My time Witnessing in Carrizo Springs last week had quite an astonishing ending…a private tour of the facility by Kevin Dinnin, President & CEO of BCFS. I still am having trouble situating the experience, so I will cling to the basics – report what I saw and write reflections on my conjectures.

I would venture to say the facility was the finest high density child shelter in the country. Full stop. From the remodel of the original apartments, to the classrooms, bathrooms, barbershop, beauty salon, medical clinic, private trailers for RAICES and other lawyers, emergency medical services and private fire department…everything was shiny, new and nice. Every concern I could think of that I have ever had or heard anybody else voice I asked about. Every response I got was reasonably thought out:

–they weren’t enforcing a “no touch” policy – side hugs were given with the child’s permission by caregivers who modeled the behavior for the kids, who were also allowed to give each other side hugs; they could sit on each other’s bunks, the girls could braid each other’s hair, the boys could playfully punch each other on the upper arm, etc.

–children where not marched around in single file, they moved in nature groups with the caregivers

–the kids could talk to each other and had ample “leisure time” that wasn’t structured to do so

–both a psychologist and psychiatrist were on-staff and available to a child that needed them almost immediately

–there was a room with a door and a banks of phones in each dorm – Dinnin stressed 2, 10-minute phone calls per week was the MINIMUM that had to be provided. He insisted any kid that wanted to call out here could, without limit. Directly across the hall from the phone room was the “Dorm Mom’s” office which looked a lot like a nurse’s station. If a child wanted privacy in the phone room, they could talk behind a closed door. Each phone was preprogramed with 911, the national sex abuse hotline, and the consulate for each of their countries.

–the kids got 6 hours of classes a day (reading, writing, math, social studies, science, physical ed); each 45 pupil portable classroom has a teacher and teacher’s aid (both certified) and 2 certified principals ran the system.

–an hour of exercise in the morning – large muscle exercises inside (due to heat) but also soccer outside; they were allowed to use their leisure time to play soccer, basketball or learning American football.

–Dinnin stressed their goal was to get the kids to their sponsor families in record time, the goal being within 30 days (still not Flores Settlement…but since HHS’s position is that Flores is waived on federal land, I welcome BCFS’s new standards.)

–Much more striking than anything else, I saw happy children…happy children and happy caregivers. There might have been tortured children somewhere on the property, but they certainly weren’t in the roughly 6-8 groups that passed close to me, and not in those I studied across the campus. The kids looked relieved. I remembered the look… I had seen it in our shelter kids within about 24 hours. I didn’t need to look at their individual charts to know that this was the best situation they had experienced in a long, long, time. I was not warned to refrain from interacting with them. Since I don’t speak Spanish, and since I was riding with “the bigwigs” and they were walking with “their keepers”, I didn’t figure it mattered all that much. The language I used to communicate was the same I use at Homestead, only much more subtle. Every time I beat my chest and pointed to them, every blown kiss, every hand-heart, every smile and wink was met with a huge grin, waves, returned kisses and giggles over the attention.

Needless to say…it was everything I could do to keep it together. The kid’s relief was more than contagious.

People are shocked when I admit that I got a tour, by the head-honcho, no less. It was obvious to me that Dinnin was proud of his product and wanted to show it off the minute I saw the never-before-used sign on the fence explaining the purpose of the facility and stating that tours would be provided for media and elected officials with 2 weeks’ notice. What obviously got me a tour was my sign, outing myself as Witness Tornillo. I have no doubt Kevin Dinnin put as much time into showing off his facility to me as he did to any media…I think it must be important to him to convince us not only of their good intentions, but also their goals met…”Tornillo lessons learned” as he often repeated.

So there’s my report. Writing an honest reflection was what took so long. I sought the good counsel of Lee Goodman, Joshua Rubin and several other highly respected individuals. And after I listened to everyone’s impressions of my experiences and what they thought was going on, I sat alone and reflected on my experience, and pondered what I thought about it all.

First and foremost, I didn’t see any kids that looked like they were being tortured. I saw kids that looked genuinely happy, some obviously slipping into a lightheartedness along with what were quite genuinely loving caregivers. I did not see “guards”. I saw people that appeared to be as dedicated to these kids well-being as we were, expressing it in the role they were playing in this fiasco. What I saw was as different from what I saw at Homestead, or that video clip entitled “The Boys of Tornillo”, as night from day.

If a fish rots from the head…and it does…the “corporate culture” of this facility was coming from Dinnin. I was totally convinced he was setting the bar high, and his employees were totally committed to reaching it. At one point, when he was explaining their goal of having every child to their sponsors within 30 days, he bragged that one day that week they had placed 10% of the total population. I thought the group of them were going to break out into high-fives. I am quite sure if I was not there, they would have. I could not judge his heart…I don’t know how much of what I saw was due to a religious or altruistic impulse, or whether it was coming from a skilled executive adapting his business to a changing political climate in order to capitalize on a lucrative budding industry – or what percentage of both. It was obvious that he intended this facility to redeem the company’s earlier attempt, repeatedly commenting that “transparency was vital” or “Tornillo lesson learned”. And it was obvious that whatever the impetus, the product that was the result of it was a damned good one…at a head-count of 169.

