Amtrak Update

As I mentioned in my post on Amtrak last week, there's a whole sub-sub genre of YouTubers who liveblog their Amtrak trips. They aren't really train buffs like I am; they seem just to enjoy the scenery combined with amenities like eating in the dining car or riding in the sleeping cars or business class. This would be perfectly fine, except that Amtrak travel is predictably nightmarish, with trains regularly canceled or running nine or 12 hours late or even longer, with the diner and snack bar out of food, toilets clogged, heat out, and so forth.

In that post last week, I mentioned one of the best-known Amtrak YouTube channels, Grounded Life Travel, with the charming couple Allie and Rob, who go ga-ga over the Amtrak long distance trains they ride several times a year on crosss-country trips, often between cruises on opposite coasts. Frankly, this sort of Amtrak travel is high-risk activity. Even Allie and Rob mention oh, by the way, Amtrak canceled the Coast Starlight on their Los Angeles-Seattle leg, but no big deal, they just rented a car, drove 18 hours, and got back on the train.

Once almost 20 years ago, I took just such an Amtrak odyssey, booking Grounded Life style sleeping car accommodations between LA and Philadelphia. There were no cancellations, and the toilets mostly worked, but there were numerous problems with the ventilation and drunken, noisy sleeping car passengers. As I changed trains in the early morning of the third day in Pittsburgh, the conductor on the new train, once he looked at my tickets, said only, "I feel your pain." I'd said nothing to him; he simply understood what the Amtrak experience is really like. This will never make it to Allie and Rob's videos.

In this week's news, the Amtrak Eugene, OR-to-Vancouver, BC route, the Cascades, which Allie and Rob pitch in the video above as "Amtrak's Most Underrated Route", has been almost completely eliminated and substituted with charter buses, not because of anything Elon Musk has threatened to do, but because of an entirely forseeable circumstance:

The years-long process to restore regional intercity rail service and build up train ridership in western Washington and Oregon was dealt a major setback this week when Amtrak suddenly withdrew dozens of train cars from service for emergency repairs.

It means the state-supported Amtrak Cascades service is, for now, left with just one working train.

On its website, Amtrak said substitute bus service will be offered to passengers booked on cancelled trains “until further notice.”

Corrosion discovered on Amtrak’s aging Horizon-class railcars caused the trouble. The rail company immediately removed all 70 of its Horizon train cars from the fleet nationwide, including 26 used on the Amtrak Cascades line.

As even Allie and Rob pointed out in the video I linked last week, Amtrak's equipment is old, dirty, and poorly maintained. The Horizon cars were delivered in 1990, making them 35 years old,

In the Pacific Northwest, 26 cars were sidelined, leading to the cancellation of all but one of the seven daily round trips for the Cascades in the Vancouver, British Columbia-Seattle-Portland-Eugene, Ore., corridor. The single round trip continuing to operate will be a Seattle-Eugene, Ore., round trip — trains Nos. 503 and 508 — using the Cascades’ lone operable Talgo trainset; a second such Series 8 train has been sidelined since November after striking a tree during a storm.

Oh, OK. They at least had one spare, or they had it until it hit a tree last fall. But that leaves out an earlier problem that took other Talgo-type equipment out of service:

On December 18, 2017, Amtrak Cascades passenger train 501 derailed near DuPont, Washington, United States. The National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) final report said regional transit authority Sound Transit failed to take steps to mitigate a curve at the accident location, and inadequately trained the train engineer. [However, Amtrak operated this service, the engineer was an Amtrak employee, and Amtrak was responsible for his training.] . . . A number of automobiles on southbound I-5 were crushed, and three people on board the train died. -

. . . [T]he WSDOT owned Talgo Series VI passenger trainset, was also damaged beyond repair. The NTSB later said that the use of these trainsets should be discontinued "as soon as possible," because of their lack of crashworthiness and overaged safety straps used for assembly retention. This led WSDOT and Amtrak to retire and scrap the remaining Talgo VI trainsets. The sets will be replaced with new Siemens Venture train sets.

So let me see. Amtrak put the then-30-year-old Horizon cars in service on the Cascade trains because its Talgo VI cars were unsafe, but that's OK, they'd be replaced with Siemens Venture cars, except the Venture cars, nine years later, still haven't been delivered. But this allowed the Horizon cars to stay in service on the Cascades until someone found they were corroded and unsafe, so they have to be taken our of service now, too. And they'd have an extra Talgo 8 set to use, but it hit a tree. As I say, riding Amtrak is high-risk behavior.

Where are Allie and Rob? This is all beyond them.

Meanwhile, just this past Thursday,

Amtrak President Roger Harris emailed employees that the railroad would consider ways to reduce costs in the coming weeks, including cutting the number of management positions within the company. In a statement provided to Railfan & Railroad, an Amtrak spokesperson confirmed that the railroad was indeed tightening its belt.

