Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children
Bethany Christian Services, which has links to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has fostered out at least 81 children taken from their parents at the U.S. border.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy prompted widespread public outrage in the spring and summer of 2018, and the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the United States’ border with Mexico has given rise to a potential future crisis as lawyers and advocates express grave concerns that many separated families may never be reunited.
Among the approaches taken by the federal government has been to engage foster care providers throughout the country to house children whose parents were forced or coerced into giving them up at the international border.
At the end of June 2018, one foster care provider in particular came under intense scrutiny, and was the subject of speculation over its operations, as well as its links to the Trump administration. On 24 June, the left-wing Facebook page “The Other 98%” posted a widely-shared meme about Bethany Christian Services:
Bethany Christian Services, an adoption center with financial ties to [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos, has taken 81 immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border. Most have had no contact with their families. They’re charging $700 per child per night. This isn’t foster care, this is state-sponsored kidnapping.
There were more detailed claims about the links between the DeVos family and Bethany, with The Other 98% writing: “Betsy DeVos donated $300,000 to the group and her husband’s cousin Brian DeVos was a Vice President.”
The links between the extended DeVos family and Bethany are undeniable. Tax filings archived by ProPublica show that between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (the philanthropic organization run by DeVos and her husband) gave $343,000 in grants to Bethany Christian Services.
Between 2012 and 2015, Bethany received $750,000 in grants from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which is run by the Education Secretary’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen.
Furthermore, Brian DeVos — a cousin of Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick — was the Senior Vice President for Child and Family Services at Bethany as recently as 2015, and Maria DeVos — who is married to Dick DeVos’s brother Doug — has served on the board of Bethany.
The DeVos family has for years been a wealthy and influential force in Christian conservatism and Republican politics in their home state of Michigan and beyond. While Betsy and Dick DeVos did oversee the donation of $343,000 in grants to Bethany between 2001 and 2015, it’s worth noting that they also donated millions of dollars to dozens of other recipients, many of them Christian-oriented educational and childcare organizations.
Bethany Christian Services is a prominent non-profit provider of adoption and foster services, as well Continue reading: Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children
