Border NGOs raking in 'obscene' amount of taxpayer cash

FPI / May 15, 2024

Endeavors is a non-governmental organization (NGO) which gets nearly 100 percent of its funding from the U.S. government to assist illegal immigrant children.

Here is some of what the millions in taxpayer dollars are being used for at Endeavors as reported on May 12 by The Free Press:

Classes in “pet therapy,” “horticulture therapy,” and “music therapy.” In 2021 alone, Endeavors paid Christy Merrell, a "music therapist," $533,000.

An internal Endeavors PowerPoint obtained by America First Legal, an outfit founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, showed that Endeavors between April 2021 and March 2023 conducted 1,656 “people-plant interactions” and 287 pet therapy sessions.

Endeavors’ 2022 federal disclosure form also shows that it paid $5 million to a company to provide fill-in doctors and nurses, $4.6 million for “consulting services,” $1.4 million to attend conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. In 2021, the NGO shelled out $8 million to hotel management company Esperanto Developments to house migrants in their hotels.

Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government, a staggering $1.3 billion, is by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the U.S. southern border.

The amount of Americans' taxpayer money these NGOs are getting "is obscene," said Charles Marino, former adviser to Obama HHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”

The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited from Joe Biden's open borders policies: Endeavors, Global Refuge, and Southwest Key.

"These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available," Madeleine Rowley wrote for The Free Press. "And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million."

In 2018, Baltimore-based Global Refuge had $50 million in revenue, according to its federal disclosure form. By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million — $180 million of which came from the Biden administration. Global Refuges in 2022 spent $82 million on housing unaccompanied children. It also granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children.

Southwest Key in 2020, the year of Covid-19, received $391 million from the feds. By 2022, that number rose to nearly $790 million despite a number of scandals in the recent past, including misuse of federal funds and several instances of employees sexually abusing some of the children in its care, Rowley wrote for The Free Press.

Tara Rodas, a government employee who was temporarily detailed to work at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake shelter in 2021, told The Free Press she uncovered evidence of fraud within the sponsorship system. “Most of the sponsors have no legal presence in the U.S. I don’t know if I saw one U.S. ID,” said Rodas. “There were no criminal investigators at the site, and there was no access to see if sponsors had committed crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.”

Deborah White, another federal employee temporarily detailed to the Pomona Fairplex facility in 2021, told The Free Press: “Ultimately, the responsibility is on the government. But the oversight is obviously not adequate—from the contracting to the care of the children to the vetting

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