Everywhere Is a Border State

NGOs receive taxpayer dollars to facilitate mass immigration all over the United States. Senate Republicans appear to have caved to Democrats on defunding them.

A white van bearing the words “OIM – ONU Migración” sped past a row of low yellow buildings, looking out of place in the neighborhood like a roving FEMA tent. Auden B. Cabello, a journalist documenting the border crisis, posted a video of the sight to Twitter and asked a good question: “What is the IOM, International Organization for Migration (UN), doing in Eagle Pass, Texas?”

The IOM (or OIM in Spanish) is the chief immigration agency of the UN. It works with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to “cooperate closely with international organizations, governmental and non-governmental, concerned with migration, refugees and human resources in order, inter alia, to facilitate the coordination of international activities in these fields.” Put simply, the IOM partners with NGOs to facilitate mass immigration.

Though they don’t receive the scrutiny they deserve, NGOs are a critical part of the ongoing crisis. They provide migrants with shelter, transportation, legal assistance, and more. Their facilities act as conduits into the interior of the country, on-ramps to highways into the heartland.

If you visit the IOM’s Migrantinfo portal, you will find a dropdown menu titled, “I’m looking to migrate.” With a few clicks, you, a prospective migrant, will be directed to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, located in San Juan, Texas. Catholic Charities is one of the most notorious NGOs because it receives significant government funding—as opposed to charitable contributions—to help migrants enter and remain in the U.S. It is an arm of the political establishment masquerading as a Christian mission. But how effective are they? Very, according to a Heritage Foundation investigation that relied on mobile device data.

The Heritage Oversight Project and Heritage Border Security and Immigration Center “obtained and analyzed movement patterns of anonymized mobile devices that were detected on the premises of over 30 NGO facilities at or near the border,” the think tank explained in a memo. “We assign a high degree of confidence to the assumption that the vast majority of these devices belong to individuals who illegally crossed the border.”

Heritage described its findings as a “sampling” and noted time constraints, among other limitations. Nevertheless, what it discovered was shocking. In one phase of the study, geofencing identified 3,400 unique mobile devices at the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley facility. They were later tracked to 433 of 435 congressional districts.

Heritage looked at 13 NGOs near the southern border in another phase of its investigation. “These locations were selected based on human source intelligence that the facilities may be involved in the processing and transportation of illegal aliens into the interior of the United States,” the memo states. They identified over 5,000 mobile devices that were later traced to all but one congressional district.

Of the 52 districts with the highest density of devices, 71 percent were Republican.

Much of this is taking place with taxpayer dollars. The omnibus bill signed by President Joe Biden last December directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to transfer $800 million in funding to FEMA. Money from there was then allocated to NGOs in grants distributed via FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program-Humanitarian and Shelter and Services Program.

House Republicans have tried to tackle this issue through the Border Reinforcement Act, which was introduced in April. The House later passed it as part of the GOP’s Secure the Border Act.

A key section in the House bill calls for stopping federal funding to any group that provides “transportation, lodging, or immigration legal services to inadmissible aliens.”

When Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the Senate companion, the Texas Republican’s office issued a press release stating that the “Secure the Border Act will resume construction on the wall, tighten asylum standards, criminalize visa overstays, increase the number of Border Patrol Agents, defund NGOs receiving tax dollars to help traffic illegal aliens throughout the heartland, prohibit DHS from using its app to assist illegal aliens, and more.”

Cruz’s companion bill contained identical language about defunding NGOs.

However, the portion about defunding NGOs did not appear in a discussion draft of the Senate bill that recently made the rounds, leading immigration restrictionists to fear Republicans caved to Democrats.

Those concerns appear to have been confirmed.

The NGO issue is completely absent from the proposal released today by a working group led by Sens. Lindsey Graham, James Lankford, and Tom Cotton.

“NGOs dictate America’s border security policy,” a former Trump Homeland Security official told Contra. “They staff the agencies, the White House, they sue when they don’t get their way, they lobby Congress to make sure the border remains open, and they make millions from the taxpayer to house illegals and fly them around the country.”

“Any effort to secure the border must focus on defunding the NGO dominance of this space,” the former official said.

Senate Republicans don’t seem to be on the same page.

Other countries have taken similar and even more aggressive steps on this issue. In 2018, the Hungarian government approved legislation to curb the ability of NGOs to help migrants illegally enter and stay in the country. “The Hungarian people rightfully expect the government to use all means necessary to combat illegal immigration and the activities that aid it,” said Interior Minister Sandor Pinter.

Originally published on the author’s Substack