The Biden administration saw unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens enter our country. As a result, the public saw its security compromised, its communities inundated, its public resources overwhelmed, and billions of its tax dollars squandered.
At the same time, the criminal cartels that ran massive human smuggling operations grew ever richer and more powerful as a result of former President Joe Biden’s border crisis. But they were not the only ones cashing in on the crisis that brought millions of illegal aliens to the United States over the past four years. An assortment of nongovernmental organizations, ideologically committed to open borders, simultaneously facilitated and profited from resettling illegal aliens across the country.
Some 11 million illegal aliens were encountered at our borders between 2021 and 2025, with millions released or paroled into the country. Many of them lacked a place to live and other basic necessities. Lacking the capacity to address those needs, the federal government turned to NGOs to serve as contractors. These groups were tasked with finding or providing migrants with shelter, ensuring they were fed and had access to healthcare, and enrolling them in public assistance programs.
Very little of this assistance came out of their own pockets. Instead, the government paid these NGOs to provide many of the services needed by the hundreds of thousands of migrants the Biden administration was allowing into the country every month. On top of that, like with any other service provider, some of the government money funneled through NGOs went to pay salaries and support organizational overhead and other proprietary interests.
Even more disturbingly, there has been very little accountability by the NGOs for how billions of tax dollars are being spent. The crisis that undermined just about every identifiable interest of the public and the communities in which they lived instead wound up serving the ideological and financial interests of the NGOs.
In February 2022, I, Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX), wrote a letter to Catholic Charities USA, one of the leading NGOs involved in settling illegal aliens, raising concern that the Biden administration was “deputizing NGOs to harbor, transport, and encourage unauthorized aliens to resettle throughout the United States.”
All of these activities are illegal. The letter requested a full accounting of Catholic Charities’s activities in this matter and disclosure of how much money the NGO had received from federal, state, and local governments to carry out its role in resettling illegal aliens. Needless to say, no meaningful response to these questions was ever received.
Clearly, the new administration is disrupting the business model the NGOs created during the Biden years. The Trump administration has quickly worked to halt the influx of new illegal aliens and end catch-and-release policies along with the abuse of parole that allowed large numbers of illegal aliens into the country. Moreover, on her first full day on the job, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately paused “federal funding to nongovernmental organizations that … support or provide services to removable illegal aliens.”
Policies, like presidential administrations, come and go. We need to put laws on the books that will prevent future administrations from simply throwing open our borders as the Biden administration did. Congress also needs to prevent any future administration from handing out billions of taxpayer dollars to unaccountable NGOs that cross the line between providing services and actively encouraging, harboring, and abetting illegal immigration.
Before any funding is restored, it is imperative that President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency takes a careful look at how the billions of dollars paid out to resettle illegal migrants have been spent and determine if that taxpayer money is advancing the interests of the public or the ideological interests of the NGOs.
VANCE WANTS TRUMP TO ‘BUILD THE ENTIRE BORDER WALL’ BY 2029
This month, I (Gooden) introduced legislation, the Protecting Federal Funds from Human Trafficking and Smuggling Act, that would require the Office of Management and Budget to certify that NGOs receiving government funding are not involved in human trafficking, smuggling, transporting, or other illegal activities. These NGOs would lose their tax-exempt status if they knowingly violated federal laws.
Two of the most popular steps the Trump administration has taken during its first few weeks in office have been securing our borders and ensuring that every government agency and contractor is spending taxpayer money to advance the interests of the public, not undermine them. As we have seen over the past four years, basic common sense and respect for the rule of law are not always the guiding principles in Washington, which is why it is important that Congress not squander this opportunity to enact legislation that will ensure NGOs are never again able to use the people’s money to aid and abet illegal immigration.
Lance Gooden represents Texas’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Dan Stein is president of the Federation For American Immigration Reform.