Federal officials made 'every effort' to downplay a COVID-19 outbreak at a migrant children facility earlier this year, warning 'politics will take over,' whistleblowers say

• A whistleblower complaint on conditions at a child migrant facility in Texas was filed Wednesday.
• The report accused federal officials of downplaying a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility.
• Hundreds of children contracted the virus in close quarters, the complaint said.

Federal officials tried to downplay a COVID-19 outbreak at a child migrant facility earlier this year, according to two whistleblowers.

The Government Accountability Project filed a whistleblower complaint on Wednesday on behalf of Arthur Pearlstein and Lauren Reinhold, two career federal civil servants who volunteered at the Fort Bliss Emergency Intake Site between April and June this year. Xavier Becerra, a Biden appointee, had taken over the Department of Health and Human Services at this time.

According to the report, hundreds of children contracted the coronavirus in the overcrowded conditions of the facility, and the virus spread to many workers as well. Adequate masks were not consistently provided or enforced, Pearlstein and Reinhold reported.

Meanwhile, "every effort was made to downplay" the outbreak, the report said.

"At a 'town hall' meeting with detailees, a senior US Public Health Service manager was asked and refused to say how many were infected because 'if that graph [of infections] is going to The Washington Post every day, it's the only thing we'll be dealing with and politics will take over, perception will take over, and we're about reality, not perception,'" the report said.

The manager, who was not named, would only acknowledge that several children had been hospitalized, the report said, without mentioning reasons for the hospitalizations.

The report also said that when detailees ended their time at the facility, they were given instructions by the HHS Public Affairs Office, asking them to "make everything sound positive about the Fort Bliss Experience and to play down anything negative" if asked about their time there.

The HHS press office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The department told NBC News in a statement: "The care and well-being of children in our custody continues to be a top priority for HHS. Currently, children at the Emergency Intake Site at Fort Bliss meet with a case manager weekly and we have close to 60 mental health and behavioral counselors on site working with the children. It remains our policy to swiftly report any alleged instances of wrongdoing to the appropriate authorities."

This is the second whistleblower report the Government Accountability Project has filed about the Fort Bliss child migrant facility in the last month.

Two other whistleblowers reported on gross mismanagement at the facility in an early July report.

Other details from the two reports include:

• Three government contractors with no child care experience were paid, in total, close to $1 billion to operate Fort Bliss.
• A thousand children or more were housed in undivided dormitory tents the size of a football field, with bunk beds spaced just 18 inches apart.
• There was widespread lice in the girls' tents and riots in some of the boys' tents.
• Children were not given clean underwear for weeks.
• Cases slipped through the cracks and children were mistakenly put on buses or planes home, only to be taken off at the last moment.