reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
Chairman Perry and members of the caucus, I thank you for inviting me to discuss what I describe as the most historic mass migration crisis ever to strike The United States. What has happened at the Southern border is history-making in scope with long-lasting second, third, and fourth order implications for American citizens. The mass migration that began around inauguration day 2021 calls for a broader public discussion about what it is and how it works. During its first year and now into its second, I interviewed hundreds of immigrants, most recently on an eight-day fact-finding journey to Tapachula, on the Guatemala–Mexico border.
From my vantage point, there is one root cause most often cited by the immigrating foreign nationals for coming now: that President Joe Biden opened the American southern border wide to them. They see on social media, from hundreds of thousands who have gone before, secure quick releases and resettlement into America—the ultimate golden chalice—and they decide to gamble large smuggling 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 a national record of nearly 2,000,000 border patrol apprehensions in a single year with probably 500,000 more gotaways, an undercount.
The caucus should know that nonprofit advocacy groups and, more notably, the United Nations appear to be working alongside the criminal smuggling organizations on the same mission. United Nations agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are providing hard cash, food, shelter, legal services, and psychological services along the migrant trails, which also materially facilitate journeys that everyone involved knows lead to illegal American border crossings. In various forms, the UN and the nonprofits it funds contribute to the current mass migration crisis. I found a UNHCR stamp booklet discarded on the Rio Grande riverbank on the Mexican side, and I observed handout cash debit cards to migrants in long lines.
Workers reported that they give $400 every fifteen days to families of four, renewable every two weeks. The UN tells me only the most vulnerable receive this cash, yet in Reynosa and Tapachula, long lines at UNHCR offices revealed regular family units, many with debit cards, who said they might have to leave the migrant trail and go home without this money. The cards are part of a vast and escalating UN program called cash-based interventions along the migrant trail through Latin America, including unrestricted, unconditionally usable plastic cash cards, cash-filled envelopes in some areas, money transfers for lodging and pharmaceutical prescriptions, and something called movement assistance—transportation money to move forward when camps empty and reform further north. Credible reporting shows the UN is providing these forms of assistance along the 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 per migrant per day. Non-cash assistance keeps migrants on the US trail; in Tapachula, Mexican asylum approval is important for permission to move legally beyond the southern provinces toward the US border. But many coming from Guatemala tell Mexican immigration they are seeking US jobs, which is not an eligible asylum claim, so they are denied.
I did learn of a UN-funded migrant advocacy center where a full-time staff of certified psychologists helps migrants recover repressed memories of more eligible persecution. This manager said his group also trains migrants on how to pass muster with Mexican asylum interviewers the first time around, producing a 90% success rate for thousands a year. Other UN-funded psychologists offer similar work.
If true, the UNHCR in Mexico has found another way to keep thousands more on the trail toward the American border. Some will defend this UN assistance as lifesaving; others will view it differently, and they will want to know more. 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 each year. Thank you.
I note that the border is a national security concern. Recently, I reported a Venezuelan crossing the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, and the FBI-wanted individual held in ICE headquarters here in Washington, D.C. intervened and demanded he be ordered released because he might get COVID in detention. He is now living freely pursuing an asylum claim in Detroit. Thank you.