The nonprofit organizations profiting from Biden’s border crisis
Communities throughout the United States are suffering while they try to find money to house, clothe, feed, educate, and provide medical care for millions of illegal immigrants caught and released into the country by President Joe Biden. However, the left-wing nonprofit organizations paid to serve migrants are profiting pleasantly.
According to an examination by the Free Press of three of the most prominent nonprofit organizations paid by the Biden administration for migrant services, their revenues have more than tripled since 2018, and each of their CEOs makes more than $500,000 a year.
One, Global Refuge, saw its revenue rise from $50 million in 2018 to more than $200 million in 2022. Documents show that Global Refuge housed more than 2,500 migrant children in 2019 at a cost of $30 million. It housed just 1,443 in 2022 at a cost of $82.5 million. In that same period, Global Refuge CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah saw her salary rise from $244,000 a year to $520,000. Before coming to Global Refuge, she served as former first lady Michelle Obama’s policy director.
Another nonprofit group, Endeavors, was awarded more than 1 billion dollars in 2022, of which it spent $533,000 on a music therapist, $4.6 million on “consulting services,” $1.4 million on conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. Despite past scandals involving self-dealing among top executives, in 2022, Southwest Key Programs was awarded almost $800 million, of which it gave more than $1 million to its CEO.
Each nonprofit organization benefits from the Department of Health and Human Services’s Unaccompanied Children Program. When children are caught illegally crossing the border without parents, Border Patrol must, by law, turn them over to HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is charged with housing, feeding, and educating them until their parents or a sponsor can be found. HHS does not provide these services. They contract with nonprofit outfits that do, hence the big payouts to Endeavors, Global Refuge, and Southwest Key Programs.
Under the leadership of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the Unaccompanied Children Program has been plagued by fraud and abuse. One director quit after Becerra threatened to fire her if she didn’t discharge children to sponsors faster.
“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants,” Becerra told ORR staff in 2022, “he would never have become famous and rich.” But the CEOs of the nonprofit organizations Becerra pays sure are getting rich.
Profiteering at the nonprofit groups involved in the Unaccompanied Children Program is a tiny fraction of the problem. The Biden administration has opened the spending floodgates through many other federal programs including State Department funding for the United Nations’s Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan; Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which is not to be confused with FEMA funding for Shelter and Services Program; or HHS funding for refugee entrant and assistance programs. Billions of dollars flow from taxpayers to far-left nonprofit groups allegedly to provide services without oversight for millions of migrants.
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“We could afford to take, in a heartbeat, another 4 million people,” Biden said while campaigning for president in 2019. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre, absolutely bizarre.”
It’s easy to afford the housing, food, education, and medical costs of millions of new migrants when you are spending other people’s money, as Biden always is. It is even easier to spend that money when you know it is going to your political allies. It is past time for Congress to cut off the border crisis gravy train.
