Defunding the NGOs

At their core, NGOs are an off-the-books form of shadow government.

We’ve railed against the use of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) for years so it's gratifying to see that these NGOs are finally getting the attention that they deserve. At their core, NGOs are nothing more than an off-the-books form of shadow government. They exist primarily to enact policies that our out-of-control federal agencies want to establish, but are legally prohibited from doing so.

NGOs have been used to push a variety of State Department agendas in foreign countries and they’ve been at the forefront of government-directed censorship that has plagued our country - and effectively killed free speech in the UK and European Union. In other words, NGO's are a government-funded extension that act as effectuators of unofficial government policy - put in place to promote agendas that our federal agencies are unable to implement directly.

NGOs are both a vast grift and a total corruption of our Constitution.

Although there’s a dawning public realization, many people are still unaware that large amounts of federal funds are being given to a wide variety of NGOs, many of them UN-related. Fewer still are aware of just how large these amounts are - and what purposes they are being used for.

In one particularly nefarious example, taxpayer money was used to facilitate the flood of illegals into our country. Some of this money comes from the funding that we are paying to the United Nations - $4.1 billion slated for 2024 - up from $3.4 billion in 2023. But there’s another even larger element to the UN Funding that often goes unreported.

The US also provides voluntary contributions to UN-related entities through accounts tied to the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and other related programs. Congress generally appropriates overall funding to these accounts, but it’s the executive branch that determines how these unmarked funds are actually allocated.

For example, according to USAID reports, the United States contributed more than $7.4 billion to U.N. entities through global humanitarian accounts in FY2022, including Migration and Refugee Assistance, International Disaster Assistance, and Food for Peace - an amount that’s more than double the official UN contributions for that same year.

In other words, in addition to the generalized funding that we already provide to the UN, Biden’s State Department has been providing enormous amounts of additional funding to the UN - and as we’ll see, this hidden funding was used to establish the hundreds of NGOs that set up way-stations all along the routes from Latin America into the US.

As the Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell noted, these NGOs were also “involved in lobbying the Biden administration and our Congress to keep the border wide open… they're involved in D.C. making sure the border stays open through policy and support to the Biden administration. A lot of their staffers and people connected in those NGO networks are in the Biden administration.”

If there’s doubt regarding the role of NGOs as an unofficial extension of our government, consider that in addition to the funding by our government, the actions by the NGOs paralleled Biden's executive orders on the border that were issued on day one and continued throughout the first month of his administration.

Biden’s EOs allowed the border to be thrown wide open, deportation rules halted and created an exemption of legal penalties for those who violated our immigration laws. Simultaneously the State Department and USAID established internal funding for the NGOs that had begun driving the flow of illegal immigrants into our country.

None of this was organic. This point cannot be emphasized enough. The flood of illegals was not something that happened spontaneously and without planning. Everything was designed, constructed and paid for by our government, primarily using NGOs as off-the-book governmental vehicles to do so.

It had long been suspected that the State Department was directly facilitating illegal immigration into the United States - using the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration or PRM to do so. According to their website, PRM’s mission is to “provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world on behalf of the American people by working with other governments and international partners.”

Despite their noble-sounding mission, PRM goes to some lengths to hide where their funding is actually going and what it's really being used for. But a January 2024 report from Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies began to shine some light on the financial activities of PRM. In that report, Bensman highlighted how the United Nations was providing funding for US bound migrants in 2024.

The amounts being spent by the UN were enormous - including nearly $1.6 billion in cash debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and even “humanitarian transportation” during 2024 to millions of U.S.-bound immigrants in 17 Latin American nations and Mexico.

As Bensman notes, “The document makes clear in writing that the UN and these partners know their endeavor aids, abets, and makes possible the “onward movement” of immigrants who intend to illegally cross borders, especially to get into the United States.”

But it was the UN’s use of the NGO’s and related organizations that got Bensman to investigate further. What he found was shocking.

The State Department’s PRM division, along with USAID (run by former Obama UN Ambassador Samantha Power), had given the UN’s International Organization of Migration “more than $1.4 billion in just the last 12 months, by far the most on record. PRM was also the biggest donor to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which is among 15 different UN agencies that will spread money and aid all along the migrant trails of Latin America.”