My experience as houseparent of a small, neighborhood child abuse shelter was that it was easy to be present to each kid… be fun…be wise… be the best caregiver you could be focused on the best interest of each child…when the head-count is low. When the shelter is running at capacity, with the constantly changing dynamics of children at various levels of trauma coming and going…not so much. (Even after 30 years, my mind just flashed back to the weekend at the child abuse shelter that broke my husband and was the beginning of the end of that experience. I can still see each one of those kid’s faces and remember each of their stories. It started with our own personal road to Golgatha on Good Friday morning – by Easter Sunday, though we were giving it our all…I’m not thinking we were all that present, fun or wise. Joe and I now lovingly refer to it as “the weekend we learned we could go 72 hours without sleep before the hallucinations set in…and then learned how to work through hallucinations.” BCFS’s contract allows for a maximum of 1,300 kids. As often as Kevin repeated his “lessons learned” or “transparency” mantra, I repeated mine…”Damn, Kevin, I’d REALLY like to see this operation at full occupancy!” It is my hope by continuing to be gregariously respectful and painstakingly honest, I can finagle a tour when the numbers are higher.

Another incidental that is worth mentioning is that every one of the children I saw knew they were going to their sponsor families ASAP. Kevin assured me there was a good chance when we came back on the 27th they would be gone, and I read in print days ago that now the closure date had been pushed up to 7/26. Of course the kids were happy…they were being treated well and they knew they would be with their families within the week. And Dinnin brought his team in 3 days before their self-imposed deadline on placing their first batch of kids, which was no doubt at least partially responsible for why the staff was bursting with pride and eager to tell me how they were killin’ it.

Dinnin is an impressive executive. And regardless of intention, the man certainly did seem to reflect on the failings of Tornillo and attempt to correct them on this second go at it …meeting or exceeding corporate goals that surpassed that which was contractually required of them. But what if Kevin wasn’t there? As best I can tell, these exemplary standards are coming directly from him. What if he got hit by a bus and another individual took his place? What if it was the individual who was setting the bar for Homestead? As well as this particular batch of kids were treated, there is no guarantee that the next batch would be… because there is still no oversight of this process. This new, improved BCFS could change at any moment…all it would take would be one false step off the curb against traffic by it’s CEO.

And then there’s my suspicions about why a company would spend so much money and put forth so much effort to inform the public, just to shut down within the month. Something strange is going on there. Dinnin is on record as saying “maybe it was too much too late”, but that he would rather be over-prepared and never need to use it, than to ever have another “Clint” situation. If the facility was prepped and ready, there would never be a need for a child to stay in a CBP facility longer than the 72-hour maximum. So the entire staff is on standby? They would come and go, based on need? Wish I would have had the presence of mind to follow that scenario through and asked how that works.

And although Josh doesn’t agree…I would still lay a bet that Carrizo Springs now plays a big role in Homestead’s hurricane evacuation plan. It wasn’t just that Homestead wouldn’t share their “secret” plan for how they were going to get 2,600 kids bused out of the way of a hurricane…it was that they weren’t willing to share where they would take 2,600 traumatized kids if the Homestead facility WAS hit by a hurricane. Now that Homestead’s headcount is down to 1,600 and Carrizo Spring’s empty facility could conceivably house 1,300…duh…match made in heaven. Or somewhere.

You may have noticed that for a woman who has been insisting that we “control the narrative”, I have not used the terms “prison” or “concentration camp” or “guards” in describing this facility. That is because those words didn’t seem to fit. As I took the tour, I continually asked myself….if I knew my granddaughter, Camille, was stuck in this place for 30-45 days… could I live with it? The answer kept coming back “yes”, I could. There was nothing about this operation that looked like the clips we have from Tornillo, what we see over the fences of Homestead, or the pictures and descriptions of the CBP atrocities. There was nothing about this operation that looked like ANYTHING we have seen or heard these children enduring while in American captivity. “A gilded cage is still a cage” I am told…and that is undeniably true. But if my granddaughter was in this situation, I would much rather her be in a “gilded cage” than a CBP torture chamber. “They may have been given a lot, but that which is most important…their families…their freedom…THAT is still being withheld from them”. Except it wasn’t. They didn’t come in under Flores Settlement time…but they did blow former placement times out of the water. What I saw was a perfectly thought out child shelter, unfortunately high-density, but perfectly equipped, with perfectly remodeled living quarters, occupied by perfectly joyful children who I was told numbered 169, and what appeared to me to be perfectly bursting-with-pride employees. “Read up on Theresienstadt”, I was told. Well that’s taking a fucking sledgehammer to a ray of hope, is it not? I’m stuck in ambivalence. While I agree with the down-home Texas axiom of Dr. Phil, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”, I refuse to believe that human beings cannot evolve. Did BCFS want Carrizo Springs to be a “model” for the country? I have no doubt. Is that necessarily a bad thing? As far as I am concerned, I would need proof to say that it was.

I took the time to research Dinnin’s history with BCFS. Under his 25 year direction, the non-profit has grown from one children’s shelter on the south side of San Antonio to a national leader in emergency management and response; a non-profit corporation that operates child abuse shelters, provides assisted living services, and vocational training for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities; mental health services for children and families; foster care and adoption services; life skills training and other support for teens and young adults; pre-natal and post-partum health services; early education; and international humanitarian aid for children living in impoverished conditions in developing countries. The man may or may not be a saint… but one thing that is apparent is that he is one savvy businessman. It’s hard for me to believe he would have made a mistake like this. BCFS poured every penny of the $775/kid/day they pulled down off their contract for the less than 400 kids they served for less than 1 month into that facility….and no doubt thousands upon thousands more. They didn’t do that to pull up stakes and leave in 27 days. Something isn’t as it appears.

Since what I witnessed doesn’t make any sense at a multitude of levels, it seems to me Witness Carrizo Springs needs to break the Witness “vigil” template of Tornillo and Homestead and do something new and different… a Rapid Response group prepared to spring into action when need be. Maybe the buddy-system will keep BCFS from becoming Theresienstadt. Evidently, all it takes to get their attention these days is one person in the utility easement across the street from the front gates with the word “Witness” on their sign.