President Joe Biden’s invasion of illegal aliens isn’t just a political gambit to bring in new Democratic voters.
It’s also a get-rich-quick scheme for nongovernmental organizations that resettle “unaccompanied children.”
Those groups and their executives are pulling in billions of dollars to help Biden colonize the United States with penniless Third World “migrant” kids, some of whom, we now know, harbor potentially fatal diseases.
And taxpayers foot the bill.
“Obscene” Subsidies
Noting that some 130,000 “unaccompanied children” surged into the country in 2022, The Free Press recently reported that the “the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs”:
“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”
The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. 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 so-called services are classic examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse: “Migrant” kids receive pet, music, and horticulture therapy, the website reported. The Endeavors group threw away $533,000 on a single music therapist in 2021.
“An internal Endeavors PowerPoint obtained by America First Legal, an outfit founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, showed that the nonprofit conducted 1,656 ‘people-plant interactions’ and 287 pet therapy sessions between April 2021 and March 2023,” the website continued.
In 2022 the group wasted $11,700,000 on lobbyists, “consulting services,” attending conferences, and “fill-in” doctors and nurses. In 2021, the outfit blew $8 million to put up “migrants” in hotels.
As for payroll, that’s out of control as well. Endeavors’ CEO is Chip Fulghum, former financial chief at the Department of Homeland Security, who landed at the outfit as chief operating officer. He earned $600,000 in 2022. The then-CEO, Jon Allman, walked off with $700,000. And seven other executives pulled down more than $300,000. Endeavors’ payroll increased 650 percent from from 2018 to 2022, from $20 million to $150 million.
“Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s [sic] 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border,” The Free Press reported.
Not surprisingly, the website found that the group’s budget is 99.6 percent taxpayer money that comes from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a subsidiary of the Health and Human Services Department. In 2018, ORR’s budget was $1.8 billion. Last year, it was $6.3 billion. This year, it will waste $7.3 billion, “almost all of which will be funneled to NGOs and other contractors,” the website reported.
Another outfit lining its pockets with taxpayer money is Global Refuge, the website reported:
In 2018, according to its federal disclosure form, the Baltimore-based nonprofit had $50 million in revenue. 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. Global Refuge also granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children.
Now Global Refuge employs over 550 people nationwide, and CEO [Krish O’Mara] Vignarajah said in January that the nonprofit plans to expand to at least 700 staffers by the end of 2024.
Vignarajah is lining her pockets, too. Hired in 2019 for $244,000, her salary rocketed to $522,000 three years later. For that amount you’d expect proper stewardship of the taxpayers’ money. But alas, that isn’t the case, the website observed. From 2019 to 2022, Global Refuge decreased the number of “migrants” it served even as it increased the amount of money it spent on them.
In 2019, it “housed 2,591 unaccompanied children while spending $30 million,” the website disclosed. “Three years later, the NGO reported that it housed 1,443 unaccompanied children at a cost of $82.5 million — almost half the number of migrants for more than double the money.”
That’s about $11,600 per “migrant” kid in the first instance, and about $57,172 in the second, a 392 percent increase.
But the Southwest Key outfit might be the worst:
The man with the $1 million salary is Dr. Anselmo Villarreal, who became CEO of Southwest Key Programs, headquartered in Austin, Texas, in 2021. (Villarreal took a drop in pay compared to his predecessor, Southwest Key founder Juan Sanchez, who paid himself an eye-popping $3.5 million in 2018.)
Despite 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, Southwest Key continues to operate — and rake in big government checks. In 2020, the year of Covid-19, its government grant was $391 million; by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.
Southwest Key’s federal disclosure forms show that in 2022, six executives in addition to Villarreal made more than $400,000, including its chief strategist ($800,000), its head of operations ($700,000) and its top HR executive ($535,000). Its total payroll in 2022 was $465 million.
Endangering Kids
Aside from robbing the taxpayers by channeling federal money to these outfits, the ORR is cavalierly endangering the kids by not ensuring that the “sponsors” to whom they are sent aren’t criminals.
Background checks are no longer mandatory for adults in a sponsor’s home.
“Tara Rodas, a government employee who was temporarily detailed to work at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake shelter in 2021, told The Free Press she also uncovered evidence of fraud within the sponsorship system,” the website reported:
“Most of the sponsors have no legal presence in the U.S. I don’t know if I saw one U.S. ID,” said Rodas. “There were no criminal investigators at the site, and there was no access to see if sponsors had committed crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.”
Click here to learn more about The John Birch Society’s efforts to stop America’s illegal-alien invasion.
