More On The Key, Conflicted Role Of Faith Based NGOs In The Migration Crisis
[T]he county’s two major migrant sheltering agencies gave notice that they will be laying off employees by the end of next month.
Catholic Charities in San Diego will let go of 73 employees at its two shelters, one in San Diego County and the other in Imperial County. Jewish Family Service will do the same with about 115 employees at its San Diego Rapid Response Network migrant shelter — once hailed as a national model for welcoming a large number of people.
According to NBC 7 San Diego,
Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, announced an additional $43,675,626 in Shelter and Services Program funding Wednesday [November 27, 2024] for non-governmental organizations providing support to migrants awaiting their immigration court proceedings.
The Catholic Charities Diocese of San Diego received $21,598,261 and Jewish Family Service of San Diego received $22,077,365 in SSP funding to assist newly arrived migrants. This funding -- which goes toward necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, medical care and transportation -- is in addition to the over $39 million in SSP funding announced in April.
. . . In April [2024], the county of San Diego and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego County were both awarded $19,592,554.
These piecemeal reports suggest that the two faith-based NGOs, which appear to operate the principal migrant shelters on the San Diego section of the border, were between them receiving something approaching $100 million in federal funding in 2024. Breitbart News commented,
[M]igrant crossings have plummeted since Trump took office and allowed the U.S. Border Patrol to do its job, while restoring the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers awaiting court dates.
According to the UK Daily Mail, the Trump border policies have simply eliminated the market for migrant shelters at the border:
California's formerly overrun border with Mexico is now virtually empty just months after Donald Trump's election, images show.
Aid workers have begun packing up after weeks without seeing any migrants, SF Gate reports.
'To say there has been a dramatic change would be an understatement,' Jeffrey Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector, said.
Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.
December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.
The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.
But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.
Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.
December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.
The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.
But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.
. . . Stalnaker told SF Gate the addition of concertina wire has drastically reduced the number of illegal entries, which has seen arrests plummet by 70 percent so far this fiscal year compared to last.
Whether the NGOs have been laying off staff due to the Trump administration's funding cuts or due to the drastic decrease in border crossings is a chicken-or-the-egg question. The San Diego NGOs were getting dollops of grants in the tens of millions to run the migrant centers, when the problem they were meant to address has now suddently disappeared -- but let's keep in mind that the benefits and other assistance they provided were part of the policies that had been attracting the migrants in the first place. In other words, they were facilitating the problem they were somehow supposed to fix.I see two conflicts for all the fiath-based NGOs that provide migrant services at the border. The first is that they were tacitly relying on traffickers to bring them their clientele. For instance, they complain that cuts in their funding leave them unable to serve the numbers who turn up at their doors:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the administration, by withholding millions even for reimbursements of costs incurred before the sudden cut-off of funding, violates various laws as well as the constitutional provision giving the power of the purse to Congress, which already approved the funding.
The conference's Migration and Refugee Services has sent layoff notices to 50 workers, more than half its staff, with additional cuts expected in local Catholic Charities offices that partner with the national office, the lawsuit said.
But the services Catholic Charities had been performing at the San Diego border assumed a steady supply of migrants delivered by traffickers. Their hands aren't clean. In addition, there's another conflict Catholic Charities has with Catholic doctrine, specifically Catechism 2241:
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.
The faith-based NGOs, among which Catholic Charities is prominent, are reported by DOGE to assist the migrants in obtaining social security numbers at the border, with the understanding that they can be used for various kinds of benefit and voter fraud as outlined in yesterday's post. They are tacitly encouraging, or at least enabling, the migrants to violate US laws. Beyond that, as Antonio Gracias pointed out in Green Bay,
ICE told us that kids are being trafficked back and forth across the border to complete families to make this easier. This is a human tragedy.
The unaccompoanied children numbered in the hundreds of thousands in recent years. Some must be passing through Catholic Charities camps, and it's hard to think Catholic Charities staff is not aware of the situatuion and even knows who these children are, having seen them more than once. Are they doing anything to stop this? Beyond that, as Gracias continues,
And how many of these people died on the way up here that didn’t make it in? What happened to them? We created a system here that created [an incentive] for people to come and be taken advantage of by these traffickers.
Let's keep in mind, the more migrants who were encouraged to show up, the more money Catholic Charities and the other faith-based NGOs got. They didn't have any incentive to limit their number. The only thing that limits them is the likelihood that they will be turned away at the border or deported if they enter illegally, and the threat of deportation is already encouraging them to leave:
If migrants are deported by the United States government, they are separated from their families and detained in crowded jails, sometimes for many weeks. Once legally deported, migrants cannot visit for 10 years or longer, even when their relatives remain in the United States. They also lose possessions and easy access to their bank accounts.
Haitians “are self-deporting right now because they don’t want the worst thing … because [the government] does send them back to Haiti immediately,” Jeff Lamour, an American businessman in Albertville, Alabama, told Breitbart News on Friday.
. . . South of the border, northbound migrants are also turning back homewards. “It is true that people are going different directions,” Caleb Vitello, a senior official in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told the Council on Foreign Relations. For example, the northward foot and boat traffic in the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has dropped “because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there,” he said.
The migrants’ exit is bad news for business groups who want more imported customers, workers, and renters to increase their profits and stock values.
It's also bad news for the faith-based NGOs that provide the business groups with imported customers, workers, and renters and work closely with them. What's remarkable is the perceptiveness and efficiemcy with which the Trump administration has simply knocked the legs off the whole economic stool that drove migration. They cut demand by closing the border and beginning deportations for those who'd gotten in. They cut supply by turning off the funmding spigot to the NGOs that throve off the problem. In a mattrer of months, the immigrant camps have been shutting down.