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UN Budgets Millions for U.S.-Bound Migrants in 2024

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8 months ago

14 minute read

As this mural in Tapachula, Mexico, shows, UN agencies are well aware that their cash aid and assistance helps support illegal immigration over the U.S. southern border. January 2022 photo by Todd Bensman.

From the Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman

Public docs show cash handouts to help feed, transport, and house people headed for the U.S. border

Early on in America’s historic border crisis, now entering its fourth record-smashing year, some Republican lawmakers named a significant enabling culprit other than the usual Mexican cartel smugglers. They named the U.S. taxpayer-funded United Nations as essentially a co-smuggler after seeing my reports that the UN was handing out debit cards and cash vouchers to aspiring illegal border crossers on their way north.

One outraged group of 21 border-security-minded lawmakers even pitched a bill that would require the United States, the UN’s largest donor, to turn off the taxpayer money spigot. H.R. 6155 never caught fire, though, in no small part because “fact checks” claiming to debunk other reports like mine in the conservative press dissuaded broader media interest and left the American public in the dark.

But now the UN’s 2024 update to the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” (RMRP for short), a planning and budget document for handing out nearly $1.6 billion in 17 Latin America countries, can cast a broad confirming light on the cash giveaways and much more aid for 2024 ahead — with the helping hands of 248 named non-governmental organizations. Despite the RMRP plan title naming Venezuelans as recipients of this aid operation, the document’s fine print (footnote on p. 14 and paragraph on p. 43, for instance) says the largesse goes to “all nationalities” and “multiple other nationalities”.

A Haitian shows his UN cash card outside a UN facility in Tapachula. He was there to complain the agency had not deposited money in the depleted card. January 2022 photo by Todd Bensman.

The documents clear up any mystery about what the UN and NGOs are doing on the migrant trails and leave no room for supposedly debunking “fact checks”.

In a nutshell, the UN and its advocacy partners are planning to spread $372 million in “Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)”, and “Multipurpose Cash Assistance (MCA)” to some 624,000 immigrants in-transit to the United States during 2024. That money is most often handed out, other UN documents show, as pre-paid, rechargeable debit cards, but also hard “cash in envelopes”, bank transfers, and mobile transfers the U.S. border-bound travelers can use for whatever they want.

The $372 million in planned cash giveaways to the 624,000 immigrants moving north and illegally crossing national borders “represents a significantly greater share of the financial requirements” for 2024, the RMRP says, but it is still only one part of much broader UN hemisphere-wide vision that aims to spend $1.59 billion assisting about three million people in 17 countries who emigrated from their home nations. Most will be “in-destination” recipients already supposedly settled in third countries, albeit in declining numbers, but a rising share of cash will go to the spiking numbers of “in-transit” immigrants launching journeys from those accommodating countries north to the United States.

Cash cards going out to immigrants in long lines at a camp in Reynosa, Mexico, in September 2021, photos that first drew ostensibly debunking fact checks. Photos by Todd Bensman.

Without distinction, both populations get access to UN cash but also “humanitarian transportation”, shelter, food, legal advice, personal hygiene products, health care, and “protection” against threats like human smuggling, and much more besides cash in envelopes or debit cards.

The cash handouts will be in the mix during 2024 as the UN and its private partners incorporate an “increased use of CVA” in, for instance, the $184 million it plans to provide 1.2 million people, $122 million for rent support and also “temporary collective shelter” for 473,000 people, and $25.8 million for “humanitarian transportation” to 129,000 people crossing borders. There’ll also be “expanded use of multi-purpose cash” for those claiming “gender-based violence”.

The UN’s 2024 Game Plan

The 130-page UN-spearheaded RMRP 2024 update went public in December and is readily accessible online, as is the original 2023-2024 plan it revises — sharply upward. It is the latest since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN’s International Organization for Migration started the program in 2018, originally for Venezuelans but now open to anyone in 17 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. (For the complete list of involved groups, see p. 268, here, and explore their activities further with this handy interactive tool).

Some 57 international organizations would manage the handouts of $273 million, while 132 “national NGOs” and “civil service organizations” would handle $70 million in aid. Fifteen UN agencies would get the lion’s share at $1.2 billion.

