By Kyle Becker – Trending Political News
The Biden administration is laundering billions in taxpayer funds through Non-Governmental Organizations to facilitate illegal migration into the United States.
The State Department, for example, is offering a “loan” program to any foreigner around the world who desires to travel to the United States, claim without evidence that he or she is a “refugee,” and then resettle in the country — all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
As described by the the United States Refugee Admissions Program on its official website, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Travel Loan Program “helps to provide penalty and interest-free loans to refugees arriving in the United States.”
“Refugees who accept these travel loans are required to sign a promissory note prior to departure, committing themselves to repayment of the debt within a determined period after arrival,” the program description notes.
IOM “arranges travel for refugee using funds furnished by the Department of State and is mandated to subsequently receive refugees’ repayments on behalf of the Department of State,” the website explains. “Repayments made are remitted to a revolving fund created between the Department of State and IOM for use by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) to defray the cost of future refugee travel.”
“A Travel Loan repayment is initially assigned either to IOM itself or to a resettlement agency,” the website adds.
There is a single video on the International Organization for Migration (IOM) YouTube channel. It advertises the travel loan program, which can be viewed below.
As further elaborated by the organization, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Travel Loans Program “works with resettlement agencies to administer penalty- and interest-free loans to refugees arriving in the United States.”
A list of those agencies:
- Church World Service (CWS)
- The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS)
- The Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC)
- HIAS
- International Rescue Committee (IRC)
- Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS)
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
- United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
- World Relief Corporation of National Association of Evangelicals (WR)
However, the federal government’s spending on “Refugee and Entrant Assistance, Administration for Children and Families, Health and Human Services” amounts to billions of taxpayer dollars each year paid out to dozens upon dozens of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
The U.S. government’s allocation for spending on “refugee” resettlement and unaccompanied minors, as well as associated programs, is $14 billion for Fiscal Year 2024 (due to $3 billion in unspent funds rolling over and $3 billion in new allocations).
As stipulated by the United States’ Citizenship and Immigration Services, “You must receive a referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for consideration as a refugee.”
The difference between a refugee and asylee is noted in a Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2023.
Under Section 101(a)(42) of the INA, a refugee is a person who, generally, has experienced past persecution or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Individuals who meet the statutory definition may be considered for either refugee status under Section 207 of the INA if they are outside the United States, or asylum status under Section 208 of the INA, if they are already in the United States or present themselves at a U.S. port of entry. Both refugee and asylum status are forms of humanitarian protection offered by the United States.
The proposed ceilings for refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 is shown below.
It should be added that these numbers do not include “the admission of spouses and unmarried children under 21 who are still abroad or are located domestically but did not accompany the principal refugee by filing a ‘following-to-join’ petition, which does not require a separate refugee adjudication for these family members overseas.”
The report also notes Priority 4 (P-4) – Privately sponsored refugees:
The Department of State, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services, is developing a private sponsorship pilot program for refugees admitted through the USRAP that it anticipates launching in late calendar year 2022 as part of efforts to expand community participation in refugee resettlement.
Private sponsorship is a specific form of community sponsorship whereby private sponsors work independently of resettlement agency partners to welcome refugees, accepting primary responsibility to provide core services and other basic supports to newly arrived refugees to facilitate their resettlement.
The Biden administration’s approach to resettling “refugees” in the United States is to funnel taxpayer funds to NGOs and INGOs such as the United Nations who carry out the human trafficking scheme for them.
This scheme was illustrated well by the interview of Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, with NPR. The January 2023 report notes the State Department’s launch of Welcome Corps, “a private sponsorship program that will harness the generosity and goodwill of American citizens to resettle refugees.”
As a Fact Sheet on Welcome Corps notes:
The Department of State, in collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services, is pleased to announce the creation of the Welcome Corps, a new private sponsorship program that empowers everyday Americans to play a leading role in welcoming refugees arriving through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) and supporting their resettlement and integration as they build new lives in the United States. […]
The Department of State will roll out the Welcome Corps in two phases to identify, evaluate, and scale-up the most successful elements of private sponsorship as an innovative, community-led model of resettlement, with the goal of cementing the Welcome Corps as an enduring feature of our refugee resettlement system.
The Fact Sheet then notes a “consortium” of private groups that are trafficking migrants into the United States.
“The Department of State is funding a consortium of non-profit organizations with expertise in welcoming, resettling, and integrating refugees into U.S. communities to support the Welcome Corps,” the State Department notes. “This consortium is being led by the Community Sponsorship Hub, and includes Church World Service, IRIS – Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, the International Refugee Assistance Project, the International Rescue Committee, and Welcome.US. This consortium will offer expert guidance and support to Americans joining the Welcome Corps.”
The Biden administration’s illegal alien trafficking scheme was effectively exposed and criticized by Lora Ries in a May 2023 piece at the Heritage Foundation.
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.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) also raised attention and condemned the Biden administration’s policy.