“Given the current environment, the Executive Leadership Team and the Board have determined that we must act now,” the statement read. “We will do this by examining our costs, including the size of our management staff, in a proactive and controlled way. In addition, we will be more selective in starting new projects and will look harder for efficiencies and innovative ways to address the problems and opportunities we face.”

The "current environment", of course, is an oblique reference to Elon Musk and his characterization of Amtrak as "kind of embarrassing", which, given the via dolorosa of the nearly decade-long Cascades fiasco, is hard to dispute.

It sounds as if Amtrak has been top-heavy with deputy assistants to the assistant director, but the question that sticks in my mind is that airlines have been familiar with problems of one or another type of plane being temporarily or permanently grounded, or individual planes being hit by helicopters, landing upside down on the runway, or whatever. My impression is that they have contingency plans to reassign equipment in place covering every such eventuality.

All of a sudden, big surprise, Amtrak discovers 70 35-year-old coaches, already characterized by Amtrak's biggest fans as old, dirty, and poorly maintained, are also unsafe, and they have to be taken out of service. Nine years earlier, another type of equipment was declared unsafe and had to be taken out of service -- but apparently nobody at headquarters had the tiniest inkling that such a thing could ever happen, much less happen again.

“Amtrak is determining how to replace the grounded Horizon trains by redistributing other trains in its national fleet,” said Washington State Department of Transportation rail division spokesperson Janet Matkin via email Wednesday. “Amtrak will notify the states of Washington and Oregon as soon as a plan is in place to move replacement trains to the Pacific Northwest.”

They'll be back with a solution just as soon as they can come up with a plan. Doggone, Allie and Rob sure liked those trains. Maybe they can liveblog a ride on the bus replacements, except there's no dining car, no snack bar, no roomettes, just the usual drunks and crazies. I would go a step beyond Musk: don't privatize it, just let Greyhound buy more buses and be done with the whole problem.

Musk's Interview With Bret Baier

In a remarkable interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Elon Musk and members of his DOGE team put on a surprisingly grounded performance. Musk sometimes comes off as having a little too much fun trolling his opponents, but this interview gives a clear idea of why he's gotten so rich -- he actually understands business and IT, something most business and IT people don't.

However, it's difficult to find a single written transcript. The best I can come up with is in this post at Red State, which quotes extensive excerpts, for instance,

MUSK: We're talking about elementary financial controls, that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit, it will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.

I spent most of my career on the controls side of IT, security, procedures, contingency planning, and related areas. Part of my function was to be audited almost constantly. Internal and external auditors and bank examiners would come in and want to see in detail how the company, for instance, made sure that only the people who were specifically authorized to sign checks outside the computer system were also exclusively permitted to issue equivalent payments through the computer.

Another issue was how the company identified confidential customer and employee data and made sure it was kept confidential. That would include medical and medical insurance data, financial information, social security numbers, personnel actions, legal strategies, and so forth.

Another issue was ensuring that the company could maintain critical operations that relied on the availability of its IT systems and data. Just as an example, several major financial companies had both their executive offices and their IT facilities in the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on 9/11. How did they react to losing their major officers and their whole IT operation? Recognize that if there were no way quickly to recover customer accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars would be inaccessbile for weeks or months, or possibly just disappear forever.

(As it happened, in that case, the brokers and so forth typically had mirror-image backup operations already running in places like New Jersey, because the auditors had recognized the potential problem for decades and had long since insisted the companies plan for it.)

These are the sorts of things auditors ask about. They report directly to the corporate board of directors, in large part because as Musk puts it, if such controls aren't in place, the company would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. Failing an audit in the private sector is a big deal; it leads high-level managers to get fired.

Via the Red State summary,

Another manipulation of the fraud gap discovered by engineer Steve Davis is over $300 million in Small Business Administration loans had been given out to people under the age of 11 and over $300 million distributed to people over the age of 120. Musk discussed how this gap occurred, lamenting how fraudsters exploit the Social Security numbers of newborn babies.

It had been reported weeks ago that there were people over 200 years old still in the Social Security files who weren't flagged as "deceased". This was pooh-pooed at the time as being unimportant, since it involved relatively few cases, and they weren't actually receiving benefits. But if the numbers are active, people can steal them, whether they're getting benefit checks from that account or not. This was the reason for the large-scale marking of accounts for 120-year-old-plus people as "deceased". Quoted in the Red State piece,

[DOGE member Anthony] ARMSTRONG: The reason this is happening is that the two systems are not talking to each other. Right? So, you don't know at the Small Business Administration that you're giving a loan to a nine-month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross-referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. So, that very, very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. There are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another, and if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.

The piece quotes another DOGE engineer, Steve Davis:

As an example, there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system.

BAIER: And that's an accurate figure?