The NGOs actively participated in crafting the RMRP 2024 Update, which amends a 2023-2024 plan released back in 2022 that at the time foresaw a decline in illegal immigration after 2023. It increased, instead.

A Nicaraguan on his way to the U.S. showed his UN cash card in Monterrey, Mexico. January 2022 photo by Todd Bensman.

“Country-level projections of in-transit movements for populations moving north through Central America and Mexico have been revised sharply upwards,” p. 44 explains in updating the 2024 RMRP update.

The reasons given include factors like “xenophobia” leading resettled migrants to leave for the United States. It does, finally, tag the real culprit: U.S. policies that created “newly established opportunities for regular pathways to move to the United States of America” for those who could make their way to northern Mexico.

The document makes clear in writing that the UN and these partners know their endeavor aids, abets, and makes possible the “onward movement” of immigrants who intend to illegally cross borders, especially to get into the United States.

None of them care. Twenty new groups joined the UN endeavor for 2024 for a total of 248.

Their plan frequently acknowledges the illegality, saying for instance, that one in three of the Venezuelan migrants the UN aims to help are in “irregular situations”, including those “who have crossed international borders without complying with all the legal and administrative requirements for entry and may not have the required documentation to do so”, as well as visa overstayers. The original 2023-2024 plan even spelled out that “special attention will be given to the use of [cash and voucher assistance] for in-transit populations, including the need for comprehensive solutions throughout the journey”.

The only expression of apparent concern about supporting people clearly intending to break U.S. law shows up on a page depicting a map with the thin red line of a migration route leading to the U.S. border at about El Paso. Someone took the trouble to add a footnote on that page noting that the map “does not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the UN”.

UN workers help long lines of immigrants apply for aid in Tapachula, Mexico. Photos by Todd Bensman.

Why hand out hundreds of millions of dollars as cash and services to hundreds of thousands planning to illegally follow that red line through UN member states, to include crossing the US border, when those nations don’t like or want it and must bear the political controversies of it?

“To support access to asylum procedures, migratory regularization activities, and socio-economic integration”, the plan says.

The money handout program “has taken on increasing importance”, it explains elsewhere, because it gives growing numbers of immigrants “the flexibility to cover their expenses and needs they deem most urgent, increasing their dignity and autonomy”.

Where It’ll Be Doled Out

Over the past three years, I have visited UN waystations featuring long lines of U.S.-bound immigrants applying for aid from clipboard-wielding workers handing out cash cards and other goodies, from Reynosa and Monterrey in the north of Mexico to Tapachula in the far south. But the waystations also appear everywhere along the trails much farther south.

The RMRP plan calls for distributing most of the cash, cash equivalents, and vouchers to migrants in Colombia and Ecuador, which are launch pads that sent 450,000 people through the Darian Gap jungle passage in Panama. The plan calls for 24 NGO partners to give money to 95,000 in Colombia and 59,000 in Mexico.

Some of the so-called transportation assistance is for local cab rides to stores or doctor appointments. But the UN agencies also know that aid will facilitate “increased onward movements” between countries of the “in-transit population” for 105,000 immigrants in Colombia, 25,000 in Brazil, 13,000 in Panama, and 3,700 in Mexico, to name a few places.

Likewise for “shelter”, $27.5 million is earmarked for 161,000 travelers in Colombia, $22.5 million for 179,000 in Ecuador, $18 million for 165,000 in Peru, and $4.3 million to help 33,000 in Mexico.

Political Fight or Flight

In years one and two of the historic mass migration crisis that President Biden’s let-them-all-in policies triggered, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives spoiled for a political fight over UN and NGO activity along the migrant routes because it was funded largely and ironically by the United States. And not just them. In December 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to investigate whether non-governmental organizations unlawfully assisted mass border crossings that overwhelmed the El Paso region.

Recent Congressional Research Service reporting reminds us that they had some legitimate grounds to complain; the United States has been the largest financial contributor to UN entities since the UN was established in 1945. Congress and the executive branch play key roles; Congress appropriates U.S. funding, while the executive branch shapes where the money will go through the State Department and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City.

Complaints, questions, and proposed legislation about the UN’s role in all of this may have gone cold, but as the latest RMRP plan reveals, the world body is as hot on the trail as ever.