As Bensman observed, “I have visited UN waystations featuring long lines of U.S.-bound immigrants applying for aid from clipboard-wielding workers handing out cash cards and other goodies, from Reynosa and Monterrey in the north of Mexico to Tapachula in the far south. But the waystations also appear everywhere along the trails much farther south.”

According to the 2023 fiscal year Congressional presentation from the State Department’s PRM, “U.S. contributions… helped the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance increase its asylum registration and processing capacity by 400 percent.” As their presentation notes, “In Central America and Mexico, PRM support helps government officials and civil society to identify, screen, protect, and assist vulnerable migrants and to strengthen national asylum systems and other protection capacities.“

Notice what’s really being disclosed in PRM’s congressional presentation. In addition to providing humanitarian aid for existing streams of migrants, the underlying infrastructure to create these enormous streams of refugees was being directly funded by PRM.

In reality, all of this is being funded by you. Taxpayer money is being spent - more or less anonymously - by the US State Department to help facilitate the unprecedented stream of illegal immigrants that have been flooding across our borders and throughout the entire US.

When we first discovered that it was our own State Department that was funding the flow of illegals into our country we had a hard time accepting what we were seeing. A complete and total betrayal by our State Department - using our own tax dollars against us.

But the more we dug, the worse that it got. We uncovered massive and ongoing donations (bottom of page) from several FEMA programs to a variety of NGOs - including large amounts that were sent repetitively to Catholic Charities of America.

The amounts designated by FEMA under just one program for illegals (between the years 2024 and 2023) were huge: $650 million and $364 million respectively. Drop down on FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program page to “Annual Funding” in order to see the amounts we’re referencing.

Another section where we found large amounts of funding for illegals is under FEMA’s “Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP)” program that likely receives additional funding support from other sources. The discovery of Catholic Charities as a primary recipient of FEMA funding was not an anomaly.

As it turns out, many of the NGOs that are recipients of taxpayer-funded money from the State Department are actually faith-based non-profit organizations. As Bensman notes, “The UN has entrusted faith-based establishment NGOs with handling a lot of the $372 million in “Cash and Voucher Assistance” and “Multipurpose Cash Assistance”.

Indeed, a follow-up “examination of the more than 30 faith-based nonprofits among those UN NGO partners - representing Jewish, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic [particularly the Jesuits], and nondenominational evangelical organizations - shows that the U.S. State Department’s PRM and USAID have been mainlining taxpayer funds to these groups.”

According to The Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell, “Catholic charities are… the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to this. They are deeply involved in facilitating the travel of illegal aliens throughout the country.”

To add insult to injury there was another potential source of unexpected funding for these same NGOs. This new funding source was working its way through Congress in early 2024 in the form of additional funding for Ukraine that was disguised as a “Republican-led” Border Bill.

The “Trojan Horse” Border Bill that was introduced by Republican Senator James Lankford and Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (designed in conjunction with the Biden White House) included a shocking $2.6 billion for “refugee and entrant assistance activities”. Additionally there were two other provisions - one in the amount of $5.6 billion and the other in the amount of $3.5 billion - that were designated as “International Disaster Assistance” and “Migration and Refugee Assistance” respectively.

This carefully hidden funding lurking within Lankford’s Border Bill was intended to go directly to the same NGOs that were responsible for the flood of illegals into our country. As America first Legal observed, the proposed bill was even worse than the current laws. Fortunately the Border Bill ultimately failed - although its failure was used as a political attack on Trump during the election.

The hard truth is that we are the ones who have been paying for the flow of illegals through massive federal subsidization of the hundreds of NGOs that set up waystations throughout all of Latin America. And this represents only a single subset of activities where our government employs the NGO model. As we mentioned at the outset, the active censorship of Americans has its roots in a variety of government-directed NGOs, nonprofits and universities.

It’s long-past time to bring an end to our government’s funding of NGOs as a means to avoid the carefully-designed constraints of our Constitution. It’s time to make our government accountable for their actions. The new Trump Administration cannot start soon enough.