DAVIS: Correct. Correct. This is something that has been identified as a problem, a pre-existing problem since 2008, at least from an IG report. So, there are some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this, 2008, and nothing was done about it. And so, 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that could be used only for bad intentions, there would be no way to use those for good intentions. So one of the things the DOGE team is doing is carefully, and very methodically, looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.

There are other problems that can also grow in private and NGO environments that can easily get out of control, for instance, quoted in a Fox News link:

Davis brought up federal credit cards, which he labeled a "mundane" but "illustrative" example of DOGE's work.

"There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn't make sense. So one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we've worked for the agencies and said, 'Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?'" Davis explained.

Corporate credit cards can be used for all sorts of things, not least motel rooms for office trysts, something I've seen come up in my own experience. There can be no question that this sort of thing is going on -- even if it could be claimed that the amounts are negligible, it shouldn't be allowed, and controls should be in place to eliminate the problem.

My impression of Musk, even though in certain areas he's not a serious guy -- remember the frozen embryos with Amber Heard? -- has gone up. He dresses as badly as Bill Gates, but while Gates is just a flake, Musk is an eccentric with many redeeming features.

Spreading False Narrative

I found a pretty typical legacy media take from CBS Miami this morning, More than half a million Latin American, Haitian immigrants given deadline to self-deport:

The Department of Homeland Security officially posted a notice to end protections for 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to the Federal Register on Tuesday.

This sets up a 30-day deadline, which will fall on April 24, for those affected to self-deport or face the consequences.

"The Department of Homeland Security is warning that if these people do not voluntarily depart the country, they will be found, arrested and deported from the country," CBS News immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez said. "In fact, the administration is saying that the people affected by this policy change should sign up to self-register on a smartphone app provided by the government and tell people that they will be departing the country."

This isn't really news to start with; this step had been expected, and a month ago, the administration froze funding for many of the NGOs that pass money through to the migrants. Nevertheless, CBS maintains the convenient fiction:

Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado said the new guidelines unfairly target individuals who were legally admitted into the country.

"That's not fair, because people that came in with the parole came in legally through the legal system and they were authorized by the United States authorities to remain legally in the United States," Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado said. "So, the fact that you're having to leave within 30 days, facing the possibility of being detained is definitely something that's not like it's not due process, like it's just a violation of what they were initially granted."

The CHNV program never granted "legal" status to anyone who came into the country via its provisions; the "immigration attorney" is incorrect. They have been here under "humanitarian parole":

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to exercise discretion to temporarily allow certain noncitizens to physically enter or remain in the United States if they are applying for admission but do not have a legal basis for being admitted. DHS may only grant parole if the agency determines that there are urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons for a person to be in the United States, and that person merits a favorable exercise of discretion. Grants of parole are made for limited periods of time, often to accomplish a discrete purpose, and individuals are typically expected to depart the United States when the authorized period expires unless another form of status or relief is conferred.

There are several iffy questions about the CHNV program. For instance,

To come to the U.S. under CHNV, a person needed a sponsor who could demonstrate they could financially support the person or family who would live here.

Just who the "sponsors" are has never been quite clear. The money for the CHNV program has come from grants to a small number of faith-based NGOs amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, which I've discussed in recent posts. These NGOs then identify individual sponsor groups, who apparently receive money from these grants to support the specific migrants, who appear to be purposely settled in specific communities, such as Springfield, OH, Charleroi, PA, or Rockland County, NY, where a group of about 5,000 Haitians had been settled, according to the link.

The sponsor groups, according to the sketchy reports we've had from the communities where the Haitians have been resettled, then work with private real estate managers, grocers, employers, and car dealers to supply the sponsored Haitians with slum housing, sweatshop employment, cars in apparently at least some cases, food, and other goods and services. It appears that these payments are in bulk from the "sponsors" to the private entities, and as a result, they're highly profitable business. But they never reach the Haitians themselves, who in fact appear to be captive to the "sponsors".

However, when the Trump administration froze funding to the NGOs that passed the money for all this through to the sponsors, that simply knocked one key leg off the CHNV stool -- the rent, car payments, grocery bills, and so forth could no longer be paid. The Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado in the CBS link misrepresents the situation:

Aguado pointed out this brings up other legal challenges: "People have lease agreements, legally speaking, the legal obligations of a lease agreement, or maybe a vehicle, all of these terms and legal contracts that we have now obligation switch, and what are they going to do with those contracts?"

I strongly suspect that the lease agreements and vehicle titles are not in the names of the individual Haitians or families; in the case of rentals, as we saw in Springfield, OH, multiple families occupied single residential units, while titles to Haitians' cars that were abandoned or damaged in wrecks were impossible to trace. The Haitians under the program were being supported by "sponsors"; they weren't self-sufficient and wouldn't normally have qualified for conventional rentals or financing.

