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Chairman Perry and members of the caucus, I am here to discuss what I term the most historic mass migration crisis ever to strike The United States, noting that what has happened at the Southern border is history making in scope and will have long lasting second, third, and fourth order implications for American citizens. During its first year and now into its second, I have interviewed hundreds of immigrants, most recently on an eight day fact finding journey to the Guatemala–Mexico border city of Tapachula.
From my vantage point, there is but one root cause that the immigrating foreign nationals most often cite for coming now: that President Joe Biden opened the American southern border wide to them. They see over their cell phones, social media, hundreds of thousands who have gone before, secure quick releases and resettlement into America, the ultimate golden chalice, and they gamble huge smuggling fee investments that criminal smuggling gangs will get them in to stay too. With such an enticing return on smuggling investment, no thinking person should wonder why this global migration hit the all time national record of nearly 2,000,000 border patrol apprehensions in a single year with probably 500,000 more gotaways, and that’s an undercount.
But the caucus should also know that nonprofit advocacy groups and, more notably, the United Nations appear to be working side by side with the criminal smuggling organizations on the very same mission. United Nations agencies such as the International Office of Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are providing hard cash, food, shelter, legal services, psychological services along the migrant trails, which also materially facilitate journeys that everyone involved very well knows despite any protestations to the contrary always lead to an illegal American border crossing. In whatever small or large way the United Nations and the nonprofits it funnels money to can reasonably be said to contribute to the current mass migration crisis. I found my first clue on a Rio Grande riverbank on the Mexican side, a discarded UNHCR stamp booklet. Hand out cash debit cards to migrants in long snaking lines. The workers handing them out said they give $400 every fifteen days to families of four, renewable every two weeks. The UN tells me only the most vulnerable get this cash. But in Reynosa, and again most recently in Tapachula, Mexico, where I saw the same long lines at the UNHCR office, nothing about them indicated acute vulnerability. They were regular family units of the sort crossing by the tens of thousands right now. Some showed me their debit cards there too and said, were it not for this money, they might have to leave the migrant trail and go home.
Further inquiry showed the cards are just part of a vast and sharply escalating UN program called cash based interventions all along the migrant trail through Latin America. According to the UN documents and migrants, these include the unrestricted, unconditionally usable plastic cash cards, but also cash filled envelopes in some areas. Never a good look cash filled envelopes. Money transfers for lodging, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and something called movement assistance, which means transportation money to move forward when camps empty and reform further north. Credible reporting shows that the UN is providing these forms of assistance all along the migrant trail from South America to Texas.
On a Kakuta to Bogota Colombia segment, the UN was seen handing out food, clothing, and necessities worth an estimated 200 to $300 day per migrant. And then there’s important non-cash assistance keeping migrants on the US trail. In Tapachula, approval for Mexican asylum these days is important for permission to move legally beyond the southern provinces where I was, always to The US border, of course. But many coming in from Guatemala innocently tell Mexican immigration they’re going for US jobs, which is not an eligible asylum claim. So they get denied.
But I found a UN funded solution recently. The manager of a UN funded migrant advocacy center told me a full time staff of certified psychologists help these migrants recover repressed memories of more eligible government persecution. This manager told me in a recorded conversation that his group also trains migrants on the front end of the process how to pass muster with Mexican asylum interviewers the first time around. He said these operations produce a 90% success rate for thousands a year. Other UN funded psychologists offer what sounds like similar work.
If all this is true, the UNHCR in Mexico has found another way to keep thousands more on the trail over the American border. Many can and will defend this UN assistance as lifesaving, but others who learn of it reasonably interpret this in a very different way, and they wanna know more, of course. However, Americans wanna interpret this assistance to migrants, they undoubtedly know they are joining a historic mass migration. All Americans deserve to know the full extent of it because The United States is the UN’s largest donor, and the US Congress appropriates a huge amount of money to the UN every year.
I’ll also mention that the border is a national security concern. Just recently, I reported that a Venezuelan crossed the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville and that the FBI wanted that FBI watch listed individual held in that ICE headquarters here in Washington DC intervened and demanded that he be ordered that he be cut loose because he might get COVID in detention. That individual is now living freely pursuing an asylum claim in Detroit. Thank you. I thank the gentleman.