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?

Catholic Charities Starting To Show Effects Of Trump Cutbacks

Now and then, I've mentioned here the role Catholic Charities has played in enabling settlement of quasi-legal migrants in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA, to the extent that the large numbers of those resettled have badly strained community resources and driven up housing and insurance costs. I've also questioned the apparent lowball estimates of how much money the US bishops receive from the federal government.

This story gives an indication of the effect Trump administration cutbacks have had on Catholic Charities, at least in Columbia, MO:

The Central and Northern Missouri chapter of Catholic Charities will end its resettlement program March 31.

In an email to supporters, Executive Director Litz Main said the nonprofit had to end the program due to the lack of federal funding.

“We deeply appreciate your partnership and shared commitment to serving those in need,” Main said in the email. “As we navigate this transition, we welcome opportunities to collaborate in new ways to continue supporting refugee families in our region.”

The cuts come from a federal level, after President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and halted all funding for agencies that support refugees. Although the executive order was blocked by a federal judge in February, local resettlement programs still face a lack of federal funds. There is no indication when the program will resume, and the case is expected to face an appeal from the Trump administration.

Media coverage of this Missouri issue appears to be limited to simply repeating the wording of a press release from Catholic Charities, which oddly makes no mention of any specific amount Catholic Charities will lose from the discountinued federal funding. The question I've aksed in my earlier post linked above is why the specific amounts given to individual Catholic Charities refugee programs in cities like Fort Worth and Louisville alone are in the hundreds of millions, when "official" estimates of total federal grants to the US Bishops are only about $100 million.

The Missouri Catholic Charities press release repeated without any question by local media concludes,

City of Refuge, a refugee-focused nonprofit in Columbia, said in an email to its supporters Tuesday that one of the largest federal grants it receives will no longer be given to nonprofits. The funding will end Sept. 30. City of Refuge was not available for comment.

However, City of Refuge sent an e-amil to supporters that said,

Meanwhile, I received communication over the weekend that one of our largest federal grants can no longer be allocated to non-profit organizations (you can read the policy letter here). The good news is that we have a little bit of time – we aren’t losing the funding today. The bad news is that the deficit amounts to that $50,000/month I forewarned you about.

$50,000 a month amounts to $600,000 a year. How this relates to any total amount of funding from the federal government to the Central and Northern Missouri chapter of Catholic Charities is impossible to say, but $600,000 a year alone is probably eaten up by salaries and administrative costs of staff. Whatever crisis the interrulption of federal funds to Catholic Charities is causing, it seems to me that the bishops need to be more transparent and accountable on how this money has been spent.

In addition, the USCCB page on Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration and the Movement of Peoples makes the point:

Because there seems to be no end to poverty, war, and misery in the world, developed nations will continue to experience pressure from many peoples who desire to resettle in their lands. Catholic social teaching is realistic: While people have the right to move, no country has the duty to receive so many immigrants that its social and economic life are jeopardized.

For this reason, Catholics should not view the work of the federal government and its immigration control as negative or evil. Those who work to enforce our nation's immigration laws often do so out of a sense of loyalty to the common good and compassion for poor people seeking a better life. In an ideal world, there would be no need for immigration control. The Church recognizes that this ideal world has not yet been achieved.

There can be little question that the social and economic lives of many Western countries, including the US, have been jeapordized by the current waves of migration. The 2024 US presidential election was decided n large part on this particular question. A difficulty I see is that up to now, Catholic Charities has enabled levels of resettlement in relatively small communities like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA that seriously impact their social and economic life.

In addition, the USCCB page on Catholic social teaching says, "Undocumented persons are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by employers, and they are not able to complain because of the fear of discovery and deportation." Yet numerous examples of Catholic Charities resettlement programs show that these enable sweatshop employers and slumlords by promoting an overall resettlement "package" that includes exploitive working conditions and substandard housing.

Leaving aside the fear of discovery and deportation, the migrants are also kept in such conditions by the fact that they don't speak English, aren't familiar with US life, are unemployable without detailed translation and transportation services, and can't easily leave their enclaves to seek out other opportunities. Isn't Catholic Charities enabling this situation by cooperating with the slumlords by paying the migrants' rent and the sweatshop employers by effectively endorsing the labor contractors and, at least in some cases, subsidizing the sweatshop wages?