In addition, the CHNV program was never indefinite:

CHNV parole status is for two years. During that time, a person can get working papers and seek asylum, which provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

That window to apply for a way to stay, though, doesn't match people's experience with the U.S. timetable for approving permissions.

Jean Marie Lauture, who was a high-ranking police official in Haiti, has been in the U.S. since Sept. 13, 2023. He has applied for asylum, but he hasn't been approved by the U.S. He said others who applied last year, like him, also haven't heard back.

So Mr Lauture had two years to formalize his status, but if he isn't successful, he will need to return to Haiti in September of this year no matter what. One can argue that it was never realistic to expect the Haitians to become legal within two years, but this was a problem for the Biden administration, which initiated the program. It simply isn't Trump's problem. As the CBS link put it,

CBS News first reported in early February that the Trump administration was planning to revoke the legal status of individuals who entered the U.S. under the CHNV process.

DHS said many of the people that came through this program were loosely vetted and it undercut American workers.

This would apply, for instance, to the Venezuelans settled in Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX. They were brought in as a group by "sponsors" who somehow didn't check whether some number were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, who promptly transferred their criminal activities to the US. It was in fact part of a package deal.

The problem for those who hope to reinstate the CHNV program through the courts is that whether the funding to the NGOs and sponsors can be restored, no one in the country under the program can stay longer than two years. So far, the Trump strategy has been effective, and many Haitians are already starting to self-deport.

Immigration Becomes An Issue In Canada's Election

Via Breitbart:

Canada’s conservative leader wants to win the nation’s April 28 national elections and is hammering Justin Trudeau’s replacement for supporting the massive legal immigration that has caused massive pocketbook damage to ordinary Canadians.

. . . The two parties are close in the polls as Poilievre slams Carney for supporting Trudeau’s very unpopular immigration policy.

n 2015, the investor-led Century Initiative persuaded Trudeau to grow the economy by inflating the nation’s population from 36 million to 100 million by 2100. Since then, Trudeau has imported four million migrants — or 10 percent of the nation’s population, which is the equivalent of 33 million migrants in the United States.

That huge population of legal migrants — which includes many Indians and migrants who are too old to work — inflicted an economic shock and massive economic damage to 30 million ordinary Canadians.

It cut wages, exacerbated healthcare shortages, and spiked housing costs. It dropped workplace productivity and reduced corporate research. It also imported criminals, unexpected sanitary habits, unfamiliar foreign conflicts, and strange ethnic resentments.

. . . However, Canada’s major investors and older citizens gained enormously. Trudeau’s mass migration inflated the stock market by 40 percent with a flood of consumers, renters, and low-wage workers.

In the run-up to the April 28 national election, Poilievre is wrapping the Century Initiative around Carney’s political neck.

The soft Canadian border will become an increasing problem with illegals crossing from the US as pressure rises on them to self-deport. A former officer in the Canadian Border Services Agency who now researches border security at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Kelly Sundberg, said, “Canada can expect a tsunami of illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities and coming into our country.”

Sundberg attributes the change to the Trump administration’s increasing removal of undocumented migrants, particularly actions such as sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to Guantanamo Bay. Canada’s lax border compounds this, Sundberg said.

“I hope I’m wrong, but it would appear that we’re going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country,” he continued. “And they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them.”

As a true crime fan, I've been intrigued by the fact that two of Canada's most notorious serial killers had sideline businesses involving smuggling, something we never saw in the US with figures like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. In fact, psychological profiles of figures like Bundy and Gacy stress their desire to maintain a respectable facade -- they would never dirty their hands with petty crime.

But Gabriel Wortman, who killed 22 and injured three in a 2020 Nova Scotia shooting spree, was alleged earlier to have smuggled guns and drugs into Canada:

On July 27, [2020,] court documents were unsealed, detailing police interviews with witnesses who claimed Wortman was a drug smuggler who provided people in Portapique and nearby unincorporated community of Economy with drugs from Maine. These witnesses alleged Wortman had stockpiles of guns and drugs, along with false walls and hidden compartments, in his properties. The RCMP confirmed three days later that Wortman had kept hidden compartments in buildings, but they were unable to corroborate the drug smuggling claims. . . . Additional witnesses told police that Wortman and an associate tended to travel to the U.S. and smuggle cigarettes, alcohol, and presumably other illegal items from there, using a sailboat the associate owned.

Paul Bernardo, who with Karla Homolka made up the Ontario "Ken and Barbie killers", encountered Leslie Mahaffy, one of their victims, while stealing license plates on a dark street late at night.

After their marriage, Karla and Paul Bernardo lived in their home on Bayview in St. Catharines. Paul had begun augmenting his income by smuggling cigarettes across the border and needed the stolen license plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. It was the need for a stolen license plate that brought him into contact with his first murder victim, Leslie Mahaffy.

