Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2025

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by Outside Contributor

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is doing some digital archeology into the dark closet of federal spending, and the skeletons they’re turning up aren’t pretty.

I’ve been writing for over two years about the Biden administration’s use of taxpayer money to facilitate illegal immigration. But I won’t complain about headlines like “Elon Musk said DOGE uncovered $59 million in payments for luxury hotels”—even if Musk’s work was more to “publicize” than to “uncover.”

Thanks to Biden’s open border and mass parole programs, millions of aliens entered the U.S. border illegally over the past four years. Over the same timeframe, Congress granted $31 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to provide housing, medical and legal services to these aliens.

But the Biden administration also actively worked to facilitate mass migration using the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—whose mission is to help disaster-stricken Americans, not aid illegal aliens.

Via the Department of Homeland Security, the Biden administration channeled billions to FEMA, which in turn granted states, cities and nonprofits money to transport, house and care for illegal aliens.

From FY2021 to FY2024, Congress gave FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program $2.2 billion for “nonprofits and local entities to provide support to noncitizens released from DHS custody.” This means “to pay for illegal aliens released at the border.”

In 2024 alone, FEMA set aside $640.9 million in Shelter and Services grants “to enable non-federal entities to off-set allowable costs incurred for services associated with noncitizen migrant arrivals in their communities.” The top recipients were Denver; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Massachusetts; New York; and Philadelphia—Democrat-run states and cities with “sanctuary” policies offering free housing and services to illegal aliens.

Biden also used the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (a FEMA grant program authorized in 1987 to help homeless veterans) to pipe another billion dollars into housing illegal immigrants. The $59 million DOGE just flagged was doled out as part of one FEMA grant to house illegal aliens in New York City in more than 200 jerry-rigged shelters that included formerly luxurious hotels like the Roosevelt.

This isn’t an anomaly. It’s just the latest payment in a four-year federal subsidy of sanctuary cities. And these FEMA grants are just one tool among many used by the Biden administration to fund an unauthorized, taxpayer-funded mass migration system.

Officially, refugees who have been vetted and selected are supposed to enter the U.S. through the congressionally authorized U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

Funded by the U.S. government, USRAP already had a network of NGOs and charities such as Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, and Lutheran Refugee and Immigrant Services. Traditionally, these NGOs were paid to help bring in and resettle a fairly small annual number of refugees.

The Biden administration took this existing NGO pipeline and supercharged it with billions of dollars of federal money, and these charities went from handling tens of thousands of cases per year to millions through many different channels and programs.

In November 2024, retired Border Patrol officer J.J. Carrell told a flabbergasted House Homeland Security Committee that DHS was cutting checks for $600 million to Jewish Family Services alone every three months that year.

Similarly, the government granted over $550 million to various Lutheran charities in FY2024, most of it for migration. Catholic Charities USA received $1.4 billion in federal grants in 2021 alone.

Much of these taxpayer dollars went directly to the task of importing illegal aliens.

Americans have seen the consequences of wide-open borders but might not have focused on the fact that it was done with their money. DOGE’s candlepower can enlighten them.

Reprinted with permission from The Heritage Foundation by Simon Hankinson.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.