The migration crisis plaguing the United States’ southern border has been a point of political and humanitarian tension for Americans. However, for some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) it may represent a great profit opportunity.
This is what a report from the American website points out Free Press, which analyzed 2022 data (the latest available) from three prominent organizations that receive the most money from the US government to work on the US southern border providing assistance to immigrants, especially unaccompanied minors. They are: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs and Endeavors.
According to the report, the current migration crisis contributed to further increasing the coffers of these NGOs, as well as possibly significantly increasing the salaries of their executives, all thanks to the transfers made by the White House, currently led by the Democrat Joe Biden.
The report showed that the combined revenues of these NGOs, coming from federal funds, increased from US$597 million in 2019 to around US$2 billion in 2022, under the Biden administration.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), of the Administration for Children and Families, which is part of the US government’s Department of Health and Human Services, is the entity responsible for transferring public resources to these NGOs.
In the USA, the reception of minor immigrants who cross the country’s border without a legal guardian falls under the “Unaccompanied Children Program”, an initiative also controlled and financed by the White House.
However, the practical execution of this responsibility has largely been delegated by the program to NGOs, especially to the three mentioned. Such organizations are currently responsible for managing shelters set up in the states of Texas, Arizona and California, where these immigrant minors are generally housed temporarily while they await reunion with family members or the appointment of legal guardians.
The federal budget allocated to ORR has been increased significantly over the past few years, growing from US$1.8 billion in 2018 to US$6.3 billion in 2023.
The documents examined by the Free Press indicate that the CEOs of these organizations may also be benefiting from this increase in public transfers. According to the report, in recent years, the salaries of these executives have risen to approximately US$500,000 per year, with the CEO of Southwest Key reaching the level of US$1 million in annual compensation.
Southwest Key Programs, whose CEO is Anselmo Villarreal, is known for having faced several scandals in recent years. The most notable of these was the case involving one of his employees, named Levian Pacheco, who was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2019 for sexually abusing immigrant teenagers in an NGO shelter located in Arizona during 2016 and 2017. According to information from the Arizona prosecutor, the individual, in addition to committing the abuse, exposed the victims to the HIV virus.
But, apparently, this was not enough for the American government to decide to end sending funds to the NGO. In 2022, under the Biden administration, government transfers to Southwest Key reached almost US$790 million.
Discrepancy between financing and assistance
The numbers analyzed by Free Press become even more surreal when one considers that, in some cases, the increase in government money transferred to such organizations does not correspond to the proportional growth in the assistance provided by them.
The report highlighted the case of the NGO Global Refuge as an example of this. In 2019, the organization served 2,591 minors with a publicly funded budget of US$30 million. Surprisingly, in 2022, despite having provided assistance to just 1,443 minors, spending soared to around US$82.5 million.
This substantial increase in the cost per child served has raised significant questions about the lack of supervision, efficiency and management of public resources that are being allocated to these organizations, which are considered by the Democratic government as “vital” for humanitarian assistance.
Charles Marino, who worked with Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama’s administration (2009-2017), told the American website that “the amount of taxpayer money they [as ONGs] are receiving is obscene.” He added that, in the event of further investigation into the matter, “we will discover that the waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers’ money [que é enviado para essas organizações] will rival what we saw with federal Covid money.”
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