. . . Leslie had actually gone back to her home to see if there was any way to get in without waking her parents. With the worst possible luck imaginable, she encountered Paul Bernardo who was prowling around the neighborhood looking for license plates to steal.

He pulled a knife on Leslie Mahaffy and forced her to go in his car.

So apparently, smuggling guns, drugs, and cigarettes is a common sort of criminal activity in Canada even among respectable, seemingly middle-class people, whereas tbat sort of activity in the US is much more closely acssociated with the habitual criminal underclass.

At the same time, it appears that in the political debate north of the border, there's at least a strain of opinion that says controlling it is exclusively a US issue, for instance:

Let’s be 100% clear. When you cross the border into the USA, you have to go through US customs, not Canadian customs.

If illegals are making it into the USA from Canada, they’re getting there by going through US customs. They drive over and go through US customs or they fly over and go through US customs. So your question should really be “Why can’t US Customs get control of their border?”

I have the impression that many Canadians have so far been unwilling to look at the big picture and perhaps to minimize smuggling from the US into Canada. But think for a moment -- if Canada were in fact part of the US, smuggling guns and cigarettes would simply disappear, the guns especially would be legal.

The USCCB, Catholic Charities, And Refugee Resettlement

I still find myself in a peculiar rabbit hole trying to make sense of the various refugee resettlement programs for which the Trump administration has cut funding, especially those delegated by various departments to the US Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities. No discussion I've seen is especially precise or seems to reflect any real understanding of how these programs work, much less which program is which, especially those under the Catholic umbrella.

Let's start with the USCCB's lawsuit against the Trump administration filed in February:

Catholic bishops sued the Trump administration on Tuesday [February 18] over its abrupt halt to funding of refugee resettlement, calling the action unlawful and harmful to newly arrived refugees and to the nation's largest private resettlement program.

. . . 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.

. . . The conference is one of 10 national agencies, most of them faith-based, that serve refugees and that have been sent scrambling since receiving a Jan. 24 State Department letter informing them of an immediate suspension of funding pending a review of foreign-aid programs.

Here's where the murk begins. This lawsuit, as far as I can determine, is over the termination of a single program covered by an agreement or agreements between the US bishops' conference and the State Department, which is actually pretty small as these things go.

The USCCB said it is still awaiting about $13 million in reimbursements for expenses prior to Jan. 24.

As of Jan. 25, it said, there were 6,758 refugees assigned by the government to USCCB's care that had been in the country less than 90 days, the period of time for which they're eligible for resettlement aid.

But as far as I've been able to determine, the number of refugees in Catholic-sponsored programs, and the amounts of money involved, are far larger than this story implies. This particular lawsuit is against only the State Department and the Department of Health, Educstion, and Welfare, but many other agencies fund the whole Catholic refugee resettlement enterprise:

President Joe Biden’s border policies were a boon for private religious charities associated with the Catholic Church, which collectively received billions in grant money while helping house and resettle migrants, while a federal watchdog warned about mismanaged funds and a potential for fraud.

The funding for these humanitarian programs that came through the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency has come under renewed scrutiny by President Trump and his administration, who seek to reverse years of financial incentives for the crisis of border crossings under their predecessor.

Catholic Charities USA, comprised of 168 local member agencies across the United States, is one of the largest private recipients of government funding under several immigration-related programs that critics have said allowed the Biden administration to relocate and shelter migrants in the United States.

According to data from USAspending.gov, Catholic Charities branches across the United States collected over $2 billion in federal grants over the last four years of the Biden administration, primarily through the Department of Health and Human Services which granted about $1.93 billion for programs. Other agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development also doled out significant—if smaller—sums, about $156 million and $138 million, respectively.

This money comes from a wide variety of individual programs and individual grants, and it covers a variety of migrants in the country under different legal conditions. For instance, migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who had been here under the CHNV program are not, strictly speaking, "legal", but were under a condition known as "humanitarian parole" that lasted for a maximum of two years, during which they were expected to find a way to achieve full legal status.

A separate, different quasi-legal status is Temporary Protected Status,

a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that allows migrants from designated countries to reside legally in the United States for a period of up to eighteen months, which the U.S. government can renew indefinitely. During that period, TPS holders are eligible for employment and travel authorization and are protected from deportation. The program does not include a path to permanent residency or U.S. citizenship, but TPS recipients can apply for those designations separately.

Currently designated countries under the TPS program include Afghanistan, Burma, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia, and others. So as one promiiinent example, migrants from Haiti could be here under either humanitarian parole or temporary protected status, under programs with different funding, different conditions, and different lengths, but in general, they have not been "legal".

But the program under which the USCCB is suing the Trump administration is none of these, it's with the State Department:

Nearly 7,000 refugees had been assigned by the government to the bishops' resettlement program, under two contracts, court records said, for the 2025 fiscal year that awarded the conference about $65 million for initial resettlement expenses.

