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Federal and state officials have denied Pima County Supervisors’ request to use Operation Stonegarden grant funding towards reimbursement costs related to humanitarian aid, according to a Dec. 26 memo from County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.

Last May, the supervisors voted 3-2 to accept the controversial grant, with a condition stating more than $200,000 of that money should cover the cost of housing and providing services to the large influx of asylum seekers experienced during that time.

Democratic Supervisor Sharon Bronson was the swing vote and sided with Republican Supervisors Ally Miller and Steve Christy to approve the funding. Democratic Supervisors Ramón Valadez and Richard Elías voted against the measure.

Community activists who oppose the use of Operation Stonegarden in Pima County say the program promotes collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents, which targets immigrant communities within Southern Arizona.

When the supervisors approved it, activists criticized their decision and said the plan to use federal money for humanitarian aid reimbursement would not work.

Now their criticisms have been validated, as Huckelberry explained in his memo that the county learned “indirectly” from Sheriff Mark Napier that US Border Patrol (USBP) and the Arizona Department of Homeland Security (AZDHS) denied their request. He said the reasons used to deny the request were “seriously flawed,” but the department has the authority to do so “unilaterally without appeal.”

Huckelberry wrote that USBP and AZDHS were concerned that the supervisors had previously rejected the Stonegarden funding in 2017. That decision was made after intense public criticism over the partnership between the sheriff’s department and federal immigration authorities such as Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In a letter from USBP Chief of Law Enforcement Operations Brian Hastings and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Assistant Administrator Bridget Bean, AZDHS was informed that Pima County’s request for the reimbursement funds were denied because they believe “there is no border security operational benefit derived from this reallocation request.”

They also wrote that while reviewing the request for humanitarian aid reimbursement, they took into consideration “the previous voluntary return of over $1.2 million in FY17 operational funds by Pima County, which resulted in the loss of over 11,000 Operation Stonegarden-funded overtime hours.”

Huckelberry took issue with that point in his memo, saying Pima County’s previous rejection of the grant allowed the money to be reallocated to other agencies. Essentially, it was not a loss of funds.
He also argued in a response letter to AZDHS Director Gilbert Orrantia that local non-governmental community organizations were so overwhelmed by the influx of asylum seekers that the county had to take action, or else Border Patrol would have had to “deal with the ill-will from releasing several thousand asylum seekers to the streets of Tucson.”

Huckelberry asked Orrantia if there is any possibility the county can appeal the rejection, but has yet to hear back. For now, the possibility of the county receiving reimbursements for the cost of housing asylum seekers within the Pima County Juvenile Justice Complex remains uncertain.

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It needs to be written in big, bold, flashing red neon letters: Beware of For-Profit Education. Kindergarten through college, all of it. If for-profit education is not banned outright, then we need to regulate and enforce the hell out of it.

Case in point: the for-profit college industry.

For-profit colleges have taken some recent, well deserved hits after decades of swindling their students. Just this month, the University of Phoenix was fined $191 million for its misleading advertising and predatory recruiting tactics. The 105-campus, for-profit Corinthian College chain dissolved in 2015 under the weight of its own misdeeds.

The Obama administration began the latest attempts to clamp down on the worst excesses of the industry — there were a number of earlier attempts — and set about forgiving college loans for students who were bilked by for-profit colleges. The Never-Obama Trump administration has reversed many of the previous administration's regulatory measures, while Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court for accidentally-on-purpose bungling the process of loan forgiveness.

Not many people were talking about the sins of the for-profit college industry when I began blogging about them a decade ago, beginning with a piece I wrote in November 2009, For profit colleges need oversight as well. At the time I thought I was being prescient. I thought I was ahead of the curve. It turns out I was actually three decades behind, or 60 years behind if you go back to the genesis of the problem at the end of World War II.

Here is a brief history of the abuses of for-profit higher education and ongoing, bipartisan attempts to fix the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation which allowed the industry to run roughshod over its customers, followed by the George W. Bush administration's intentional reversal of anti-profiteering regulations so it could run rampant once again. I'm drawing most of the information from a long, detailed history contained in a report by the Century Foundation.

For-profit education scams date back to the 1944 GI Bill, which gave returning soldiers the opportunity to enroll in colleges and training programs. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs took advantage of the easy government money and offered bogus programs to GIs. Investigative reports exposed the fraud as early as 1946 in articles like the Saturday Evening Post's “Are We Making a Bum Out of GI Joe?” Congress passed a series of laws to correct the abuses beginning in 1948 and continuing through the 1950s.

In the 1960s, programs which were part of President Lyndon Johnson's War of Poverty opened new opportunities for scam artists to create fraudulent training programs. In 1971, Carl Bernstein, a few years before he and Bob Woodward began on their famous reporting on the Watergate break-in and its aftermath, wrote a series of articles about abuses at trade schools in Washington DC. Other investigative articles followed in other areas of the country. As a result, the office of Health Education and Welfare imposed new restrictions.

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