my name and my face, I can’t go back to working this because everybody knows each other.

SERAPHIN: Yeah.

(1:30:10)

ARELLANO: And if I show up to another job, if they don’t already know, a week into it another NGO would show up and they would be like, hey, that’s a whistleblower you hired, get him out of here. Everybody knows each other, everybody covers each other. 

And … it’s not a big thing yet. Everybody focuses on DHS, FBI. But everybody for some reason lets the NGOs off the hook.

SERAPHIN: What are the names of these NGOs, if you don’t mind? 

ARELLANO: So, I worked for MVM Inc.

SERAPHIN: That’s mike victor mike incorporated?

ARELLANO: Correct. And I’m gonna, you want me to name a few? I’m gonna name the ones that got the major contracts. So, there’s a company called Crucial Staffing — so they’re staffing agencies, is another thing. And a lot of these staffing agencies got contracts primarily in the food industry, but out of nowhere they get lucky to get a government contract, and it’s like, how are you going from food to immigration, it’s insane.

So, MVM Inc., Southwest Key … BCFS Staffing, Acurity, Deployed Resources, Strategic Security which is out of New York as well. There’s Arrow Security, Endeavors, Loyal Source out of Florida….

(1:32:30)

SERAPHIN: And everybody kind of trades in the same contracts, they’re all — and employees, I assume, can jump from one ship to another if another gig pops up, is that kinda how that works?

ARELLANO: Correct, correct. That’s how I ended up in New York. They called each other they were like, ‘hey, tell us who’s been working how long, who’s done what, send them up here, offer them this much.’ They all look out for each other. Sometimes they’ll subcontract each other. So, sometimes they’ll say, ‘hey, I gotta move this many kids, but I don’t have enough staff, can you help me out?’ And they’ll help each other out.

(1:33:13)

SERAPHIN: It’s a wild racket when we start getting the big government money in play. What’s your prerogative look like now, what’s your future looking like, do you have any prospects for getting another job? I know you said you’re recovering from some surgery, we wish you well on that. But what are you looking at? You know, you blew up this job, and it sounds like for some very good reasons, so, what’s the future?

ARELLANO: I don’t know what I’m doing right now. I’m still dealing with, because when I got my name and my face out there, this has been my life for multiple years. So people who I would speak to daily … people I would go hang out with, go have a burger with, they don’t talk to me any more. There’s still people who do, but it’s not the same. The majority who were in my life, they want to protect their job. And I understand it, I don’t blame them. But my life has kind of been turned upside down.

I’m still dealing with that, and my head is nowhere … I’ve done some job interviews, but it hasn’t worked out. And being from the border, there’s not much out there to work unless you’re going to work for NGOs or be in law enforcement, on the border. I don’t know where I’m going to go from here.

What I can say is, my mind is — although I’m still dealing with all this, I feel a lot better mentally. You know, my mental health. It’s doing a lot better than when I was working at these places. And that outweighs the money, that outweighs everything bad that happened to me. At night I can sleep better. Now that it’s all out there.

…

(1:36:00)

I’m happy I’m out of this line of work, I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I don’t regret it. I don’t regret anything I spoke out against. Hopefully something pops up in my future soon….

SERAPHIN: I appreciate everything you shared with us, and I also appreciate the type of courage it takes to go forward and destroy a career or a job that is paying you well, because you know things are immoral, or unethical or illegal that are going on. 

I applaud you for your effort, I applaud you for stepping forward, and stepping into the unknown. It is a strange place, I know it very well. Many of my friends are still sitting in that spot, so, you’re amongst very good company….

####

Twitter @carlosstex 

http://www.givesendgo.com/texascarlos22