The federal government is giving billions of dollars in subsidies to illegal immigrants while tens of thousands of American veterans remain homeless. In so many ways, Biden has his priorities backwards.
Illegals should be deported and veterans should be prioritized. As long as even one American veteran is still living on the streets, we shouldn’t spend a penny on illegals.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there were an estimated 19,750 sheltered homeless veterans. The number of unsheltered homeless veterans is estimated to be just under 40,000 on any given night. Those numbers should weigh heavily on the nation’s conscience. We’ve made progress toward reducing the population of homeless veterans in recent years, but there’s still much more work to be done.
This issue is deeply personal to me. As a Marine and Iraq war veteran, those are my brothers and sisters out there. Many homeless veterans are suffering from mental health issues, and in many cases those issues are directly traceable to their service to our country. Yet all too often, we as a society turn a blind eye to their struggles, despite all that they’ve sacrificed for our benefit.
Under the America First mantle, President Trump made caring for our nation’s veterans a priority, and it paid off. Reforms improved accountability and efficiency at the Veterans Administration, and investments in innovative approaches to helping veterans resulted in a substantial decline in the number of homeless veterans between 2017 and 2020.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration has demonstrated more interest in providing assistance to illegal aliens than homeless veterans.
Last year, for instance, Biden officials sparked a nationwide outcry when it was revealed that they were in talks to offer illegal immigrant families up to $450,000 as “compensation” for the Trump administration’s efforts to secure our borders. The total cost would have been at least $1 billion for this program, whose only evident justification would have been as a political rebuke of the Trump America First policies.
Biden must have had a sense that this would be unpopular, because he sought to transfer taxpayer dollars to illegal immigrants through court settlements, avoiding the need to get an appropriation from Congress. Fortunately, the idea proved so deeply unpopular that the administration eventually dropped the idea. But the Democrats had other, even worse ideas.
The so-called Build Back Better Act – which came within a hair’s breadth of being passed, and which many far-left Democrats still dream of reviving – would have transferred an even more enormous sum of money to illegal immigrants. The bill would have paid out over $10 billion to illegal immigrants because Democrats wanted to eliminate the Child Tax Credit requirement that parents provide a child’s Social Security number to qualify for the payments.
To put that number in perspective, consider that the VA’s entire FY 2022 budget request for combatting veteran homelessness was less than $3 billion. A single line item in Biden’s desired budget would have resulted in taxpayers spending three times as much to subsidize illegal immigrants as we spend to help homeless veterans find a place to live.
The Biden administration’s desire to lavish money on illegal aliens while tens of thousands of veterans remain on the streets is unconscionable. It’s an insult to every American – especially those of us who have served in the military and have to watch our federal government throw money at criminals who are living here in violation of the law while ignoring those who served our country honorably and need help establishing a stable and productive life for themselves as private citizens.
Until every last veteran is taken care of and off the streets, we shouldn’t spend a single penny on illegal immigrants in any way shape or form. Deport them immediately.