WASHINGTON, D.C. –– Today, Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, delivered the following opening statement in a full committee hearing to examine how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped facilitate and benefited from the historic Biden-Harris border crisis, as well as how far-left NGOs are still working to help inadmissible aliens undermine federal immigration law under the Trump administration.
Watch Subcommittee Chairman Guest's full opening statement in a hearing entitled, “An Inside Job: How NGOs Facilitated the Biden Border Crisis.”
As prepared for delivery:
For four years, the Biden-Harris administration created the worst border crisis in American history. From day one, Biden, Harris, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas implemented a policy of mass catch-and-release, dismantled effective border-security policies, and gutted interior enforcement. As a result, roughly 13 million inadmissible aliens were either encountered at our borders or entered as gotaways. The consequences have been devastating.
Thousands of Americans were lost to fentanyl poisonings. Gang members wreaked havoc in local communities. Young women like Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin were raped, abused, and murdered by illegal aliens.
This committee led the way in impeaching Secretary Mayorkas for his willful and systemic refusal to enforce longstanding immigration laws—laws passed and amended over the years by bipartisan majorities in Congress. The American people also emphatically rejected the open-borders policies at the ballot box last November.
What is not known by many, and what will be highlighted today at this hearing, is that the Biden-Harris administration could not execute an open borders policy on its own. They needed help, and that help came from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the federal government.
These groups that received billions in taxpayer funding would prove instrumental in helping the Biden-Harris administration process and release a historic number of illegal aliens into our communities.
Under a DHS program called the Emergency Food and Shelter Humanitarian Program (EFSP-H), which later became the Shelter and Services Program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided grants to numerous NGOs, many of whom were operating at the Southwest border. These groups spent billions of taxpayer dollars given to them by the Biden and Harris administration to provide all manner of benefits to illegal aliens “recently released from DHS custody,” according to the department.
Our taxpayer dollars were spent on purchasing tens of thousands of nights in hotel rooms for illegal aliens, instead of using existing ICE detention facilities to house those detained individuals. The Biden-Harris Administration sent taxpayer dollars to NGOs to put them in hotels at the cost of hundreds of dollars per night, often without any ICE supervision.
Even worse, our tax dollars were used to form the final link in the cartels’ human smuggling operation, paying to help illegal aliens travel to their preferred destination—Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and other destinations of choice.
Jason Owens, then-chief of the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, told us in an official interview, “ICE would then turn [illegal aliens] over to NGOs for them to travel to wherever they were going to go while they await their hearing.”
Recent studies have shown that illegal aliens who passed through the doors of these NGOs at the border ended up in effectively every congressional district in this country. Many of the NGOs served as a launching pad for mass illegal immigration.
The abuse was so widespread that even the Biden-Harris administration and the NGOs couldn’t deny what was happening. In June 2022, one DHS official said the department “will continue to closely coordinate with and support…NGOs to facilitate the movement of any individual encountered at the Southwest border…” John Martin with the Opportunity Center for the Homeless, an NGO in El Paso, said that his organization works with illegal aliens to “facilitate travel to the destination of their choice.”
These actions appear to constitute a violation of Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits any individual from encouraging or inducing someone to enter the country unlawfully, or helping transport them in the interior.
Corruption and waste were rampant in the spending by NGOs. Under Biden and Harris, DHS’s top watchdog audited millions of dollars that had gone to local grant recipients over a six-month period in 2021. They found that a lack of proper documentation kept them from determining how more than half of that money had been spent. In some cases, they discovered that funds had been used to pay for benefits for individuals who were legally ineligible to receive them.
The Biden border crisis proved to be a profitable business model for NGOs. According to the Free Press, three large NGOs involved in handling unaccompanied alien children—Global Refuge who received 85 percent of its revenue from government grants, Endeavors who received 97 percent of its funding from government grants and Southwest Key Programs who received an astonishing 99 percent of its revenue from government funding — these three groups saw “their combined revenue grow to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022.”
They had a vested interest in prolonging the crisis. One NGO, Southwest Key Programs, used the increase in government funding to raise salaries of officers across the board, including an over $675,000 salary increase for their CEO, according to media reporting.
Many NGOs tried to mislead the public in how these funds were being allocated, as documented by a recent Florida grand jury investigation, “actively obstructed” efforts to determine how they were spending federal dollars. The grand jury also noted that some NGOs received the vast majority of their funding from federal grants—pretty interesting for groups calling themselves “non-governmental organizations.”
The American people are tired of being told that we should fund the actions of those breaking our laws. They are tired of groups encouraging people to cross the border illegally, and organizations that facilitate the release of illegal aliens into the interior.
When would-be border crossers know that a host of benefits awaits them immediately after crossing the border, they are more likely to make the deadly journey. That’s exactly what happened on Biden and Harris’s watch as millions of vulnerable people put themselves in the hands of the cartels and smuggling groups.
An untold number perished along the route. Tens of thousands more suffered physical and sexual assault on the way, and many are still trapped paying off their cartel debts through forced labor or working in the sex trade.
We can and should look for ways to care for the vulnerable and less fortunate. But using taxpayer dollars to undermine our laws and the well-being of Americans and migrants alike is not the way to do it. We cannot let taxpayer dollars be used to facilitate lawbreaking. Shining a light on this disgrace is the first step in accountability. This can never happen again.
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