Trump Scores a Key Win Against the Immigration Industrial Complex

Did you know that your tax dollars funded the housing and transportation of illegal aliens across the country? President Donald Trump has moved to stop this phenomenon, and his efforts recently met with an important success.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced that it would not renew agreements with the federal government relating to children’s services and refugee support.

As I wrote in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the USCCB formed one arm of the Immigration Industrial Complex, the network of NGOs receiving federal funds to move illegal aliens across the country.

Some of this work may be noble—it involved finding homes for unaccompanied alien children and those freed from human trafficking—but it also abetted the border crisis, on an industrial scale.

The Immigration Industrial Complex

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted in an April 2022 memorandum that his plan for “border security” involved “bolstering the capacity of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to receive noncitizens after they have been processed by [Customs and Border Protection] and are awaiting the results of their immigration removal proceedings.”

The Biden administration released millions of illegal aliens on parole, giving them court dates to adjudicate their immigration status, but these aliens routinely miss their court dates and move to live elsewhere in the country.

In 2022, The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center teamed up with the Oversight Project to track where illegal aliens move. They traced cell phones detected at federal immigration facilities, finding that these devices moved across the country.

Illegal aliens in facilities maintained by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, for example, moved to 433 out of America’s 435 congressional districts.

As a reminder, at least 9 million illegal aliens entered the United States under President Joe Biden. Only 11 U.S. states have populations greater than 9 million, and even left-leaning “sanctuary city” mayors lamented their inability to deal with the influx of illegal aliens.  

Many faith-based NGOs that launched to help legal immigrants in previous eras of U.S. history revamped their efforts in recent years, helping immigrants apparently regardless of legal status. These Immigration Industrial Complex groups likely would not exist without federal funding.

Global Refuge, formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, for example, received $180 million in government grants, more than seven times what it received in “all other contributions” ($25 million), in 2022. The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported receiving the vast majority of its revenue ($117.4 million of $121.7 million) through government grants in 2020.

Chapters of Catholic Charities received at least $1.13 billion under Biden through the Refugee and Entrant Assistance State/Replacement Designee Administered Programs grant from the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, for example. Catholic Charities USA received $1.4 billion of its $4.7 billion in revenue from government support in 2022—more than the $1 billion it received in private donations.

The Trump Freeze

The Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars in grants in order to conduct a program integrity review. This seems eminently reasonable. While Americans of faith like myself may support programs that care for the less fortunate—particularly legal immigrants and refugees— we should not be forced to pay for these charitable programs with our tax dollars, much less have our tax dollars spent to help relocate illegal aliens across the country.

The administration should ensure that these programs do not abet the immigration crisis and incentivize more illegals to enter the country.

Predictably, however, the Immigration Industrial Complex responded with lawsuits.

USCCB sued the State Department in March to challenge the freeze on around $65 million in federal funding for refugee services. The Biden administration had provided the USCCB with $100 million annually, and the funding covered more than 95% of the bishops’ spending on those programs.

The State Department canceled two multimillion-dollar refugee resettlement contracts with USCCB last month, directing the bishops to “stop all work on these program[s] and not incur any new costs.”

Only in this context did the USCCB finally announce the end of its work with the federal government.

“Today, the USCCB makes the heartbreaking announcement that we will not be renewing existing cooperative agreements with the federal government related to children’s services and refugee support,” the bishops said. “This difficult decision follows the suspension by the government of our cooperative agreements to resettle refugees.”

In other words, the USCCB is claiming to take a pro-active action, but the announcement actually represents the USCCB’s recognition of reality—the administration had already made the determinative steps.

‘Rigorous Screening’

Notably, USCCB claimed, “All participants in these programs were welcomed by the U.S. government to come to the United States and underwent rigorous screening before their arrival.”

The Biden administration “welcomed” many immigrants outside the legal channels established by Congress, particularly through the program that imported people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The Biden administration chartered planes for these aliens and granted them parole to remain in the country, a protection the Trump administration will remove later this month.  

Lora Ries, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, contested the vetting claim.

“The Biden administration demonstrated repeatedly that aliens and sponsors were not adequately vetted, whether that was Afghan evacuees, sponsors for unaccompanied children, sponsors for parolees, or others,” she told The Daily Signal.

“Lack of vetting was the reason for multiple Inspector General reports and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services pause of one of its parole programs,” Ries added.

A Critical Admission

Bill Canny, the executive director of USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services program, told EWTN News that the program cannot continue without federal funding.

“You can’t replace the generosity of the [United States] taxpayer and how they help either needy people overseas or needy people domestically,” Canny told EWTN. “You can’t replace that, in this case, some $200 million a year, which it would have been this year. So we can’t replace it with private [money].”

Perhaps USCCB should create a new program that can be funded with private donations, to address the real human concerns that justified the original program. In that case, not only would the program be directed to the people who most need it, but it would also be able to survive without federal strings attached.

USCCB was fulfilling a few important charitable functions, but its old program formed part of a noxious Immigration Industrial Complex. I pray that it can establish a new program dedicated to helping legal refugees and human trafficking victims, without abetting the border crisis.

Americans of faith in general—and Catholics, in particular—are a generous people. Let’s allow them to fund charity with their own dollars, not by using the power of the state to force them to fork over the cash.