Biden's Weak Policies and Reliance on NGOs To Secure the Border Are Putting Our National Security, and the Safety of Countless Women and Children In Danger

When I was Secretary of State, one of the challenges my team and I faced as we executed the President’s mission was constant criticism, activism, and even lawsuits from radical, left-leaning non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) dedicated to undermining our work. These NGOs are more than willing to use their considerable resources – often culled from government grants and contracts – to advance goals commensurate with their narrow, far-left ideology. Even standing up a simple commission of bipartisan experts to produce a report to help re-center our foreign policy on the unique American conception of human rights was met with lawsuits and severe backlash, as they feared its findings would be at odds with their own agendas – regardless of whether their agendas put the American people first.

While the Trump Administration was able to gradually decrease the tax dollars put towards many of these organizations, the Biden Administration is now relying on them more than ever. This egregious misuse of federal funding is scandalous, and it is contributing to a far more terrible crisis that has put children in harm’s way.

According to recent reports, the Biden Administration is so utterly incapable of managing the crisis on our southern border that it has outsourced much of the work to NGOs who believe in an open border, and provide resources to help migrants make it up to our southern border. This funding is only exacerbating the Biden Administration’s self-inflicted immigration crisis, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of men, women and children being put in dangerous situations, too often at the mercy of cartels, human traffickers, and criminals.

The Biden Administration is subsidizing and perpetuating the immigration crisis in part by funding these NGOs. Tax dollars are funneled to these NGOs through the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an office whose budget has more than quadrupled since the Trump Administration was in office. This year alone, ORR will send over $7 billion to NGOs at the border. Endeavors, one of the NGOs, spent millions of dollars in 2022 on “consulting services,” sending its employees to attend conferences, and paying lobbyists – nothing that will help stem the tide of illegal immigration.  

This is yet another case of the Biden Administration using taxpayer dollars as a slush fund to help political allies. Team Biden took billions of dollars meant for ‘COVID relief’ and sent it to far-left governors whose poor leadership had put their states in deep debt. It took billions meant to reduce inflation and instead funneled it to green energy groups and industries. Now, it is taking money that should be used to hire more border patrol agents and finish building the wall and instead sending it to NGOs that facilitate more illegal immigration. Never in American history has a presidential administration been so blatantly dishonest and wasteful with the American people’s money. 

The true tragedy, though, isn’t even the lies and wasteful spending. The true tragedy is that under the Biden Administration, over 300,000 children have arrived at our borders without their parents.  These children are at the mercy of smugglers, cartels, and ‘coyotes,’ without whose help they would never be able to cross our border in the first place. This has led to unconscionable outcomes, as it is estimated that 75–80% of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are victims of human trafficking. The smugglers and cartels who help them get into our country charge exorbitant fees, which lead to the children being sold into forced labor or indentured servitude once they cross the border.  That’s not something happening far away; it’s something happening inside America because of the Biden Administration’s open border policies. The next president should empower the federal government to work alongside state and local authorities to root out every instance of these terrible situations.

In the end, the only thing that will fix these problems is getting our immigration system back under control, as it was in the Trump Administration. It is absolutely possible – we simply need leaders who are committed to enforcing the law and putting America first, not adhering to a narrow, anti-American ideology and using corruption and fraud to help out political friends. The cost of not doing so enriches cartels and criminals, and the most vulnerable – especially children – are the ones who pay the price. I pray that the next occupant of the Oval Office will institute policies that put an end to this crisis and keep children safe.