Social Welfare for Illegal Aliens is Now Being Funneled Through ICE
FAIR Take | October 2022
The hits just keep coming from the most radically open-borders administration in U.S. history. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently created the Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP) to provide a range of taxpayer-funded services to illegal aliens in removal proceedings. Even worse, they tapped a Soros-funded nonprofit that wants to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to oversee it. The fox is truly guarding the henhouse.
The nonprofit in control, Church World Services (CWS), is currently soliciting bids to provide those who have violated our immigration laws up with “access to counsel, affordable housing, childcare, transportation, healthcare, schooling, language classes, and cultural orientation programs.” If illegal aliens they’re assisting are deported (unlikely given Biden’s dismantling of immigration enforcement and purge of those who do not toe the open-borders line), they will “assist with supportive departure planning” and “referral to reintegration services.” The program will target areas with large populations of asylum seekers (read: illegal aliens) enrolled in ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. ATD includes GPS tracking devices which, short of proper detention, give the best chance to ensure aliens in proceedings actually show up to court. Those enrolled in CMPP are unenrolled from ATD, a fact the government hid in a footnote in its solicitation for contract bids.
CWS, along with over 60 other leftist open-borders groups, is a member of the “Defund Hate” campaign which seeks defunding of ICE and CBP and calls enforcement a “structural barrier to positively transforming the immigration system.” In February 2019, CWS helped gather signatures on a petition to restrict funding for “detention camps and deportation agents” as the U.S. faced a potential government shutdown. CWS has also helped provide caravans of illegal aliens with fundraising, legal assistance, and media support. Its donors include far-left groups such as George Soros’ Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, all of which bankroll woke social justice initiatives. As “secretariat” and “fiduciary agent” of the CMPP effort, CWS will be empowered to delegate the provision of wraparound services to subcontractors and will likely steer these awards to their liberal donors and fellow “Defund Hate” members.
Although this is only a pilot program with just $5 million provided by Congress, we have seen time and time again that, once created, government programs never go away. To the contrary, they tend to become bigger, suck up more taxpayer dollars, and undergo mission creep as they justify their own existence in ever-more-obstreperous ways. CWS will be in the driver’s seat to lay the foundation for this program’s future as they can approve personnel, create the manual, conduct “program monitoring,” and define “data requirements.”
To summarize: Biden is rewarding those who break our laws with taxpayer-funded public benefits, a chance to escape GPS tracking, and tools to fight his own immigration enforcement agency – even though they likely won’t be deported because he purged people who actually enforce the laws – and the outfit running the show wants ICE and CBP abolished. The fact that this contract has been given to CWS is terrible, but we are compelled to ask why the CMPP program was created in the first place. There are a lot of homeless veterans that could use job training, school enrollment support, mental health and psychosocial support, and “flexible funds assistance,” which are all included in the program. The government should not be coddling those who broke our immigration laws over those who fought for our liberties. But this is par for the course for an administration that has repeatedly shown more concern for foreigners than U.S. citizens.