Photo Credit: Hotel Palm Aire
By Todd Starnes.
A plan to house hundreds of illegal immigrant children at a multimillion-dollar hotel complex in Texas was scuttled after the prospect of taxpayers footing the bill for luxury lodging proved too much of a public relations obstacle.
BCFS, previously known as Baptist Child and Family Services, which has a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to run camps at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Fort Sill in Oklahoma, had a deal to buy the Palm Aire Hotel in Weslaco, Texas, for $3.8 million. The hotel was built in the 1980s and includes three swimming pools, tennis courts and an exercise room.
“This proposal sought to find a solution for providing safe, humane care for the children flooding across the border and overwhelming U.S. Border Patrol and communities,” BCSF said in a statement announcing the deal was scrapped. “BCFS is thankful to the City of Weslaco for their consideration and support, and is disappointed that misinformation has fueled so much negativity against this effort that its success is likely jeopardized.”
Officials said the project never reached the point of submitting a proposal to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, but one of the hotel’s current owners confirmed that a sales agreement with BCSF had been in place.
The deal died Wednesday afternoon, hours after FoxNews.com reported that as many as 600 children between the ages of 12-17 could be placed at the Palm Aire, where BCFS would also provide medical and mental health care and educational and recreational programs under a contract that sources said could total as much as $50 million.
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Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
By Michelle Malkin.
They’ve blown it again, big time. They just can’t help themselves.
During the Bush years, the open-borders movement won over bleeding hearts in the White House but alienated the American public with radical displays of La Raza (“The Race”) militancy, desecrated American flags, and Che Guevara–shirt-wearing, fist-thrusting marches across the country.
Left-wing public-relations consultants taught the amnesty mob to tone it down, turn the flags right-side up, and stop threatening Reconquista. But the phony red-white-and-blue dye job didn’t last. The movement’s true extremist entitled roots can’t be concealed for long.
On Monday, leading illegal-alien journalist-turned-activist Jose Antonio Vargas engaged in a foolish stunt that will backfire on him and his allies in the media and Hollywood and on Capitol Hill. An openly defiant lawbreaker who proudly calls himself “the most privileged undocumented immigrant in the country,” Vargas traveled to Texas with a film crew to commune with illegal aliens surging across the border.
But on his way out of the Rio Grande Valley, the former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner was detained at the McAllen, Texas, airport by Customs and Border Patrol. He was attempting to clear security and board a flight without legally required U.S. identification. No surprise: Vargas initially made it past the buffoons at the TSA.
Read more from this story HERE.