The bishops' conference received a letter on Jan. 24 from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration notifying it that its refugee resettlement contracts were "immediately suspended" pending a review of foreign assistance programs.

I'm somewhat puzzled that the US bishops are suing over only this one, relatively small program, when the programs with Catholic Charities are much larger and cover many more migrants -- and they all do pretty much the same thing. But even this distinction neglects the problem that Catholic Charities USA, the national office, reports financials only for its headquarters operation and not for the 176 Catholic Charities offices in individual dioceses.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, for example, had $101,010,202 in revenue in its 2024 fiscal year—$82,194,646 of it from government grants.

Just that one diocesan office has received grants equivalent in magnitude to those awarded to national-level non-Catholic faith-based NGOs. In yesterday's post, I mentioned Church World Service. Global Refuge, a Lutheran-affiliated NGO, reported total income of $230,822,000, of which $221,476,000 came from government grants. World Relief, affiliated with the national Association of Evangelicals, reported $163,157,027 total income, of which $126,026,563 came from government grants.

All of these grants expanded enormously under Biden.

Most of these, including individual Catholic Charities offices, now have urgent messages on their websites referring to the financial crises they now have due to the Trump administration's cancellations of these grants. One of my questions is why so few of these NGOs, but especially Catholic Charities, have followed the USCCB's example and filed suit against the deparments that have cut off the funding.

Let's keep in mind that the USCCB is apparently suing over maybe $13 million, maybe $65 million, and layoffs of 50 workers, while Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston alone has lost more like $82 million, and non-Catholic NGOs have lost upwards of $100 million each.

One thing this speaks to, though, is the effectveness of the Trump cuts. In a matter of weeks, they've identified the lifeblood of the repopulation movement, grants to faith-based NGOs, and cut off the flow. I would guess that the turn of the money spigot was so sudden and complete that the NGOs just haven't had the budget to keep staff that could respond, much less hire outside attorneys.

Digging Deeper Into CHNV

I'm surprised that I hadn't even heard of the CHNV program before I learned just the other day that the Trump administration had discontinued it. According to Wikipedia, which appears to be the most complete account:

Humanitarian Parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans was a program under which citizens of these four countries, and their immediate family members, could be paroled into the United States for a period of up to two years if a person in the US agreed to financially support them. The program allowed a combined total of 30,000 people per month from the four countries to enter the US. The program was implemented in 2022 (Venezuela) to 2023 (Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua) in response to high numbers of migrants and asylum seekers from these countries crossing into the US at the southwest border with Mexico.

. . . The CHNV Program is credited with greatly reducing numbers of people of these nationalities crossing into the US at the southwest border. After the implementation of Humanitarian Parole for Venezuelans, the number of Venezuelans encountered each week by the US Department of Homeland Security fell by over 90%. The US government promised to deport any person from these four countries who arrived to the US not through the program.

It simply isn't clear whether the Haitians who've concentrated in localities like Springfield, OH or Charleroi, PA, or the Venezuelans who've concentrated in places like Aurora, CO or El Paso, TX came in via the CHNV program, although it's possible to infer that their concentrated housing arrangements arise from sponsorship organizations that place them in certain facilities. The entry continues,

. . . Beneficiaries of the CHNV program are typically not eligible for refugee benefits or services. Beneficiaries from Nicaragua and Venezuela are typically not eligible for any mainstream government benefits, such as healthcare (Medicaid), food assistance (SNAP), and cash assistance (TANF). Beneficiaries may apply for asylum, family-based immigration, or another immigration pathway if they are eligible. Some beneficiaries from Venezuela may be eligible for Temporary Protected Status if they arrived before July 31, 2023. . . However, for many migrants, there is no pathway to stay in the US after the two-year parole period.

So wait a moment. I thought the Springfield and Charleroi Haitians were in fact here under TPS, and the media seems to have thought it, too:

Springfield residents are bracing for a shift after the Trump administration announced it will end protected status for Haitian immigrants in August.

City leaders in Springfield, a central Ohio city of 60,000, said they've seen an influx of 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian residents in recent years. Many of the Haitian immigrants are in the city with temporary protected status, a federal designation for immigrants from countries with dangerous conditions, such as a natural disaster or armed conflict.

The Biden administration had previously extended the status for Haiti to February 2026 due to concerns about natural disasters and gang violence. The status has been in place for Haitians since the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

So it appears that Haitians have been coming in under more than one program, and CHNV is just one possibility. I get the impression that only a few people at Homeland Security understand the whole picture here, if anyone does at all. But this is just one part of the rabbit hole.

