More than 1,100 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border but just 24 miles north of Mexico’s border with Guatemala, a gleaming new mall is set to be completed next month that will become just one node in a vast network of over a hundred facilities across Central and South America, all designed to make it easier for migrants to enter the United States.
This mass migration infrastructure is being built and paid for by the United Nations, foreign governments, international nongovernmental organizations, and American taxpayers.
In Tapachula, a city in the Mexican state of Chiapas just north of Guatemala, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is building a 75,000-square-foot migrant aid center on land donated by the Mexican government. Once completed, the facility will house employees from UNHCR, the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund, and dozens of other NGOs, all dedicated to helping migrants transit to the U.S.
The facility was commissioned to “respond comprehensively to the needs of people who arrive in Mexico … migrant refugees who travel together from all continents, and arrive in Tapachula in need of a response or attention,” Giovanni Lepri, Mexico’s representative to UNHCR told reporters when the project was first announced.
A service to migrants
In addition to providing migrants with food, transportation vouchers, and cash cards, the migrant aid center and many others like it will also provide logistical tips on how to safely reach the U.S. and even legal advice on how best to enter.
When asked how she could justify her organization essentially helping migrants break the laws of another country, an employee of the Cadena NGO told Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies, “As an organization, we’re not here to judge. We’re just here to provide a service.”
Cadena, other NGOs, and the U.N. are providing migrants with services often paid for by U.S. taxpayers. According to Bensman, UNHCR received $1.9 billion from the Biden administration in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023 after receiving just $377 million from the Trump administration in 2019.
In addition to its new facility in Tapachula, UNHCR and IOM plan to spend an additional $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American countries through a network of over 200 NGOs for its 2024 Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan, which aims to assist over 2.2 million migrants in search of “a country and community that accepts them, offers stability, effective protection, and opportunity for a life lived with dignity.”
The report singles out the opening of “Safe Mobility Offices by the United States Government in some countries of the region” as a development that will have “a positive and stabilizing impact” on migrants “by providing them with options for a regular pathway to the United States.”
It is those “options” that the Biden administration’s Safe Mobility Offices are providing migrants that are the most concerning for the future sovereignty of the U.S.
The refugee process
Congress created the first legal framework for the acceptance of refugees by passing the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Designed to help the millions of Europeans displaced by World War II, the act set quotas for how many refugees could be accepted from each country, and just over 350,000 were admitted to the country through the program.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Congress passed a number of ad hoc refugee programs, including the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which admitted over 200,000 refugees fleeing communism from southern Europe, and the Azorean Refugee Act of 1958, which admitted 2,000 refugees in the wake of volcanic eruptions that destroyed much of the islands.
It wasn’t until Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 that a standing refugee identification and admittance process was established with annual caps. Those caps are negotiated annually as part of the federal government’s annual appropriations process, with the cap ranging from about 70,000 for most of former President George H. W. Bush’s administration to about 80,000 during the Obama administration, falling to 20,000 under President-elect Donald Trump, and rising to 125,000 under Biden.
Migrants seeking refugee status in the U.S. must first register with UNHCR in whatever foreign country they have fled to. The process does not start with the U.S. government. Once the U.N. has interviewed the migrants and determined that they meet the legal definition of a refugee, they are then referred to the United States Refugee Admissions Program. To qualify for refugee status, a migrant must show that they either were persecuted in their home country due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group or that they have a credible fear of such persecution.
Once the U.N. has referred a migrant to USRAP as a refugee, the migrant is again interviewed in a foreign country by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer. Once the USCIS officer has confirmed a migrant’s refugee eligibility, the migrant is referred to a Resettlement Support Center, where they are medically screened and offered cultural training in conjunction with the State Department.
Only after passing a medical exam and a security screening is a refugee allowed to enter the U.S., where they are referred to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helps them secure housing, food stamps, and a work permit.
Crucially, every migrant who enters the country as a refugee has been vetted overseas by the U.N. and then the Department of Homeland Security. Additionally, there are strict legislatively set caps limiting how many refugees are accepted every year.
Pathway to parole
The SMOs created by the Biden administration are designed to help migrants in foreign countries work with UNHCR to begin the refugee resettlement process. According to a House Judiciary Committee report, since June 2023, Biden’s SMOs have helped connect more than 60,000 migrants with UNHCR, most of whom were then referred to USRAP to begin the refugee resettlement process.
One can debate whether or not U.S. taxpayers should be spending close to $100 million overseas helping migrants navigate the legal process to become refugees, but at least Congress has set the funding and approved the refugee resettlement system.
What is troubling about the SMO program is the House Judiciary Committee has also revealed that when UNHCR tells migrants they do not qualify for refugee status, SMO employees then educate migrants on the other “pathways” into the U.S. created by the Biden administration.
“For aliens who are not eligible for refugee resettlement in the United States,” the report says, “IOM employees at SMOs counsel the aliens on additional avenues to enter the United States. Depending on the country in which the SMO is located, an alien may apply to travel to the United States through various parole programs, including through the Biden-Harris Administration’s fraud-riddled Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) parole program.”