In fact, it's hard to avoid thinking that Catholic Charities has found a highly profitable niche enabling programs that promote levels of migration that are unsustainable because they in fact jeapodize US economic and social life, while at the same time tacitly endorsing the explolitation of these same migrants. At some point, the US bishops are going to have to confront this and deal with it.

Somebody Finally Noticed

DOJ charges 3 suspects in separate Molotov attacks on Tesla properties—each facing up to 20 YEARS in prison.

- Elias Marquez – Salem, OR
- Jordan Weller – Loveland, CO
- Darnell Brooks – Charleston, SC pic.twitter.com/aXKHCrW8zC

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 20, 2025

David Strom at Hot Air posted Trans Violence Is a Real Thing, and It Is Out of Control this morning, and he embedded the post above that lists three trans-identifying people who've been charged by the Department of Justice for arson against Tesla dealerships.

Transgender people make up a TINY fraction of the population, even with the explosion in self-identity and trans propaganda. Several of the recent school shooters have been trans, for instance, and more relevantly to today's issues the Tesla terrorism includes a large number of trans activists for some reason.

Actually, the three charged by the DOJ aren't the only ones. An instagram post from February 26 discusses a Colorado man identifying as a woman, Lucy Grace Nelson, whom police say repeatedly vandalized and set fire to a Tesla dealership. I found this when I did a web search on "trans arsonist", but that was just one instance among others. In 2023,

An arson attack that destroyed a 117-year-old church in downtown Portland, Oregon, this week has become a symbol of disorder in the city.

Cameron David Storer, a trans woman also known as “Nicolette Fait,” was arrested following an investigation by the Portland Fire & Rescue Fire Investigations Unit. The 27-year-old is charged with two counts of first-degree arson, one count of second-degree arson, and two counts of second-degree burglary — all felonies.

According to prosecutors, Storer walked into the Multnomah County Detention Center and confessed to setting the church on fire using a lighter.

“Storer stated that they heard voices in their head saying they would ‘mutilate’ Storer if they did not burn the church down and that they had planned it up to one day in advance,” said the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office in a press release. Storer allegedly told investigators she was taking oxycodone and had a history of mental illness.

In a 2019 episode,

A transgender man and gay rights activist in Michigan once named “Citizen of the Year” by a local newspaper is now accused of intentionally burning down his house two years ago, killing his two dogs and three cats.

Nikki Joly, 54, was named by the Jackson City Patriot last year as the conservative town’s top citizen after organizing its first gay community center and gay pride festival. He also helped pass an ordinance that prohibits discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing and public facilities after nearly two decades of failed attempts, the Detroit News reports.

. . . Two people who worked with Joly at St. Johns United Church of Christ told police that he had been frustrated that the Jackson Pride Parade and Festival didn’t attract more protests or generate more attention for gay rights.

. . . The case has drawn comparisons to the case of actor Jussie Smollett, who has been charged with disorderly conduct for falsely reporting a racist attack in Chicago. Still, some of Joly’s supporters said they will never believe he set the blaze.

“There’s no path for me to believe it could ever be true,” said Elody Samuelson, a bisexual woman who raised money for Joly after the blaze. “There’s no way he did it — not a bit, not a chance.”

It's hard to avoid thinking there are mental issues in play here, but it seems as though the mental health establishment will be the last to acknowledge this could be the case:

An Oregon mental health advisory board includes a member who identifies as turtle.

JD Holt, who goes by the name JD Terrapin on Facebook, advises Oregon’s Health Authority Council (OHA) on best practices and policies in mental health.

Holt allegedly identifies as a terrapin and uses “they, them and turtle” for her pronouns.

Despite this glaring defect, Holt is one of roughly two dozen consumer experts on the OHA panel, where she helps advise the state on mental health services.

Then there's the case of Jorden Matthew Dykes, AKA Yarden Silveira. His aunt

described Yarden as both loving and quick to anger, with a tendency to speak or act impulsively. He struggled socially, seldom making friends. He preferred instead to absorb himself in “special interests,” a behavior typical of children on the autism spectrum. At 13, he came out as gay on Facebook, triggering conflict with paternal relatives who had conservative religious views. His mother’s side, however, embraced him.

Two years later, at 15, Yarden told his mother that he was transgender. He believed that he had a “female brain”—the still-prevalent but scientifically flawed notion that transgender-identifying individuals’ brains resemble those of the opposite sex.

