From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

President Donald Trump has shut off the funding spigot to Biden-era initiatives and charity organizations that quietly carved out “fast-track” pathways for migrants to enter the American homeland.

On his first day back in the White House, the Republican president signed an executive order that placed a funding freeze on development assistance to foreign countries and the involved nonprofit organizations, arguing that such funding needs to be better aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests. That order had a monumental impact on one major nonprofit, in particular, and also a migration initiative created by the previous administration.

Launched in 2023 by President Joe Biden, the Safe Mobility Initiative established numerous brick-and-mortar buildings across Latin America, known as Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs), that allowed asylum seekers to apply to enter the U.S. This $80 million program proved to be incredibly popular with migrants, with a House Judiciary report finding that more than a quarter million migrants were allowed to register for potential entry into the U.S. within the first 15 months of the initiative.

House Judiciary Republicans investigating the Safe Mobility Initiative in 2024 argued it was specifically designed to “fast-track” migrants into the U.S., providing them a new pathway into the country without having to add to the chaotic scenes taking place at the southern border. The program paid foreign national employees millions to help coach migrants on how to reach the interior of the U.S.

“Following a decision by the US government, the Safe Mobility Initiative is no longer active,” reads a notice on the front-page of the program’s website, which also notes that no new applications will be accepted and for those already referred for resettlement to standby for further updates.

The Biden administration opened the first SMOs in June 2023 and continued to expand with new locations throughout Central and South America. These processing centers, working in coordination with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), allowed foreign nationals the opportunity to apply to migrate legally into the U.S.

However, critics of the initiative began pointing out that the Biden administration was simply creating an expedited run-around for more migrants to enter the U.S.

“Under President Biden, the State Department has announced its Safe Mobility Offices initiative, which allows illegal aliens to bypass the southwest border and, according to UNHCR, ‘avoid the risks associated with onward movement,’” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan wrote to UNHCR in June 2024. “In other words, this new program fast-tracks aliens into the United States out of sight of the American people and without public transparency of the chaos at the border.”

A Mixed Migration Centre survey released in March 2024 showed 90% of SMO users wanted to reach the U.S. for economic opportunities — rather than fleeing persecution or war, which is the purpose of the refugee resettlement system.

The House Judiciary Committee later eviscerated the initiative in a report published in the waning days of the Biden administration, confirming that the program was spending millions of American taxpayer dollars to help thousands of migrants in Central and South America enter the U.S.

American taxpayers funded SMOs in 13 different cities across Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica, according to the House report. More than 18,000 migrants from South and Central America departed for resettlement in the U.S. via the Safe Mobility Initiative, with roughly 67,000 total foreign nationals referred to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for possible resettlement into the country.

U.S. taxpayers altogether spent more than $80 million funding SMOs, with this funding being split between the UNHCR and the IOM, according to the Judiciary Committee. The committee additionally confirmed that SMO staffers would also counsel migrants previously deemed ineligible to enter the U.S. as refugees on other strategies to make it into the country.

“Only 14 percent of IOM employees devoted to the Safe Mobility Initiative are U.S. citizens, however, meaning that the Biden-Harris Administration uses U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay foreign national employees of the United Nations to counsel other foreign nationals on the best ways to enter the United States,” the report stated.

Biden launched the initiative in the middle of what the worst year on record for unlawful border encounters. His administration made other attempts to quell the sky-high levels of illegal immigration by creating alternate avenues for otherwise-inadmissible migrants to enter the U.S., such as the CHNV program and the dramatic expansion of the CBP One app.

The Trump administration also took an axe to the non-profits accused of fomenting the illegal immigration crisis. The president’s order freezing foreign assistance came to the chagrin of organizations like Catholic Charities USA, which have long been accused of enabling illegal immigration.

“Today we are announcing that we have stopped all grant funding that’s being abused by NGOs to facilitate illegal immigration into this country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in January. “So it’s amazing to me the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent by the federal government that has been sent to NGOs to facilitate this invasion of our country.”

“I think people are curious when we look at grants that are given out by federal agencies at how they’re utilized, and that evaluation needs to be done,” Noem added.
“We’re not spending another dime to help the destruction of this country.”

Catholic Charities USA and its affiliate organizations have been heavily involved in facilitating immigration and refugee resettlement into the U.S. over the years — with the help of the American taxpayer. From 2023-2024, the group and its affiliates received more than $5 million in federal grants, according to Catholic Culture.

Catholic Charities Southern Ohio, for example, partners with the State Department for Refugee Resettlement, with one of its main sources of revenue being government fees and grants. The group in January 2024 opened a facility providing legal advocacy and other immigration services in Springfield, Ohio, a town so inundated with Haitian migrants that local leaders begged the federal government for assistance.

