Houston, We Have a Problem: NASA Staff Is Asked to Assist With Migrant Children

By Veronika Kyrylenko

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and space research, is being mobilized help handle the rising tide of immigrants on the southern border.

An internal e-mail sent to NASA employees on Tuesday was leaked to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, who shared a screenshot of it on Twitter. He commented: “NASA just sent employees an email seeking volunteers to help staff facilities for unaccompanied migrant children, per internal email provided to me.” The agency asks its employees to volunteer to care for “children without legal immigration status” for 120 days.

The greatest need is in the area of “youth care” and “conducting and translating intake information.” The four locations specifically mentioned that are in need of aid are San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio, and Fort Bliss (in Texas).

Border and immigration agencies are struggling to find places for the large numbers of migrants. While the Biden administration vows it is turning away the majority of adults and family units (which is an outright lie, according to numerous reports, reports, and more reports), it claims it will not turn away unaccompanied children. As a result, a record 19,000 unaccompanied minors arrived at the southern border in March. According to the estimates, the influx of children who will arrive may reach as many as 117,000 persons in 2021. The number is higher than the 68,000 taken into custody during the 2014 surge of unaccompanied children and the 80,000 who arrived in 2019. The facilities at the border have already been long overflowing with migrants, some reaching nearly 2,000 percent of maximum capacity.

In a report filed on April 2 to the federal court in Los Angeles, two inspectors appointed to monitor conditions faced by children in U.S. immigration custody detailed “severe overcrowding” at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities in southern Texas.

Social distancing was “functionally impossible” inside the holding facilities, the experts said, calling the level of overcrowding “not sustainable.” In one over-capacity facility, there were not enough caregivers for the 500 migrant children under the age of 12 who were held there, the report said. “Physical distancing precautions to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have, out of necessity, been set aside and still, CBP facilities — which are not appropriate for minors, in any event — have been stretched beyond thin,” Andrea Sheridan Ordin, the court-appointed independent monitor, and Paul Wise, a medical expert, wrote in the report.

Desperate to accommodate migrant children that keep on coming, the Biden administration is building the new holding facilities and setting up enormous tents, turning convention centers into holding facilities, and renting hotel rooms. Moreover, as reported by the ABC News in March, NASA’s Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California, is considered a housing facility for migrant children. While Russia and China are working on launching a lunar base, NASA scientists are being sidetracked to cuddle and feed migrant children and translate Spanish into English for their paperwork. Not that it is an unworthy cause, but is it the best solution the Biden administration can come up with? Or is it the best use of the nation’s brightest minds in space and aeronautics?

NASA is not the first federal agency that has been ask to help. The e-mail Klippenstein posted is similar to a March 25 letter signed by Kathleen M. McGettigan, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — an agency that provides federal human resources policy, oversight, and support for federal government employees, retirees, and their dependents, and tends to their healthcare, life insurance, and retirement benefits. McGettigan called upon “our Federal Agency family of exceptional public servants to lend support to this humanitarian effort,” calling for volunteers for a four-month assignment to care for border-crossing minors. The OPM was reportedly looking for “about 1,000 employees.” The volunteers would receive travel, lodging, and per diem expenses through Health and Human Services, while their agencies would be fully reimbursed for the cost of detail duty. Are these people not needed at their jobs?

Also, now, in a job posting, HHS requests federal government employees for a 120-day deployment to support the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at facilities where unaccompanied children are housed. Doesn’t the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) need to protect “the health of all Americans and provide essential human services, especially for those least able to help themselves” — as its primary job objective?

Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also been called by President Biden to “manage and care” for the population of immigrant children. FEMA will support a government-wide effort over the next three months to safely receive, shelter, and transfer minor children who arrive alone at the U.S. southwest border, without a parent or other adult.

The Biden administration immigration policy is nothing but insane. It imposes tremendous burdens and on local and federal budgets, accelerates human trafficking, pollutes the environment, and endangers public health. Now, it is likely to disrupt the normal functioning of the U.S. federal agencies.

President Biden, meanwhile, keeps on calling the border situation “normal,” since “it happens every single year.” He explains that the surge we’re encountering is due to the “cooler winter months [that] provided conditions for migrants to flee their home countries.” You’re supposed to forget that Trump’s immigration policies that kept many migrants away were shredded by “nice guy” Joe on day one in the presidency.

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