What about CHNV sponsors? Who in fact sre they? I tried doing a web search and found mostly government sites saying good things in general about CHNV sponsors, but only one NGO actually came out and identified itself as a sponsor, Church World Service (CWS). This is intriguing, because as we see, CHNV beneficiaries aren't eligible for ordinary government aid -- it appears that the sponsors are paying for their food, housing, medical care, and so forth. CWS says on its site,

The U.S. government established Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) and Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) to provide a safe, legal pathway for these populations to come to the United States. Program beneficiaries receive humanitarian parole status, which is a legal, temporary status for a duration of two years. Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans must have US-based sponsors in order to receive authorization to travel to the US.

Groups wishing to sponsor through U4U or CHNV can choose to partner with CWS as a CWS Private Sponsor Group (PSG). As a CWS PSG, a group will be able to utilize the expertise of resettlement agency staff via remote technical assistance and support. CWS recruits, trains, and supports sponsor groups throughout the first 3-6 months of the sponsorship period so that they can help these displaced populations achieve stability in the U.S.

So as best I can determine, CWS is an NGO that serves as an umbrella for local NGOs that actually sponsor, and apparently fund, the migrants, and as we'll see, this is over 75% of their budget. These particular migrants aren't eligible for most benefits, and they're here not on TPS, but something called humanitarian parole status, which lasts only two years. What then? Who knows?

Where does the money to support the CHNV migrants come from? The implication on the CWS site is that CWS provides only technical and training support to the local NGOs, although it says it "supports sponsor groups throughout the first 3-6 months of the sponsorship period". Is some of this support financial? It doesn't say.

Wikipedia says:

Church World Service (CWS) was founded in 1946 and is a cooperative ministry of 37 [Protestant and Orthodox] Christian denominations and communions, providing sustainable self-help, development, disaster relief, and refugee assistance around the world. The CWS mission is to eradicate hunger and poverty and to promote peace and justice at the national and international level through collaboration with partners abroad and in the US.

Although the Wikipedia entry stresses disaster relief, the CWS response to the 2024 Hurricane Helene devastation in North Carolina appears to have been minimal:

CWS is on the ground, working closely with partners to assist those in need. Already, we’ve distributed over 3,286 Emergency Cleanup Buckets and 4,360 Hygiene Kits to help families begin cleaning up the devastation. But with our inventory of CWS Buckets now critically low—down to just 833—the need for more is urgent.

Based on their website, their main focus is on refugee resettlement under the CHNV program, now canceled. Their most recent annual report indicates that their income was $220,437,580, of which $186,438,785, or 84.6%, came from the US government. Of this, $170,998,164, or 78.1%, went to "Services for Displaced People". Only $6,834,006, or 3.1% , went to "Emergency Response", including the cleanup buckets and hygiene kits for Hurricane Helene.

CWS appears actually to be more transparent over its funding than other faith-based NGOs, including Catholic Charities. Catholic Charities appears to have no national site equivalent to CWS that gives any sort of picture of its relationship to government-sponsored immigration funding, but the Catholic Charities Office of Maine Refugee Services has equivalent wording on its site:

The U.S Department of State's Bureau for Population Refugees and Migration has created several pathways to refugee resettlement into the United States. People coming into the United States through the following pathways qualify for refugee benefits through ORR refugee programs. The Office of Maine Refugee Services at Catholic Charities administers the federal refugee programs as the replacement designee for the State.

. . . Other current US sponsorship programs include Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan (CHNV) Program and the Uniting for Ukraine Program. Please contact OMRS to discuss these programs further or to find out if sponsored individuals are eligible for refugee services upon arrival.

So, at least up to very recently, Catholic Charities of Maine served as a government-authorized NGO that in fact administered government refugee resettlement programs. I think it can reasonably be assumed that other Catholic Charities activities in other states operate (or operated) on an equivalent basis. But as I pointed out yesterday, the CHNV program didn't actually "resettle refugees"; it recruited people from their home countries and flew them in to bypass border immigration procedures, in the process declaring them "legal".

The CHNV policy allows eligible Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with American sponsors to fly to the U.S., where they can apply for temporary work permits under the immigration parole law, which allows presidents to welcome foreigners on humanitarian or public interest grounds.

The Biden administration has argued the policy is justified on humanitarian grounds due to the economic crises and political turmoil in the four countries. It has also argued the program archives [sic] a public interest objective by reducing illegal immigration by migrants from these countries by offering them a legal alternative to come to the U.S.

But the actual operation of this program, supported by faith-based NGOs passing through government money (deducting a skim, of course), was to place the migrants in exploitive employment and housing conditions, while destabilizing the communities in which they were resettled. In addition, up to now, it's hard to avoid thinking the immigration and resettlement policies have been a thinly-disguised repopulation program intended basically to reconstruct US society on a racial basis.

Musk Has A Point

The goal of the Biden administration was to strategically place illegals in swing states and make their status legal, thereby turning swing states Democrat.