Catholic Charities Archdiocese of San Antonio received millions in federal funding in 2024 to provide migrant services, largely through its Migrant Resource Center located near the southern border. The organization, however, was blasted by lawmakers in Washington, D.C., for allegedly using taxpayer money to cover the cost of airline tickets for migrants.

When asked by the Daily Caller if the president intended to permanently cut funding to organizations like Catholic Charities that have helped bring illegal migrants into the U.S., White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she was “quite certain” Trump’s executive order did just that.

Catholic Charities USA President and CEO Kerry Alys Robinson begged the administration in a public statement to reconsider its funding freeze, claiming that its work provides essential services. The organization did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“For more than a century, the Catholic Charities network has worked with the government to care for poor and vulnerable people in every community in the U.S., and we continue to be eager to work with government to care for our neighbors in need,” Robinson wrote in January. “We strongly urge the administration to rethink this decision.”

Trump’s decision to freeze foreign assistance spending has put a stop to other seemingly-frivolous spending on migrant services. A Lebanese gender specialist was just about to launch a U.S.-funded program providing mental health services to LBGTQ Venezuelan youths living in Colombia, but was told the initiative was defunded just as she arrived in Bogota, according to The Associated Press.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Morgan Murphy

Kash Patel will soon be confirmed as director of the FBI. It can’t come quickly enough. Patel’s pending confirmation may be why the searches for “witness protection,” “erase iPhone,” and “paper shredder” have skyrocketed in D.C. since Jan. 20th.

The Beltway bandits are on the run.

Just last month Dems fantasized that they might block Patel, along with Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. Trump’s surging popularity, now at the highest its ever been, destroyed any chance of that.

On Thursday, the former Department of Defense chief of staff cleared his first Senate committee on a vote of 12 to 10, putting him on track for a full Senate vote as early as this week.

Americans now know how deeply the deep state runs in Washington, D.C. The looming confirmation of Kash Patel will be the first reckoning at the FBI since the Church Committee’s 1975 probe in the wake of Watergate.

Since Trump’s first run at the White House in 2016, the FBI has been trying to take him down.

Patel led the investigation for Devin Nunes’ congressional probe into Russian interference, without which we might never have known that Hilary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the so-called Steele Dossier, which was essentially a smear campaign passed off as actual non-partisan intelligence.

The FBI and Justice Department then used that “dossier” as justification for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Think on that a hot second — a Democrat administration used the FBI and Justice Department to spy on a Republican campaign. It makes Watergate look like a parking ticket by comparison.

It gets worse.

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, the FBI actively worked against the President. In fact, the FBI’s #2 official at the time, Andrew McCabe, confirmed to CBS that there were meetings at the Justice Department with the FBI on how they might remove the 45th President of the United States.

Having unsuccessfully tried to remove a sitting president, the FBI then went on to make sure Joe Biden won. During the 2020 campaign, the FBI laid the groundwork with the media and social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. As the New York Post reported, the “‘FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,’ an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14, 2020.”

Instead of having its reporters hailed as modern day Woodward and Bernstein’s, the New York Post (the nation’s oldest newspaper) found itself censored and suppressed.

With Trump gone, the FBI then ran amuck, sending at least 26 agents to the Capitol on January 6th, most of which engaged in illegal activities, according to the long-awaited Inspector General’s report. It then dedicated 5,000 employees — more than 10% of its workforce — to prosecuting J6 protestors.

The FBI didn’t stop there. Biden’s G-men labeled angry parents as “domestic terrorists” and traditional Catholics as “violent extremists.” The FBI went to far as to propose infiltrating Catholic churches as “threat mitigation.”

After 10 years of abuses, the FBI’s judgement day of reckoning may arrive this week in the form of Senate confirmation for Patel.

What might day one look like?

First to go will be partisan agents bent on changing elections and subverting democracy.

Pundits have also speculated that Patel might shutter the FBI’s brutalist concrete headquarters building on Washington, D.C.’s famous mall and boot its 7,000 agents out into the heartland where they belong. It might happen.

But those who know Patel expect him to make the Bureau get back to basics: FBI agents being cops, not intelligence agents.

The core mission of the bureau is to protect Americans from crime and defend the U.S. Constitution from domestic threats. Patel will likely target the top 10 cities for violent crime and work closely with the Department of Homeland Security and Tom Holman to extradite illegal aliens.  Expect him to redirect gumshoes to come down on cyber criminals and state actors who commit 800,000+ cybercrimes and ransomware attacks each year.

He’ll also likely be working closely with newly confirmed Health and Human Services Director, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to investigate racketeering and collusion among big pharma, medical boards, and medical journals.

What worries Washington most? In Patel we’ll have an FBI director who is serious about investigating corrupt public officials.

In an age where senior lawmakers are literally accepting gold bars as bribes and lawmakers making $200k a year have net worth’s north of $50 million, Americans are asking questions.

Expect the FBI’s new director to start finding answers.

Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.