By 16, Yarden had socially transitioned. He began using the name Emily, adopted female pronouns, grew out his hair, and wore feminine attire. It was 2014—the year of the “transgender tipping point.” Public awareness of trans issues was surging, and the number of children identifying as transgender spiked.

. . . At 18, Yarden was preparing for the next step in his transition: a penile-inversion vaginoplasty, in which an otherwise healthy penis is surgically dissected, with its tissue rearranged to construct a facsimile of a vagina. He underwent the procedure shortly after his nineteenth birthday, in early 2017, at Align Surgical Associates in San Francisco.

The surgery marked the beginning of a downward spiral. Soon afterward, he was back in the hospital with severe complications, including excessive blood loss that required a transfusion. According to medical records, Yarden developed necrosis of the “vaginal” tissue. Over 2017, he was hospitalized repeatedly to undergo corrective surgeries, including stomach-tissue grafts, in which sections of tissue from his abdomen were transplanted to replace the lost tissue.

. . . Between the ages of 19 and 21, Yarden also underwent breast augmentation and facial feminization surgery—both, like his genital surgery, deemed “medically necessary” and covered by Medi-Cal, California’s publicly funded insurance program. He pinned his hopes on each successive procedure, hoping it would bring him the happiness that had eluded him. “[I]f this one surgery is a massive success,” he wrote in 2019, “then I wouldn’t have wasted so many years of my life for nothing.”

Ultimately, he decided to detransition.

“It isn’t possible to biologically transition from one sex to another, which really smacked me in the face when that reality became clear to me,” he wrote. He felt that he had been “lied to” from the start.

Yarden seemed to recognize that his autism may have influenced his decision to transition. “Maybe if I didn’t have autism, maybe if my brain wasn’t so defective, I would have caught on before it was too late,” he wrote.

Autism is increasingly prevalent among those who identify as transgender. Research links autism to higher rates of same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity—to behaviors, preferences, and traits atypical for one’s sex.

The problem here is that "autism" as it's generally understood is a meaningless term. Whether one disagrees with President Trump or Secretary Kennedy on the increase in autism diagnosis, medical professionals themselves seem unable to discuss the issue with any rigor:

[Dr. Jeremy] Veenstra-VanderWeele[, division director in child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University,] said the change in the criteria is another reason why the number of those diagnosed with autism rose. He likened it to changing the definition of what it means to be tall.

"To just use a crude example, if you would define somebody as tall if they were over six-foot-six, and then 30 years later, say that somebody is tall if they're over five-foot-10, you'd get very, very different numbers, and that's part of what's happened here," he said.

But what you've also done is made the word "tall" meaningless.

There can be little question that Jorden Matthew Dykes, whatever his condition, should never have been considered for transition. Whether or not he had autism, he was just plain unstable. As it happened,

On May 20, 2021, Yarden died in New York. The medical examiner listed “unknown circumstances” on his death certificate.

. . . [His] mother believes that he ended his own life. He had been open about suicidal thoughts. She also acknowledges that complications from his surgical issues might have played a role. Yarden described his worsening condition in graphic detail—a significant blockage caused by scar tissue and an exposed colon, which he feared could be life-threatening. Either way, his physical and mental suffering were inextricably bound together.

We need to start a serious discussion about gender transition and mental healtb, although clearly this is only part of a much bigger discussion that needs to take place. Maybe Secretary Kennedy can have some sort of positive influence here.

Amtrak CEO Abruptly Resigns

Via CNN:

Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner is stepping down from his position to “to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration,” he announced in a statement.

The decision comes as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk said he believes the US Postal Service and Amtrak need to be privatized.

There's little other information on the circumstances, except that most outlets quote from Elon Musk's recent remarks:

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom conference, Musk said it was “kind of embarrassing” that other countries, such as China, have superior passenger rail.

“Amtrak is a sad situation,” Musk said, according to CNN Business, which first reported his remarks.

“It’s like, if you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America,” Musk said.

This is actually quite true, alth0ough I'm not sure where Musk learned this -- it couldn't have been from first-hand experience, because he flies by private jet. But there's a sort of sub-sub genre on YouTube where the presenters get on an Amtrak train and liveblog their journeys. Their economic model is naturally to maximize their viewership, and that means putting Amtrak in the best light possible and making their train rides look like desirable experiences.

The problem is that as often as not, they get on the train, and a bunch of things happen -- the train is stopped in the middle of nowhere, federal agents get on, and the train stays there for several hours as they hunt for a fugitive. The train hits a car at a crossing, and it stays there for several hours pending medical attention, police investigation, and mechanical inspection. The train stops and stays there for several hours, reason never explained.

Any number of things can happen that make the train nine to 12 hours late, with the result that the YouTuber expected to be at his destination at 2 PM, but the train finally pulls in at 2 AM, having long since run out of food in the dining car, toilets jammed up, heat off, and so forth. The YouTuber understands that if this is all people see of Amtrak, they won't want to watch his liveblogged train trips, much less actually ride on an Amtrak train, and he struggles like crazy to make the whole debacle seem like a positive experience.

The video embedded at the top of this post is an example of this dilemma. A charming couple, Allie and Rob, somehow have made a career out of riding long-distance Amtrak trains and going on cruises, and they somehow finance this lifestyle by posting YouTube videos liveblogging their trips and cruises. They have to walk a fine line between accurately portraying the Amtrak experience while making the Amtrak lifestyle seem attractive enough that people will want to watch their videos. They start,

ALLIE: Alright, guys, you know that we travel a lot on Amtrak trains, we have a lot of experience under our belts, and you know, it isn't all rainbows and unicorns, is it?

ROB: No, there are some issues that we run into from time to time, sometimes every time, so we want to break those down for you today so you'll have a better underwstanding of exactly what you'll be facing as you ride on Amtrak.

First, as they put it, "other passengers on the train". This has to do in part with Amtrak's dual business model. In coach, it competes with Greyhound for the lowest-tier travel market, with the complication that while Greyhound doesn't have snack bars that sell liquor on its buses, Amtrak has snack bars that sell liquor on its trains, with inevitable results. On the other hand, the sleeping car market is largely retirees on leisure travel, a whole different group with its own issues.

Trains can stop for hours in the middle of nowhere to put off a drunk or drug-addled passenger, or they can stop for hours in the middle of nowhere to transfer a retiree with a medical emergency to an ambulance. And as Rob and Allie point out, you simply don't know the criminal history of anyone on a train, and that can be a definite issue. In an episode of On Patrol: Live, the Fullerton, CA police department was called to help remove a disruptive passenger from an Amtrak train, but in the following week's show, it turned out that the guy had elected to stay around town after being thrown off the train, and they had to deal with him again.

Another point Rob and Allie raise is that you can't ever count on any train being on time, and they aren't talking about 20 or 30 minutes, they're talking about many hours. They frequently warn Amtrak novices not to book plane tickets that depart the same day as their arrival date on Amtrak, because the train will almost certainly arrive too late for them to make it to the airport in time for their flight -- always book a hotel to stay overnight before flying out, but even that may not be enough.

Another point is that the equipment is old, dirty, and poorly maintained. The sleeping cars are sold for leisure travel where the passengers want to see the scenery, but the windows aren't washed. They make the point that this is where the Greyhound market runs up against the leisure travel market, and the leisure travel market suffers.

Another point is the wild discrepancies among staff attitudes -- there are highly motivated servers and car attendants, while others simply don't want to be there. Somehow, training and supervision are missing. And finally, the food has gotten worse.

I'm with Musk. I have a sense that nobody at Amtrak ever bothers to watch the YouTubers who express their frustrations and often make constructive suggestions. I don't know if Mr Gardner was pressured to leave, or if, as in an episode Rob and Allie recount, he simply quit and got off the train in the middle of Nebraska like a dining car server on one of their trips -- I kinda think it was the latter. Firing the CEO won't help a thing. They need to rethink the whole business and start over, or maybe just concede the market to Greyhound. But Musk sees the problem, and that's a good start.

UPDATE: From Reuters:

A White House official told Reuters Gardner had been asked to step down. An Amtrak spokesperson declined to comment on whether he had been asked to leave.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement that Amtrak needs to address safety concerns at Washington's Union Station.

"It’s time for Amtrak leadership to clean up Union Station," he said. "It’s time to rid our nation's treasures of homelessness and crime. Commuters and travelers need to feel safe in our capital."

It sounds as though nobody in the White House would ride an Amtrak long-distance train, but apparently just looking at Union Station, a few blocks away, told them what they needed to know.