While Americans Struggle Financially, the Biden Administration Hands Over Millions of COVID Relief Dollars for Illegal Immigrants
While the Biden Administration continues to transform our country by allowing historic numbers of illegal immigrants to cross our southern border, liberal cities and states under progressive leadership are siphoning federal taxpayer dollars to encourage it even further. Far-Left state and local governments teamed up with the Biden Administration to facilitate massive wealth transfers from the pockets of the American people to illegal immigrants under the guise of “pandemic relief funding.” At a time when most Americans are struggling to afford gas and groceries, the Biden Administration is further fleecing those very Americans to support its open border policy.
When President Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” (ARP) was passed in early 2021, the Administration touted it as an effort that would provide “direct relief to the American people,” “[rescue] the American economy, and [start] to beat the [COVID-19] virus.” In reality, the $2 trillion plan only delivered record levels of inflation and higher interest rates and, not surprisingly, reports have now started to surface demonstrating that this unaccountable tidal wave of federal funding was used by state and local governments to advance political goals entirely detached from the pandemic.
This week, reports revealed that many state and local governments earmarked at least $517 million provided by ARP to support “undocumented residents” – essentially, these states took federal tax dollars meant to help relief efforts and used them to encourage illegal immigration. Washington state’s COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund, for instance, provided illegal, undocumented immigrants with $340 million worth of one-time cash grants of $1,000. Those cash payments act as a magnet for even more illegal immigration.
The madness doesn’t end there, either: Apparently unable to facilitate these payments on its own, Washington state’s Department of Social and Health Services partnered with several local organizations, including Raíz of Planned Parenthood, a “gender-inclusive and non-binary” arm of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Similar programs also existed in Illinois and New Jersey, as well as the cities of Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, and Boston.
On the Biden Administration’s watch, over 7.2 million immigrants have illegally crossed our southern border. That’s more people than live in more than 36 of our states. This is fundamentally changing our country and raising costs for the American taxpayer across the board, and the irresponsible behavior of many of our states is only making this problem worse.
It goes beyond illegal immigration, though. These programs transferring federal relief dollars to illegal immigrants are symptoms of a broader fiscal recklessness that has plagued many of our major cities and entrenched far-Left state governments. For years, irresponsible legislatures have piled up debt by funding overtly political programs and embracing severely misguided policies with the confidence that, eventually, a friendly federal government would bail them out – meaning that responsible states would have to foot the bill for the mistakes of those that were irresponsible. The Biden Administration’s pandemic relief slush fund turned out to be just such a vehicle.
In Illinois, for instance, Governor J.B. Pritzker used much of his state’s $8.1 billion worth of COVID relief aid to help pay down the debt his administration’s decisions had caused the state to accrue during the pandemic. Yes, Biden’s Treasury Department may have issued a faux warning stating that states could not use COVID relief funds in such a manner – but money is fungible, and the influx of cash helped Pritzker out of a fiscal jam that he and his administration created in the first place. Similar, even more ridiculous stories abound in other states: In New Jersey, $50 million in state and local fiscal recovery funds are being used to bolster the state’s bid to host the 2026 World Cup. The state of Massachusetts used $5 million of recovery funds to pay off debts incurred by the Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston.
The states intent on transferring pandemic relief funds to illegal immigrants are, not coincidentally, also responsible for embracing the worst sets of policies in response to the pandemic. States like California and Illinois pursued lockdown policies for schools and businesses long after it was shown that such policies were both ineffective and harmful. These states’ governments then used pandemic relief funding – much of it coming from states led by responsible, conservative leaders – to cover up their mistakes while continuing to advance far-Left policies that did nothing to improve the lives of their citizens. In 2024, we should seek to elect a new Administration that will halt Biden’s “relief” slush fund and leave these states to deal with the consequences of their reckless decisions.