Bigotry comes at a cost — and we’re talking about more than karma here.
Cleaning up after President Donald Trump’s mess of hateful family separation policy came with an estimated price tag of about $200 million.
Where will the cash come from The Department of Health and Human Services is prepared to transfer that money from other funds to cover the costs, according to POLITICO.
“[HHS] has burned through at least $40 million in the past two months for the care and reunification of migrant children separated from their families at the border — with housing costs recently estimated at about $1.5 million per day,” the report states.
Because children were specifically separated from their families, they had to be housed in different shelters — “influx shelters,” or temporary contracted shelters. According to POLITICO, this costs about $800 per night — per child. Then there’s the cost of hiring case managers and other support staff, coming in at about $10 million. And the transportation to reunite children with their families comes with a price as well.
The $200 million was originally intended to cover anticipated costs for an increase in refugees. According to POLITICO, at least $17 million was taken from unused funds for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program.
“We have a public health emergency like Ebola, Zika, hurricanes — except this one is man-made,” Emily Holubowich, executive director of the Coalition for Health Funding, said, according to POLITICO. “We should not be taking discretionary funding away from programs that need it.”
“If there’s leftover money from Ryan White, it should go to support programs for poor people with HIV and AIDS, not this outrageous separation policy,” she said.
And the difference between using the shelters for incoming refugees versus to house children ripped from their parents at the border is that family separation was a deliberate decision, explained Mark Greenberg, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
“We were forced to turn to influx shelters when there was no choice,” he told the publication. “That’s really different from deciding to expand influx shelters because you’ve chosen to forcibly separate families.”
Funds could be negatively impacted for the long-term, and people currently involved remain confused.
“We’re still so in the dark on what’s going on,” a spokesperson for the Appropriations Committee Democrats told the outlet.