Todd Bensman

Prior to his government experience, Bensman worked on staff for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers, covering the FBI, federal law enforcement and serving on investigative teams. He reported extensively on national security issues after 9/11 and worked from more than 25 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. In Texas, he authored long-form investigative stories with emphases on border security related to illegal immigration and Mexico’s drug war. His reporting on human smuggling from Muslim-majority countries, Mexico’s drug war, and cross-border gun smuggling to cartels earned two National Press Club awards and an Inter-American Press Association award, among others.

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Chronic Counter-terrorism Lapses at the Border

Published on September 18, 2024

By

A US Customs and Border Patrol agent monitors the barrier separating the U.S. and Mexico in Nogales, Arizona. (Photo: Manuela Durson)

By Todd Bensman

Originally published by Jewish Policy Center

In the early morning hours of May 3, a Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the US-Mexico border a month earlier joined with another illegally present Jordanian. Together they drove a large box truck to the entry gates of Quantico Marine Corps Base in northern Virginia.

The driver announced they were Amazon subcontractors there to make a delivery to the Quantico town post office just inside. But after neither could produce credentials and were denied entry, the driver hit the gas in an apparent attempt to plow the truck through and into the base’s target-rich interior. Quick-thinking military sentries raised automatic road barricades, arrested the pair for trespassing, and turned them over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Local media soon reported that one of the Jordanians was on the FBI’s terrorism watch list.

The White House and all involved federal agencies have steadfastly stonewalled questions as to whether an illegal, border-crossing alien from Jordan on the FBI’s terrorism watch list had just attempted a jihad-motivated attack on US soil for the first known time. It is an often ridiculed scenario, but one that government experts have been warning about, including the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) own 2024 threat assessment, since the worst mass migration crisis in US history began on January 20, 2021 – President Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day.

Among the estimated seven million illegal immigrants from 160 countries around the world that Border Patrol agents encountered in just the few years since were 362 illegal immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list – all detained.

But the fact that one of these border-crossing Jordanians was reportedly on the FBI’s watch list – and nevertheless was NOT detained but left free inside the country to ram a large truck through into an important military base – is emblematic of a serious new kind of national security threat to the US homeland.

Mohammad Kharwin

In at least seven recent cases, Border Patrol agents, overwhelmed by the crisis, have accidentally released illegal border-crossers who were on the US terror watch list. Their belated discoveries prompted panicked nationwide manhunts to round them up before they could conduct terror attacks. Was the Jordanian at Quantico one of them? No one knows.

But a twice-freed Afghan national man was the most recent of these. The 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin roamed America for 11 months between his border crossing and his capture. This case and too many others demand that the federal government acknowledge emergence of a patterned new chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

An overwhelmed Border Patrol freed Kharwin into America on March 10, 2023, before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and then, a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February.

By current public accounts, an initial Border Patrol database check flagged Kharwin for membership in Hezb-e-Islami, which the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) describes as a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group.” He illegally crossed the California border in March 2023, one of 23,286 illegal aliens caught crossing that month in what would turn out to be a record-breaking year for the agency’s San Diego Border Sector. All told, there were 230,941 illegal crossers caught in 2023, up nearly 60,000 from 2022 and 90,000 more than 2021.

That extraordinary traffic no doubt strained all normal Border Patrol counterterrorism and vetting processes.

Instead of keeping Kharwin detained as a “special interest alien,” tagged until standard face-to-face interviews and corroboration of the initial hit was complete, Border Patrol agents – under orders from Washington – waved him through like millions of other illegal crossers on “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) personal recognizance papers, where crossers agree to voluntarily report later to ICE in a city of their choice.

NBC reports that Border Patrol never even informed ICE of the initial FBI watch-list flagging, which is evidently how the same collapsed border management system missed a second opportunity to catch Kharwin in late January of this year, when he showed up before an immigration judge in a Pearsall, TX, ICE detention facility for a hearing. Perhaps because ICE still didn’t have the initial terrorism flag hit, that agency’s court lawyer representative did not report it to the judge, or appeal, when Kharwin was ordered released on $12,000 bond for a distant 2025 hearing.

“The judge placed no restrictions on his movements inside the US” in the meantime, NBC reported.