The net result would have been permanent one-party rule of the USA, just like what they did in California. https://t.co/n9iOL6QP7P

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, 2025

Whatever Elon Musk may be, one thing he certainly isn't is a Biblical scholar. But there's scriptural support for his position in the post above, and it's something the USCCB, among whom there must certainly be some Biblical scholars, omit in their web page outlining the Church's teaching on migration:

Both the Old and New Testaments tell compelling stories of refugees forced to flee because of oppression. Exodus tells the story of the Chosen People, Israel, who were victims of bitter slavery in Egypt. They were utterly helpless by themselves, but with God's powerful intervention they were able to escape and take refuge in the desert. For forty years they lived as wanderers with no homeland of their own. Finally, God fulfilled his ancient promise and settled them on the land that they could finally call home.

The Israelites' experience of living as homeless aliens was so painful and frightening that God ordered his people for all time to have special care for the alien: "You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt" (Lv 19:33-34).

But another major theme in the Old Testament echoed in the New (cf the Woman at the Well, John 4:4–42) is the dilution of the faith among the northern tribes of Israel. Although this certainly had its start with King Solomon himself and his foreign wives and concubines, the Assyrians were able to exploit this opening, as outlined in 2 Kings 17:

24 The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and settled them in the cities of Samaria in place of the Israelites. They took possession of Samaria and dwelt in its cities.

. . . 33 They were both venerating the LORD and serving their own gods. They followed the custom of the nations from among whom they had been deported.

34 To this very day they continue to act according to their former customs, not venerating the LORD nor observing the statutes and regulations, the law and commandment, that the LORD enjoined on the descendants of Jacob, whom he had named Israel.

This strategy was found convenient through the 20th century; Stalin found mass deportations useful for various purposes:

From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories.

In other words, mass transfers of population for political ends is something as old as empires. There's an ongoing debate as to whether this practice constitutes "genocide". At the link:

Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention and coined the term genocide himself, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay. Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depended on ties to their particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland".

What Musk is suggesting in his post, or at least what we might infer from it, is that the Biden administration strategy of mass population transfer from particular areas amounted to a form of deportation for political ends. Musk links a tweet that includes this chart in his own post that reinforces this (click on the image for a more readable view):

Estimates of how many people from the designated countries, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, vary, as do the particular features of the program. As of 2023, the Biden administration itself said,

On January 5, 2023, the Biden administration announced its intent to provide “safe and orderly pathways to the United States” for up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela [per month]. The new program, formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), allows certain people from these four countries who have a sponsor in the U.S. and who pass a background check to come to the U.S. for a period of two years to live and work lawfully, using a legal mechanism known as “humanitarian parole.”

On one hand, the actual numbers admitted, according to the chart above, are far greater, and few actually received background checks:

The Trump administration is revoking the legal status of more than 500,000 migrants who entered the United States through a Biden administration parole program.

CBS News reported that 532,000 migrants from countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who entered the country through a program called CHNV, will have their “work permits and deportation protections” terminated in April.

. . . In August 2024, Fox News reported that DHS under the Biden administration had decided to halt the “issuing of advance travel authorization” for the CHNV Parole Program, “out of an abundance of caution.”

The freeze of the program at the time came “after an internal report” found there were “large amounts of fraud in applications for” people wanting to sponsor migrants in the program, according to the outlet.

This raises the question of who the "sponsors" of these people were. Immigratiomn documents suggest that they provide transportation to the US and "initial" housing:

Maintain flexibility in your welcoming plans. Once your I-134A application is approved, your beneficiary will have 90 days to travel to the U.S., during which you can focus on travel arrangements or securing initial housing.

Again, it appears that the "sponsors" are often the same organizations that provide a "package" of sweatshop employment, slumlord housing, transportation -- which may even include purchasing cars for the migrants, but not assisting them in getting driver education, licenses, or insurance -- and other highly specilized services in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA. This raises for me the question of whether Catholic Charities is, or was, involved in this "sponsorship" racket.

So I'm left with some lingering questions. The Catholic bishops compare the "migrant" wave to the Hebrews fleeing Egypt, but in subsequent centuries, the Hebrews themselves were subject to forced deportation and repopulation programs that were specifically meant to weaken their faith and cohesiveness. The bishops don't mention this scriptural parallel, but the numbers involved in the current migrant wave of the past few decades are at the same order of magnitude as the Stalinist repopulations of the 1930s and 1940s, and appear to be implemented for the same reasons of centralized social engineering.

But eved more disturbing is the sense I get that in particular via Catholic Charities, the bishops are financially enabling government policies that arguably verge on genocide. At minimum, these aren't random, or even organized, works of corporal mercy -- they amount to mass deportations on an Assyrian or Stalinist scale that are meant to achieve political ends. And are the migrants "voluntary"? Not if they're being offered plane tickets, jobs, housing, and stay-out-of-jail cards. Who would turn that down?