An Inside Job: How NGOs Facilitated the Biden Border Crisis
Committee on Homeland Security
2025-07-16
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Source: Congress.gov
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The Committee on Homeland Security will come to order. Without objection, the chair may declare the committee in recess at any point. Before we begin, I want to start off by expressing the condolences of this committee to the people of the great state of Texas who have been devastated by recent tragic flooding. I know this hits especially hard to the home of several of our colleagues who call Texas home. Our thoughts and our prayers are with the victim of this flooding and their families. We are grateful for the courageous efforts of the Coast Guard, CBP, and many other first responders and volunteers who have placed themselves in harm's way to rescue those caught in the flooding. These American heroes like Coast Guard swimmer Scott Ruskin saved countless lives through their bravery, and they deserve our nation's gratitude and honor. This committee will continue to everything we can to ensure the victims receive the assistance they need and that the federal agencies are prepared to help in times of trouble. The purpose of today's hearing is to examine the role that taxpayer supported non-governmental agencies played in facilitating the border crisis under the Biden-Harris administration. I now recognize myself for a brief opening statement. For four years, the Biden-Harris administration created the worst border crisis in American history. From day one, Biden-Harris and the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas implemented a policy of mass catch and release, dismantling effective border policies and gutted interior enforcement. As a result, roughly 13 million inadmissible aliens were either encountered at our border or entered as gotaways.
The consequences of these acts have been devastating. Thousands of Americans were lost to fentanyl poisoning. Game members wreaked havoc in local communities. Young women like Laken Riley, Joyson Nongrara, and Rachel Moran were raped, abused and murdered at the hands of illegal aliens. This committee led the way by impeaching Secretary Mayorkas for his willful and systematic refusal to enforce longstanding immigration law. Laws passed and amended over the years by bipartisan majorities in Congress. The American people also emphatically rejected the open border 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 have executed an open-door border policy on its own. They needed help, and that help came from non-governmental agencies 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 country. Under a DHS program called the Emergency Food and Shelter Humanitarian Program, EFSPH, which later became the Shelter in Service Program, FEMA provided grants to numerous NGOs, many of whom are operating at the Southwest border. These groups spent billions of taxpayers' dollars giving to them by the Biden-Harris administration to provide all types of benefits to illegal aliens, those individuals who were recently released from DHS custody. 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, again, of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of those contracts, in many cases without any ICE supervision. Even worse, our taxpayer dollars were used to form the final link in the cartel's human smuggling operation, paying to help illegal aliens travel to their preferred destinations. Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, or other destinations of choice. Jansen Owen, then the chief of the Border Patrol Del Rio sector, told the committee in an official interview, ICE would then turn over illegal aliens over to NGOs for them to travel to wherever they were going to go while awaiting their hearing. Recent studies have shown that illegal aliens who pass through the doors of these NGOs at the border ended up in effectively every congressional district across the 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, the NGOs themselves couldn't deny what's happening. In June, 2022, when DHS officials said, that 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 Homelessness, an NGO in El Paso, said that his organization works with illegal aliens to, quote, facilitate travel to destinations of their choice, end quote. These actions appear to many on the committee to constitute a violation of Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationalization Act, which prohibits any individual from encouraging or inducing someone to enter the country unlawfully or helping transport them to the interior.
Corruption and waste were rampant in the spending by the NGOs. Under the Biden-Harris administration, 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 documentation kept them from determining how more than half the money had been spent. In some cases, they discovered that funds had been used to pay for benefits for individuals who were legally inadmissible to receive them. The Biden border crisis provided to be a profitable business for some NGOs. According to the Free Press, three large NGOs involved in handling unaccompanied alien children, the Global Refuge, who received 85% of its revenue from governmental grants, Endeavors, who received 97% of their revenue from governmental grants, and Southwest Keys Program who received an astonishing 99% of its revenue from the federal government. These three groups saw their combined revenue grow to an astonishing $2 billion plus by 2022. I would argue that these groups had a vested interest in prolonging the crisis when NGO Southwest Key Properties
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