The same Democrats who paint themselves as belonging to the pro-immigrant, humanitarian party are championing cruel policies that have left nearly five hundred thousand immigrant children separated from their parents and vulnerable to human trafficking and sexual abuse. Why would they change the status quo when they are getting rich exploiting it?
Amid the last border crisis in 2014, when staggering numbers of UACs, or Unaccompanied Alien Children, were being smuggled across the border from Latin America, then-Vice President Joe Biden told the press he was “greatly concerned by the startling number of… children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.. between 75 and 80 percent -- rely on very dangerous, not-nice, human-smuggling networks that transport them through Central America and Mexico to the United States.”
Biden, along with then-President Obama, supported changing the law to give those children the same treatment as UACs from Canada and Mexico. Under the proposed change, instead of allowing children from non-contiguous countries to go through the entire process of seeking asylum without any parents or guardians, they would be quickly screened and returned home to their families. In addition to reuniting children and parents, the changes would deter UACs from making the trip in the first place and greatly reduce the prevalence of human trafficking.
But something happened when the Democrats discovered what a revenue-generating opportunity this could be for them—they lost all interest in changing the law. In fact, they’ve made it much worse. When President Donald Trump was in office, his Title 42 policies meant that UACs crossing the border would be returned home to their families. One of President Biden’s first actions upon taking office was to reverse that, blocking UACs from Title 42 removal. That had the entirely predictable effect of encouraging more children to make the dangerous journey across our southern border without their parents. The number of UACs crossing our border is now five times higher than it was when President Biden first took office.
Today, instead of looking to fix the problem, the Biden administration comes to us in Congress to ask us to funnel billions more to NGOs so that their Democrat friends and donors can get even richer. The Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which funds these border NGOs, recently asked Congress for $9.3 billion in funding for the next fiscal year. In 2018, when President Trump was in office, the same agency spent just $1.8 billion.
Where is all the money going? The Biden HHS is funneling many of those extra taxpayer dollars to far-left NGOs in the name of assuaging the humanitarian crisis at the border. HHS gave $207 million in federal awards to Global Refuge in 2022. Interestingly, Global Refuge’s CEO is Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, a former policy director for Michelle Obama. Vignarajah’s salary was $520,000 last year; it doubled in three years. The CEO of Endeavors, Inc., who was an Obama administration aid made $600,000 in 2022. A former Biden transition official who helped vet political appointees assisted Endeavors in securing a $520 billion no-bid contract. That bid is now under investigation by the Inspector General of HHS.
Here's the long and short of it: The Biden border crisis is a racket. The traffickers make billions in profits and so do their NGO accomplices here in the U.S. They get rich, foreign children suffer, and you, American taxpayer, pay for it.
We can’t let them get away with it. It’s shameful, it's sickening, and House Republicans should be doing everything we can to fight against it.