A new report said that the border crisis is a boom time for the Biden administration’s not-for-profit partners who care for the thousands of unaccompanied children flooding across the border.
According to The Free Press, nongovernmental organizations that run shelters in Texas, Arizona, and California are pocketing vast sums.
Three groups alone — Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. — saw their federal revenue stream swell from $597 million in 2019 to $2 billion in 2022.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the part of the Department of Health & Human Services that funds these services, spent $1.8 billion in 2018 and is expected to spend $7.3 billion this year — most of which is contracted out to not-for-profit groups.
The Biden Admin has spent 22x more on ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS than on HOMELESS VETS.
Infuriating. pic.twitter.com/OLHZANluot
— Representative Lisa McClain (@RepLisaMcClain) May 13, 2024
“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said of the groups in general.
“We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money,” Marino said.
Healthcare and housing are major services, but the report found Endeavors funds pet therapy, horticulture therapy, and music therapy for illegal immigrant children.
Many groups have long served children at the border, but Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “What is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem.”
“It is mind-boggling that ORR has not seen fit to adjust the policies for (unaccompanied children) placements, except to make them more lenient,” she said.
“They could do a much better job, but they only want to streamline the process and make the releases even easier.”
The cost of helping illegal immigrant families and unaccompanied children keeps rising, according to Open the Books.
The group estimated that the Office of Refugee Resettlement spent $8.9 billion on illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2022, with that increasing to $10.93 billion in fiscal year 2023.
Lora Ries denounced the growth of the NGO dollar-sucking phenomenon in an Op-Ed for the Heritage Foundation.
“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,” she wrote.
“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,” she wrote.
“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.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