“This is appalling,” he remarked in response to a post by John Basham on X. “US support for the UN must end.#DefundTheUN”
Berry Razi has also shone the spotlight on the Director of the UN’s IOM, a former Obama Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official named Amy Pope.
Razi pointed out that Amy Pope’s stated mission for the UN IOM is to “promote orderly, safe, and regular migration.”
Devex notes that UN IOM has an annual operating budget of “an estimated $1.4 billion and some 9,000 staff working in over 150 countries worldwide. IOM currently has 165 Member States and a further 8 states holding Observer status.”
RAV News has been extensively investigation UN IOM camps that are funneling illegal migrants into the United States.
Ben Bergquam reported on Friday that “The United Nations sent their security to try to intimidate us at our hotel in Panama City today so we decided to expose the hell out of them!”
Bergquam and his colleague Oscar el Blue toured an area near the Panama Canal that was known as Fort Clayton that the United States ceded and was subsequently turned into a UN IOM hub. The RAV team subsequently found offices for over a dozen NGOs, including OIM/IOM, UNICEF, the Clinton Global Initiative.
In 2022, investigative journalist and war correspondent Michael Yon was interviewed by the Epoch Times about the unprecedented migration going through the Darien Gap, which extends from Panama into Columbia.
“They’re building, they’re adding on the back of it,” Yon said. “So they’re expanding this camp. There were 130,000 that went through last year between this camp and a couple of others.”
The New York Post’s editorial board remarked on the human wreckage being caused by the NGO-facilitated illegal migrant trafficking that led to the death of Laken Riley.
The suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, illegally crossed the border into El Paso in September of 2022. Yes, illegally.
Despite what activists might claim, he was not an “asylum seeker.” That’s a designation for someone who is fleeing religious or political persecution. […]
The suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, illegally crossed the border into El Paso in September of 2022. Yes, illegally.
Despite what activists might claim, he was not an “asylum seeker.” That’s a designation for someone who is fleeing religious or political persecution.
Instead, President Biden has allowed millions to game the system.
They cross the border, then, coached by charity groups, make bogus claims of asylum.
Ibarra’s wife admits that’s why they got married, “so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post, and look more sympathetic.
It will be years until their case is heard in court, and by that point even if they’re rejected no one will deport them.
In 2023, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum to the State Department in which he stated: “The admission of up to 125,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
Joe Biden had set the cap at 125,000 beginning in 2022, as he stated on World Refugee Day. In early 2021, Biden revised the annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 from what it referred to as a “historically low” cap of 12,500 the year prior.
In February 2023, President Joe Biden announced a new asylum policy that critics derided as an “asylum ban.” The International Rescue Committee, which benefits of the IOM program blasted the policy change.
“Despite promises made on the campaign trail to overhaul inhumane policies and stop forced deportations that violate due process, the Biden Administration implemented further restrictions on asylum,” IRC remarked.
“The asylum ban bars asylum seekers who crossed through another country on their way to the southern U.S. border, unless they have previously applied for (and been denied) asylum elsewhere or managed to receive an appointment at a port of entry through a new U.S. government app for smartphones,” IRC continued.
However, IRC notes that “[o]n July 25, 2023, a federal judge blocked the Biden Administration’s asylum ban, calling it ‘arbitrary and capricious’.”
But in August, as reported by Politico, “a panel of three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to put a temporary stay on a court ruling from last month that was slated to stop the asylum restrictions.”
As far-left activist group FWD.US bemoaned prior to the initial court decision, “Under the new asylum and transit ban, the number of individuals who will actually be allowed to apply for asylum is expected to drop substantially; large numbers of people will be preemptively disqualified from applying for relief, even though they have long had the legal right to seek asylum under U.S. and international law.”
In February, the federal government filed a motion to place the appeal in abeyance, a motion that was granted. However, dissenting Judge Lawrence VanDyke, blasted the decision.
“The administration’s abrupt about-face makes no sense as a legal matter,” he wrote. “Either it previously lied to this court by exaggerating the threat posed by vacating the rule, or it is now hiding the real reason it wants to hold this case in abeyance. Given its success thus far in defending a rule it has consistently characterized as critical to its control of the border, and the fact that it has to realize its odds of success in this case can only improve as it works its way vertically through the federal court system, the government’s sudden and severe change in position looks a lot like a purely politically motivated attempt to throw the game at the last minute. At the very least it looks like the administration and its frenemies on the other side of this case are colluding to avoid playing their politically fraught game during an election year.”
“This court is a legal institution, not a political one,” he added. The Biden administration begs to differ.
In February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton begun suing NGOs for their alleged role in facilitating illegal migration into the United States.
“The chaos at the southern border has created an environment where NGOs, funded with taxpayer money from the Biden Administration, facilitate astonishing horrors including human smuggling,” said Attorney General Paxton. “While the federal government perpetuates the lawlessness destroying this country, my office works day in and day out to hold these organizations responsible for worsening illegal immigration.”