Somehow, the FBI figured all of this out and got word to ICE agents to find and arrest Kharwin, which they did a month later, on February 28, in nearby San Antonio.

And Others

To date, only one federal investigation has produced a public report branding the problem, remarkable but forgotten or given short shrift by major US news media, although I did write about it. That eye-opening document was the DHS inspector general’s office report about the April 19, 2022 crossing and mistaken release of a Colombian on the FBI watch list. ICE agents were not able to track him down to Florida for two long weeks.

Its key finding was that Border Patrol and ICE agents couldn’t do normal counterterrorism protocols because they were simply too “busy processing an increased flow of migrants.”

But these six other cases qualify as investigation-worthy.

In February 2024, North Carolina authorities arrested an immigrant, Awet Hagos, reportedly from Eritrea, for allegedly firing a rifle outside a Carolina Quick Stop store in the small town of Eure. He then attacked responding Gates County Sheriff’s deputies and barricaded himself in a four-hour standoff with them. Sheriff Ray Campbell reported that an ICE fingerprints check revealed that Hagos was on the watch list, the sheriff later told local news. North Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, running for the governor’s office this November, penned a letter to President Biden demanding answers about Hagos. But these moves drew scant coverage from local newspapers and gained no known traction.

In February 2024, a Pakistani illegal immigrant on the watch list who had crossed from Mexico into California, was accidentally released for a day before US authorities, luckily, uncovered the release error and caught up with him.

In late 2023, New York police arrested a Senegalese man wanted in his home country for “terrorist activities” who somehow got into the American interior.

In 2022, Border Patrol waved through a watch-listed Somali member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group near San Diego. He was free for nearly a year before authorities untangled their mistake and finally picked him up in Minneapolis.

Also in 2022, ICE released an FBI watch-listed Lebanon-born Venezuelan who had crossed from Matamoros into Brownsville, TX. Washington ordered him released on grounds that the man was at risk of catching Covid. This release occurred against ardent FBI recommendations that he remain in detention because he was both dangerous and a flight risk. FBI documents on this case leaked, no doubt out of an overabundance of frustration among those in the intelligence community who dealt with it. I have them.

A late 2021 accidental release case of Yemen national Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed shows that Mexico too is struggling with the Biden-fomented mass migration crisis. Mexico has long been a close partner of the United States in counterterrorism at the border. But in this case, Mexico released the Yemeni terrorism suspect without informing its US partners, resulting in a “Be On the Lookout” bulletin that made its way to me about a manhunt alert that went out on the Texas side of the border.

How Many Have we Missed?

Terrorism threat border lights have been flashing red for some time now just from the hundreds who were actually caught and detained, especially since the US Customs and Border Protection agency in March 2022 began publishing “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters” by the month on its public-facing website. Those began breaking all national records when the Biden government took office in January 2021, when apprehended illegal border crossers on the FBI watch list ballooned from a mere three during Trump’s last fiscal year in office to 15, then by another 98 in fiscal 2022, then 169 in fiscal 2023, and another 80 through April 2024.

That all those who were caught is less a positive national security accomplishment than an unacceptable sampling of much bigger flows of watch-listed illegal aliens coming into America who are not caught and handled. If some two million of these so-called “got-aways” went through since 2021 (like Kharwin evidently tried to, or possibly the Jordanian at Quantico), more suspected terrorists on the FBI watch list are almost certainly among them.

In recent months, the terrorism threat at the border has generated some public concern, but almost never explicitly about the preventable accidental releases of terrorist suspects authorities later had to chase down.

In September 2023, I testified about the accidental release problem before the US House Subcommittee on the Judiciary in juxtaposition with my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, which revealed counterterrorism programs at the border that have kept the nation safe from infiltrated attacks for nearly 20 years. I told the members that Biden’s border crisis had severely compromised those old programs and caused a spate of accidental terror suspect releases, which elevated the threat of terror attack as a result.

Until then, concern was on the rise but never explicitly named accidental releases as a problem.

Threat Assessment 2024

The Biden Administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment generally warns that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” and that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry…via the southern border.”

In recent testimony about what he regards as a rising terrorist border infiltration threat, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats…emanate from” the southwest border, including the designated terror group ISIS.

