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 a little more than a week after the economic development leaders who built 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 gathered on a reservation south of Topeka could participate in the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
Tribal Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick made a cap to the historic issues last week in a video address that called the reservations “the government’s first attempts at detention centers.” In an update Wednesday, he announced that he was “pleased to share that our Nation has successfully divested itself of all interests related to third parties affiliated with ICE.”
The Prairie Band Potawatomi has a range of businesses that provide staffing for health care management, general contracting and even interior design. And Rupnick said in his final address that tribal officials plan to meet in January on how to ensure that “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” consultant 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 is also listed as the chief operating officer of the Florida branch of Prairie Band Construction Inc., which was incorporated in September.
Attempts to locate Woodward were unsuccessful. A spokeswoman 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 is affiliated with, Virginia-based Chinkapin Partners LLC.
A spokesperson for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation said the tribe has resigned from KPB. While that company still holds the contract, “Prairie Band no longer has a stake,” the spokesman said.
The spokeswoman said Woodward is no longer with the tribe’s limited liability corporation, but she declined to say whether he had been terminated.
The ICE contract was initially awarded in October for $19 million for unspecified “due diligence and concept designs” for processing centers and detention centers across the United States, according to a one-sentence job description on the federal government’s real-time contracts database. It was modified a month later to increase the payout limit to $29.9 million.
Sole-source contracts above $30 million require additional justification under federal contracting rules.
Tribal leaders and the US Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about why the firm was selected for such a large contract without having to compete for the work as federal contracting normally requires. It is also not clear what the Tribal Council knew about the contract.
“That internal audit process is really just beginning,” the tribal spokesman said.
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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas, and Goodman from Miami.