CV NEWS FEED // A new report this week revealed that a group of immigration-related nonprofits working directly with the Biden administration have been receiving massive sums of money even as the border crisis worsens and thousands of children remain missing.
“Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S.,” reported Madeleine Rowley of The Free Press (The FP), “it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.”
During the last year for which there are official data (2022), “a record 130,000” unaccompanied minor children poured into the U.S. That same year, “the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs,” Rowley reported.
Charles Marino, who served as an advisor to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, said that “the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money” connected with Biden’s handling of migrant children “will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”
The Free Press focused its report on “three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc.”
Taken together, the revenue of those three companies alone “grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available,” Rowley wrote. “And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million.”
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) funds the nonprofits. That office’s budget has also “swelled over the years—from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $6.3 billion in 2023,” according to the report. “The ORR is expected to spend at least $7.3 billion this year—almost all of which will be funneled to NGOs and other contractors.”
“The ORR does not publicly list the specific number of shelters it funds in its efforts to house migrants,” Rowley pointed out, adding that the New York Times has referred to the “business” as “lucrative” and “secretive.”
Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies told The FP that “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem.”
Rowley cited a number of examples:
Baltimore-based Global Refuge “had $50 million in revenue” in 2018. “By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million—$180 million of which came from the government. That year, $82 million was spent on housing unaccompanied children” and “granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children.”
Global Refuge CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah’s salary in 2019 was $244,000, but just three years later, her compensation more than doubled to $520,000.”
Southwest Key Programs has been the subject of “a number of scandals in the recent past, including misuse of federal funds and several instances of employees sexually abusing some of the children in its care…. Despite those controversies, the Austin, Texas-based nonprofit’s “government grant was $391 million” in 2020, and “by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.”
CEO Dr. Anselmo Villarreal makes a $1,000,000 salary.
Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, held a “staggering $1.3 billion” government contract, in 2022 “by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border.”
CEO Chip Fulghum “was paid almost $600,000” in 2022, “while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.”
“Despite these astronomical sums, the Unaccompanied Children Program is fraught with problems and suffers from a general lack of oversight,” The FP’s report pointed out:
Because so many unaccompanied youths are crossing the border, sources who worked at a temporary Emergency Intake Site in 2021 said the ORR pressured case managers to move children out within two weeks in order to prepare for the next wave of unaccompanied children.
In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis empaneled a grand jury to conduct an investigation, which showed how the ORR continually loosened its safety protocols so children could be connected to sponsors more quickly—and with less due diligence. The same report revealed that because there’s often no documentation to prove a migrant’s age at the time Border Patrol processes them, 105 adults were discovered posing as unaccompanied children in 2021. One of them, a 24-year-old Honduran male who said he was 17, was charged with murdering his sponsor in Jacksonville, Florida.
Readers can find the full report from The FP here.
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