The Left has intentionally chosen emotional weapons to achieve its open-borders agenda—asylum, unaccompanied alien children, “humanitarian parole,” and nongovernmental organizations, particularly faith-based groups.
The Left made the correct calculation that the Right would be too afraid to criticize left-wing groups’ use of such weapons, let alone shut down the Left’s abuse of them.
It’s that fear on the Right that has allowed illegal immigration numbers to grow exponentially. Fortunately, the House will soon vote on HR 2, the Secure the Border Act, a bill that would successfully end a border crisis that is built on asylum fraud, child exploitation, and corruption.
For more than two years now, the Biden administration has been encouraging and mass-releasing millions of illegal aliens into the country. To accomplish its goal of unlimited illegal immigration, the administration relies heavily on NGOs to receive, process, transport, lodge, and counsel the illegal aliens.
The administration pays the NGOs billions of taxpayer dollars through numerous federal departments—including Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State, and Justice—for this migration weaponization used against America’s interests.
These NGOs and the Left hide behind faith-based organizations to keep their federal grants flowing and to distract from the horrific results in terms of human devastation, death, sex trafficking, forced child labor, national security and public safety threats, and more. Unfortunately, the faith-based organizations are more than willing to lead the pressure campaigns to safeguard their revenue streams.
What started out decades ago as faith-based organizations supporting the State Department to resettle genuine refugees in the U.S. after a legitimate application process has evolved into mass illegal immigration and downstream activities, creating an immigration industrial complex worth billions of dollars.
Worse, those same faith-based organizations also advocate for more migration to the U.S. and against immigration enforcement. They claim they are merely helping vulnerable populations, but these NGOs clearly benefit financially from more immigration in this corrupt money-changing circle.
The House Homeland Security Committee, led by its chairman, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., just debated the role of NGOs in the border crisis and successfully voted the Border Reinforcement Act out of committee. The bill would prohibit NGO funding for unlawful activity and illegal aliens.
Given the facilitation of mass migration and reported misuse of funds by NGOs, it’s worth noting just a few examples of the federal grant money given to the most prominent groups.
According to Forbes, Catholic Charities USA was the 13th-largest U.S. charity last year. Of its total $4.7 billion in revenues, Catholic Charities received $1.4 billion from government support, compared with $1 billion in private donations and $2.2 billion in other income.
In its 2021 financial statement, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service reported it received more than $93.1 million in U.S. government grants, and $23.2 million in church, foundation, corporate, and other contributions, making taxpayer-funded grants more than 80% of its total support. In fiscal year 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services alone issued the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service a whopping $182.6 million in grants for unaccompanied alien children and refugee services.
According to its 2022 financial report, out of Church World Service’s $51.1 million in assets, more than $20.5 million came in the form of grant funds, and only $511,000 were from contributions. The New York City-based entity is a 501(c)(3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code, so it pays no federal income taxes, but it spent more than $3.7 million in advocacy and receives more than 40% of its assets from taxpayer-funded grants.
In 2021, HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) reports it received more than $40.9 million in grants from the departments of Health and Human Services, State, and Homeland Security, compared with $46 million in contributions.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services lists 10 federal grants for migration and refugee services on its website, including eight from HHS (to provide services for newly arrived refugees; strengthen refugee marriage and families; unaccompanied alien children placement and reunification in the U.S.; a joint grant with Catholic Charities USA to provide training and assistance regarding human trafficking; a joint grant with the Lutheran group to address needs of refugee youth, children, and families, which was later supplemented to find homes for trafficked children; and another to provide services to adult trafficking victims); one State Department grant (resettlement services to newly arriving refugees); and one DHS grant (to process, receive, and place Cuban and Haitian parolees).
When the Biden administration’s open-border policies and operations, including use of NGOs, have clearly resulted in the trafficking of children and women, lost children, child labor, and historic numbers of unaccompanied alien children, these NGO grants warrant rigorous scrutiny from Congress.
In its latest proposed asylum rule, “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways,” the Biden administration notes that illegal aliens pay transnational criminal organizations “to coordinate and guide them along the final miles of their journey,” adding:
This cartel-controlled movement of people across the border is a billion-dollar criminal enterprise, in which the migrants pay thousands of dollars to be smuggled … .
In the same rule, the administration describes the role of NGOs “both along the border and in the interior of the United States” as “key partners, providing shelter and other key social services to migrants and facilitating the onward movement of those conditionally released from DHS custody.”
Based on the administration’s own descriptions of the cartels and nongovernmental organization “movement” services, it’s not unreasonable to allege that the administration is paying NGOs to smuggle illegal aliens the final miles of their journey.
The Heritage Foundation has confirmed the onward movement of illegal aliens processed through southern border NGOs based on one month of phone-tracking data. In 2022, Heritage reported that approximately 30,000 aliens who went through dozens of known NGOs at or near the southern border then traveled to every congressional district in at least the contiguous 48 states. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Many of those NGOs are from the same groups; for example, Catholic Charities, HIAS affiliate Jewish Family Services, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service affiliate Refugee Services of Texas.
In addition, an HHS whistleblower testified to Congress on April 26 that “the U.S. government has become the middleman in a large-scale, multibillion-dollar, child-trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.”
The few members of Congress who have challenged the NGOs and voted to defund their open-border federal grants deserve commendation and more support.
But the rest of Congress can no longer sit silently while the Left and faith-based organizations claim the moral high ground in their mass illegal-migration operations as they seek to protect their billion-dollar government funding. Their corrupt transactions result in national security, public safety, and economic security threats for America, along with sex trafficking, forced child labor, and human misery for the migrants.
This is a turn-over-the-table-of-the-money-changers moment. But that means more members of Congress need to get the courage to follow the money and defund these open-border operations.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal
