For four years, I’ve reported about how a large, organized constellation of United Nations agencies partnered with hundreds of private nonprofit groups to direct billions of mostly US-taxpayer dollars into supporting historic illegal southern border crossing levels during President Joe Biden’s term in office.
Even for the new Trump administration, this conglomerate of 15 UN agencies and 230 NGOs was proposing to spend yet another $1.4 billion on the migration trail in 2025, $1.2 billion more for 2026. That’s in addition to the more than $6 billion from 2020-2024 during the greatest mass migration event in American history. Separately, hundreds of millions more went through NGOs to migrants arriving on the US side for their soft landing resettlements.
But now it looks like little to none of that funding will come from US taxpayers going forward. New Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday issued an “exclusive announcement” to Fox News’ Will Cain that Trump has turned off that firehose.
“We have stopped all grant funding that’s being abused by NGOs to facilitate illegal immigration into this country,” Noem said. “I’ve taken action to stop those funds, to re-evaluate them and to make sure that we’re actually using taxpayer dollars in a way that strengthens this country, to keep people safe.
“We’re not spending another dime to help the destruction of this country.”
This highly consequential sea change is guaranteed to finally bring about a badly needed national policy debate about migration. It’s one that Democrats have worked with their UN, NGO and US media brethren to squelch throughout Biden’s term in office.
An executive order may be en route with details. Those are badly needed because Noem didn’t say if the cash halt covers the 15 UN agencies working on the trails too, doing the same work as the NGOs and passing through to them some of that US cash — most of which originates as grants from the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development.
However expansive it turns out to be, Noem’s new move comes far too long after I became the first to report in 2021 the UN-NGO organization was distributing cash debit cards at a camp in Reynosa, Mexico. I’d stumbled upon lines of migrant recipients lines of migrant recipients of the cards, my Tweets and later investigation of this going viral.
I went on to exclusively report on the conglomerate’s other US-funded activities for years more, but NGO-UN allies in the Democratic Party thwarted several Republican efforts to cut the money off.
The enterprise’s kingpins, I frequently reported, were the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), both of which receive billions annually from the United States, the majority of their budgets. The UN money cannot go unaddressed if the Trump administration is serious about ending US taxpayer support for the nation’s mass migration crises.
On the ground, I often personally observed this mammoth, powerful UN cartel dish out cash cards, food, camping supplies and legal advice. I once discovered two Jesuit-run NGOs in southern Mexico offering psychologists who would help economic migrants denied asylum dig up their “repressed memories” of more eligible “government persecution.”
On an August 2024 reporting trip to Colombia and Panama, I observed farmer’s markets of NGO and UN agency storefronts near bus stops, smuggling boats and staging areas at the Darien Gap passage to Panama. Every worker there knew they were aiding and abetting illegal smuggler activity to help migrants illegally enter Panama. In Colombia, none could possibly operate without the express approval of the Clan del Golfo cartel, a vicious cocaine-smuggling paramilitary that ran the region with an iron fist.
I asked a worker manning the booth of the Jewish-affiliated NGO Cadena in the northwestern Colombian town of Necoli — a staging area for smuggler journeys through the Darien Gap in Panama — about her take on US concerns that NGOs like hers helped migrants break laws by handing out food and gear to migrants. “As an organization,” she responded, “we’re not here to judge. We’re just here to provide a service.”
Americans can expect much pushback from religious organizations whose NGOs on both sides of the US border are bloated by record-smashing cash flows padding executive salaries and endowment accounts. Some 38 of the 230 groups working with the UN south of the border had a religious affiliation, according to the UN-NGO partnership group’s latest budget plan. And the Catholic Church’s NGOs are particularly well represented on both sides of the border.
No doubt the US Conference of Bishops picked a fight with the wrong parishioner recently, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is proud of his late-in-life conversion to Catholicism, for the administration’s immigration policies. When an interviewer asked Vance about the conference’s condemnation, he said he was “heartbroken by that statement” but fired all guns.
“I think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Ouch. Vance’s estimate was actually low, but his suggestion that a crass profit motivation was behind the conference’s morality stance holds up.
Americans should remember the historic-sized cash flows when next they hear organized religious leaders fight for funding restoration on grounds that blocking it was ungodly. Law enforcement investigations of illegal abuses and ending future UN funding would reflect a truer example of God’s work.
Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies
