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“Following a decision by the US government, the Safe Mobility Initiative is no longer active,” reads a notice on the front-page of the program’s website, which also notes that no new applications will be accepted and for those already referred for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

By Jeffrey A. Tucker  

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s confirmation as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the US is the ultimate repudiation of the Covid policy response.

The scheme of lockdown-until-vaccination was the biggest effort of government and industry on a global scale on historical record. It was all designed to transfer wealth to winning industries (pharma, online retail, streaming services, online education), divide and conquer the population, and consolidate power in the administrative state.

By 2021, RFK, Jr., had emerged as the world’s most vocal, erudite, and knowledgeable critic of the scheme. In two brilliant books – The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-Up – he documented the entire enterprise and dated the evolution of the pandemic industry from its postwar inception to the present. There was simply no way to read these books and think about the corporatist cabal in the same way.

The circumstances that led to his appointment at HHS are themselves implausible and remarkable. Perceiving President Biden to be a weak candidate – one who had forced masks and shots on the population and brutally censored tech and media – he decided to make a run for president, presuming that there would be an open primary. There wasn’t one, so he was forced into an independent run.

That effort was chewed up by the usual political dynamic that befalls every third-party effort – too many ballot-access barriers plus the usual logic of Duverger’s law. That left the campaign in a difficult spot. At the same time, two huge political shifts had become clear. The Democratic Party had become a vessel and a front mainly for the administrative state with a veneer of woke ideology, while the Republican Party was being taken over by refugees from the Democrats, in effect creating a new Trump party out of the remnants of the other two.

The rest is legendary. Trump linked up with Elon Musk to do to the federal government what he did when he took over Twitter, taking the company private, gutting the place of embedded federal assets, and firing 4 out of 5 workers. In the midst of this, and faced with a terrifying flurry of legal attacks, Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet. That triggered terrible memories of RFK, Jr.’s father and uncle, and thus sparked discussions about coming together.

Within a matter of weeks, we had a new coalition that brought together old antagonists, as many people and groups seemingly in the same instant realized their conjoined interests in cleaning up the corporatist cartel. With the newly freed platform of X to reach the public, MAGA/MAHA/DOGE was born.

Trump won and chose RFK, Jr., to lead the most powerful public health agency in the world. The barrier was Senate confirmation, but that was achieved through some incredible triangulation that made it extremely difficult to vote no.

In the big picture, you can measure the size of this titanic shift in American politics by the way the votes in the Senate lined up. All Republicans but one voted for the most prominent scion of the Democratic Party to head the health empire while all Democrats voted no. That alone is striking, and a testament to the power of the pharma lobby, which, during the hearings, was exposed as the hidden hand behind the most passionate opponents of the confirmation.

Is our nightmare over? Not yet. Writing not even a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump, it is still unclear just how much authority he truly exercises over the sprawling executive branch. For that matter, no one can even agree on how large this branch is: between 2.2 million and 3 million employees and somewhere between 400 and 450 agencies. The financial bleed in this realm is unthinkable and far worse than even the biggest cynic can imagine.

Five former secretaries of the Treasury took to the pages of the New York Times with a shocking claim. “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.” This has included a career employee called “fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”

There is no reason even to read between the lines. What this means is that no person voted into office by the people and no one appointed by such a person has access to the federal books since 1946. This is startling beyond belief. No owner of any company would ever tolerate being barred from the accounting offices and payment systems. And no company can offer any public stock without independent audits and open books.

And yet almost 80 years have gone by during which time neither has been true for this gigantic enterprise called the federal government. That means that $193 trillion has been spent by an institution that has never faced granulated oversight from the people and never met the normal demands that every enterprise faces every day.

The usual habit in Washington has been to treat every elected leader and their appointments as temporary and transitory marionettes, people who come and go and disturb little to nothing about the normal operations of government. This new administration seems to have every intention to change that but the job is inconceivably challenging. As much public support as MAGA/MAHA/DOGE enjoy for now, and as many people from those groups are getting embedded in the power structure, they are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by millions of agents of the old order.

This transition will not be easy if it happens at all.

The inertia of the old order is mighty. Even on the issue of health and pandemics, there is already confusion. CBS News has reported that Fauci-loyalist and mRNA pusher Gerald Parker will head the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response or OPPR. The report cited only unnamed “health officials” and the appointment has been celebrated by Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer board member who nudged Trump into backing lockdowns in 2020.

All the while, this appointment has not been confirmed by the White House. We do not know if OPPR, created by Congressional charter, will even be funded. The reporter will not reveal his sources – raising the question of why any appointment having to do with health should be surrounded by such cloak-and-dagger machinations.

If Dr. Parker becomes ensconced in this position and another health emergency is declared, this time for Bird flu, HHS and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will not be in any kind of decision-making position at all.

The larger problems have to do with a broader question: is the president really in charge of the executive branch? Can he hire and fire? Can he spend money or decline to spend money? Can he set policy for the agencies?

One might suppose that the whole answer to these questions can be found in Article 2, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” And yet that sentence was written almost 100 years before Congress created this thing called the “civil service” that nowhere appears in the Constitution. This fourth branch has grown in size and power to swamp both the presidency and the legislature.

Courts are going to have to sort this out, and already an avalanche of lawsuits has hit the new administration for daring to presume control over agencies and their activities of which the president is and must necessarily be held accountable. Lower federal courts seem to be demanding that the president be that in name only, while the Supreme Court might have a different opinion.

The much-ballyhooed “constitutional crisis” consists of nothing other than an attempt to reassert the original constitutional design of government.

This is the background template in which RFK, Jr., takes power at HHS, and oversees all the sub-agencies. These agencies played a huge role in covering for the attack on liberty and rights over five years. His confirmation is a symbolic repudiation of the most egregious public policies on record. And yet, the repudiation is entirely implicit: there has been no commission, no admission of error, no one truly held responsible, and no real accountability.

The trajectory on which we find ourselves affords many reasons for champagne celebrations, but sober up quickly. There is a very long way to go and enormous barriers in place to get us to the point that we are really safe again from the marauding corporatist/statist complex and their plots and schemes to rob the public of rights and liberties. In the meantime, to invoke a common phrase, keep these new appointees in your thoughts and prayers.

Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.