Despite the variably specific warnings about the border infiltration threat, the ever-growing number of known accidental-release cases such as Kharwin’s and the ones I earlier told the subcommittee about, remains broadly unrecognized as the unique emerging threat problem these cases indicate. Probably because no one has been killed yet as a consequence, few federal agencies or homeland security committee lawmakers seem interested in calling it out.

But why must blood run in the streets before something is done?

Triple Down

These cases demand a public accounting as well as a classified briefing to Congress if one hasn’t happened. Each demands a full investigation that produces not only recommendations for better counterterrorism but also consequences for those up and down the chains of command who perpetrated these failures.

If federal agencies won’t do the right thing, lawmakers in both houses of Congress should compel investigations into these accidental releases and turn up the political pressure with public hearings that force top officials to testify. They must propose legislation, send demand letters to DHS and other relevant agencies, and justifiably rant about this at their bully pulpits before it’s too late to do any of that, which it might well be.

Short of vastly reducing the millions-per-year border crossings by restoring former president Donald Trump’s discarded policies, the Biden Administration could at least be forced to triple down on its counterterrorism resources at the southern border.

Todd Bensman is Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and author of OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.

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Crime

Biden-Harris Admin Adds China To Illicit Drug Watchlist After Touting Cooperation In Fighting Fentanyl Crisis

Published on September 18, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Jason Hopkins

 

The Biden administration added China to its illicit drug watchlist on Monday, despite previously touting cooperation with Beijing on countering the growing fentanyl epidemic in the U.S.

To deal with the fentanyl epidemic in the U.S. — which China has historically played a significant role in — the Biden administration created a “working group” with Beijing earlier this year, building on an agreement between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November. But China still needs to do more to keep its end of the bargain, adding the country to its “Major Drug Transit or Major Illicit Drug Producing Countries for Fiscal Year 2025″ list released Monday.

Though the list is not a “sanction or penalty,” it is meant to designate countries that act as “major drug transit or major illicit drug-producing countries,” which include “countries that are a significant direct source of precursor chemicals used in the production of certain drugs and substances significantly affecting the United States,” according to the White House. Other countries named in the 2025 list include Afghanistan, Venezuela, Mexico and India.

China has been responsible for producing a substantial amount of the fentanyl ingredients that are trafficked overseas, including to Mexico and Central America, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Those ingredients are packaged into a final product and smuggled over the U.S. southern border.

While claiming that some “significant steps” have been taken by China to stem the flow of ingredients out of its mainland, “sustained enforcement and regulatory action will be necessary to significantly reduce the [People’s Republic of China’s] role as a source of precursor chemicals used in the production, sale, and trafficking of illicit synthetic drugs significantly impacting the United States,” a statement from the White House reads.

Prior to designating China as an illicit drug trafficker and producer, the Biden administration has at several points  promoted its new “working group” with Beijing and claimed that progress was being made in countering the fentanyl epidemic. But an investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) earlier this year found that there was “no evidence” that China was cracking down on illegal fentanyl production or trafficking inside the mainland.

Instead, China is an active enabler in the crisis because it “directly subsidizes” the production and export of ingredients and fails to prosecute those responsible, according to the investigation.

“This failure — when combined with new evidence establishing that the [People’s Republic of China] incentivizes the export of illegal drugs abroad and holds ownership stake in companies doing the same — casts doubt on the veracity of the PRC’s claims that it will act to stem the massive export of illicit fentanyl materials and other dangerous synthetic narcotics,” the investigation report reads.

Some Republican lawmakers feel the administration could also do more by preventing the flow of fentanyl over the southern border.

“If President Biden were actually taking the problem of fentanyl trafficking seriously, he would have already shut down the border and with it, points of entry for drug smuggling,” Republican California Rep. Michelle Steel previously told The Daily Caller. “The Biden Administration’s border crisis has been a key catalyst in the explosion of fentanyl into the U.S.”

“We continue to press for the [People’s Republic of China] to schedule all precursor chemicals that are controlled at the international level, in line with their treaty obligations,” A State Department spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Our cooperation is laser-focused on driving action that save lives. This work will continue as we press for continued enforcement action and regulation to halt this deadly flow.”

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