A Kansas tribe said it has walked away from a nearly $30 million federal contract to come up with preliminary designs for immigrant detention centers after facing a wave of online criticism.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation 's announcement Wednesday night came just over a week after the economic development leaders who brokered the deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were fired.
With some Native Americans swept up and detained in recent ICE raids, the deal was derided online as “disgusting” and “cruel." Many in Indian Country also questioned how a tribe whose own ancestors were uprooted two centuries ago from the Great Lakes region and corralled on a reservation south of Topeka could participate in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts.
Tribal Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick nodded to the historic issues last week in a video address that called reservations "the government’s first attempts at detention centers.” In an update Wednesday, he announced that he was “happy to share that our Nation has successfully exited all third-party related interests affiliated with ICE.”
The Prairie Band Potawatomi has a range of businesses that provide health care management staffing, general contracting and even interior design. And Rupnick said in his latest address that tribal officials plan to meet in January about how to ensure “economic interests do not come into conflict with our values in the future.”
A tribal offshoot hired by ICE — KPB Services LLC — was established in April in Holton, Kansas, by Ernest C. Woodward Jr., a former naval officer who markets himself as a “go-to” adviser for tribes and affiliated companies seeking to land federal contracts.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation said in 2017 that Woodward’s firm advised it on its acquisition of another government contractor, Mill Creek LLC, which specializes in outfitting federal buildings and the military with office furniture and medical equipment.
Woodward also is listed as the chief operating officer of the Florida branch of Prairie Band Construction Inc., which was registered in September.
Attempts to locate Woodward were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for KPB said Woodward is no longer with the LLC but she declined to say whether he was terminated. Woodward did not respond to an email sent to another consulting firm he’s affiliated with, Virginia-based Chinkapin Partners LLC.
A spokesperson for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation said the tribe divested from KPB. While that company still has the contract, “Prairie Band no longer has a stake,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said Woodward is no longer with the tribe's limited liability corporation, but she declined to say whether he was terminated.
The ICE contract initially was awarded in October for $19 million for unspecified “due diligence and concept designs” for processing centers and detention centers throughout the U.S., according to a one-sentence description of the work on the federal government’s real-time contracting database. It was modified a month later to increase the payout ceiling to $29.9 million.
Sole-source contracts above $30 million require additional justification under federal contracting rules.
Tribal leaders and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security haven’t responded to detailed questions about why the firm was selected for such a big contract without having to compete for the work as federal contracting normally requires. It’s also unclear what the Tribal Council knew about the contract.
“That process of internal auditing is really just beginning,” the tribal spokesperson said.
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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas, and Goodman from Miami.
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