Unlike the refugee process, there is no firm legislative foundation for any of Biden’s parole programs. Chapter 8 Section 1182 of the U.S. Code does allow for the temporary admission of an otherwise inadmissible alien for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” but that same statute also makes clear that as soon as “the purposes of such parole shall have been served,” a paroled alien is to be taken immediately into custody and processed for deportation.
Such grants of “humanitarian” parole are supposed to be done on a “case-by-case” basis, which is why, unlike the refugee process, there is no cap for the designation in the statute. However, the Biden administration has been abusing this parole power, turning it into a new “pathway” for illegal immigrants to enter the U.S.
The Biden administration and its NGO allies like to advertise Biden’s parole programs as an orderly and humane way to bring asylum-seekers into the country, but that is what makes the fact that taxpayer-funded SMO employees are pushing migrants into the program so scandalous. The migrants that Biden’s SMOs are pushing into his parole programs have already been rejected by the U.N. for refugee status. If UNHCR has already determined that a migrant has no credible fear of prosecution in their home country, an immigration judge in the U.S. is highly unlikely to come to a different conclusion.
Since the U.N. has already determined these CHNV parole grantees don’t qualify for asylum, in two years, when their “temporary” parole status runs out, all of these CHNV paroles will automatically become illegal immigrants. Biden has brought more than 1.3 million migrants into the U.S. through the CHNV program and its sister CBP One App program, which is administered at southern border ports of entry.
The Biden administration had already created 13 SMOs in cities across Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador, and until Trump defeated him, Biden planned to open 100 more brick-and-mortar SMOs throughout Central and South America.
Open borders as reparations
The animating belief behind the network of international agencies and NGOs working to undermine U.S. borders is that the U.S. and Europe are morally obligated to take in infinite amounts of migrants from around the world because they are the source of all the problems in the world.
Reece Jones, author of Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, argues that Europe owns the migrant crisis “because of the history of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.”
“From the brutal extraction regimes of Africa to the two hundred years of British colonialism in India, European states destroyed the previous political systems that existed throughout the world, took resources and labor from their colonies, then left behind weakened, dependent states,” writes Jones.
“Rather than building walls and fences that force migrants to take ever more dangerous routes and result in thousands of deaths every year, the European Union must open borders and allow the free movement of human beings who are displaced by the history of European colonialism, arbitrary borders, and economic policies,” Jones continues. “It is time for Europe to open its borders as a form of reparations for the past injustices that led to the crisis in the first place.”
Suketu Mehta, a journalism professor at New York University and author of This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, has deemed the U.S. equally guilty.
“Today, a quarter of a billion people are migrants. They are moving because the rich countries have stolen the future of the poor countries,” writes Mehta.
“They are coming here because we were there,” he continues. “Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries.”
Because the U.S. once propped up a dictator in the Dominican Republic, anyone who wants to come to the U.S. from that country should be allowed to do so, Mehta argues. The same goes for Iraq because the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, and the same goes for every African country that participated in the slave trade. Don’t forget global warming. Since the U.S.’s carbon emissions are responsible for global warming, any country that has a flood or a cold snap earns the right to send its people here.
The goal of the Biden administration, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, is not to stop the flow of migrants into the U.S. but to make it as orderly as possible. Mayorkas admitted as much to Brett Baier in May 2022 on Fox News. When asked by Baier if it is “the objective of the Biden administration to sharply reduce the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border,” Mayorkas said it was not.
“It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system,” Mayorkas said.
That is why the Biden administration worked hand in hand with the U.N. to build 13 SMOs and began construction of over 100 more. It is the goal of Mayorkas and his globalist counterparts to make the mass migration from poor countries to our country as orderly as possible. They have no intention of stopping it, only making sure it happens with minimal resistance.
‘Making Borders Great Again’
On the first Tuesday of this month, people in the U.S. soundly rejected the Biden-Mayorkas vision of simply managing mass migration into the U.S. Instead, voters chose Trump’s vision of asserting our sovereignty and preventing the mass movement of migrants into the country.
Reinstating the successful Remain in Mexico from his first term in office, thus denying migrants who are caught illegally crossing the border into the U.S., is a good first step. It will be even easier for Trump to end Biden’s CHNV and CBP One App parole programs. However, as Trump begins to track down the nearly 6 million illegal immigrants Biden let into the country and deport them, he should also begin uprooting the international network of migrant aid centers created by Biden. Not one more SMO should come online, and Biden should close down the existing 13 offices located throughout Central and South America.
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Trump should also pressure the U.N. to stop the construction and maintenance of facilities designed to help migrants come to the U.S. border. We should not cut off the U.N. entirely. It can still serve a useful function as a prescreener of migrants who want to apply to become refugees. That system is working just fine and is checked democratically by the caps set in the annual appropriations process.
The U.S. is a country of immigrants. We will never close our borders entirely. However, there are literally over a billion people in the world who would move to the U.S. if they could. We simply cannot take them all in. We need a secure border and a working quota system that is democratically accountable to voters. We can’t let the U.N., foreign governments, and international NGOs set our immigration policies.