reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
During the four years of the Biden administration, the United States directed significant taxpayer funds to facilitate illegal immigration. While much reporting has focused on the role of NGOs after migrants cross the border, the center examined what happened before migrants reached the Rio Grande, specifically how NGOs and UN agencies were paid by US taxpayers to facilitate illegal movement through South and Central America and Mexico. The center documented a large UN-NGO support network from field reporting and annual reports from the Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan. This network comprised way stations along Latin American migration routes that enabled millions of foreign nationals from as many as 180 countries to illegally reach the U.S. border, in part funded by US taxpayers. Some funds were provided directly to NGOs by the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) or USAID, while other funding was sent indirectly through UN agencies that then funded NGOs. This was often described as humanitarian assistance to people who would travel anyway, but the center states this amounted to coordinated, well-funded assistance designed to undermine US immigration laws.
Starting in South America and Central America, NGOs distributed millions of dollars’ worth of supplies intended to help recipients plan to illegally breach borders of the United States and several other countries along the way. In Northwestern Colombia, the center found NGOs working in coordination with the paramilitary drug-smuggling group Clan Del Golfo, also known as the Gaitanistas, which controlled the smuggling routes. Nekocli, a town in Northwest Colombia, is described as a major staging area for migrants aiming to cross at the Gulf of Urabá and then reach the jumping-off point for trips through the Darién Gap. The researchers visited Nekocli and observed what resembled a swap meet or farmer’s market of NGO and UN organizations providing assistance, with booths for various groups, including the Florida-based Cadena and the Silver Spring–based Adventist Development and Relief Agency, among others. They provided services such as guidance on navigating the Darién Gap, food, dry socks, backpacks, and more. After crossing the Gulf of Urabá in Colombia, migrants reach Akande, where the jumping-off point to the Darién Gap lies. There, the UN-backed camp provided security for the camp, reportedly by a drug-smuggling gang, though the center notes that it does not have direct evidence of this, it seems likely that NGOs and the UN paid for security through the drug-smuggling gang.
After crossing through Central America, migrants reach southern Mexico, entering via Guatemala into Southern Mexico, with Tapachula identified as the first large entry point. A large, one-stop-immigration-mall-like facility under construction there housed UN agencies and NGOs. Similar camps exist in northern Mexico as well. In Tapachula, an NGO funded by the UN (and thus by the United States) provided repressed memory therapy for illegal immigrants who had been rejected for asylum by Mexico, enabling them to obtain certificates acknowledging the persecution they had forgotten, which they then used to appeal and obtain asylum status. Throughout Latin America, these networks—funded in part by US taxpayers—facilitated the flow of illegal immigrants, but oversight has been lacking, and Congress has not acted to require recipients of funding not to promote illegal immigration.