The federal agency responsible for busing, sheltering and supporting the largely unauthorized immigrant population pouring across America’s borders spent nearly $20 billion over the last two years, according to a new report.
Most of that money was spent on sheltering and caring for immigrant children who are in the U.S. illegally, with other funds also going to help new arrivals from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti and other nations favored by President Biden’s immigration policies, according to OpenTheBooks.com.
It’s not just more people. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is expanding the type of assistance it offers to include helping migrants access loans, build credit or collect direct cash payments.
“Regular Americans are underwriting the generosity. And it’s the hardworking taxpayer who is feeling the strain as migrants are resettled in their neighborhoods across the country,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks. “Exploding expenditures on everything from resettlement to auto loans are further incentivizing a vicious cycle at our borders.”
He called the money a version of “financial self-harm.”
ORR’s work has been controversial for a decade, dating back to the Obama-era migrant surge in 2014, when immigrant children unaccompanied by a parent streamed in illegally. Under federal policy, those children are supposed to be quickly transferred from Homeland Security to ORR for placement in government-funded shelters while the government searches for sponsors to take them.
The children have taxed schools’ resources and in some cases have been used as child labor, in addition to other social ills. The children from the Obama surge, for example, helped fuel a revival of MS-13, the murderous immigrant-heavy gang, from Virginia to Massachusetts.
More recently, ORR has been at the forefront of efforts to resettle the massive number of migrants being paroled into the U.S. as pseudo-refugees. The administration says they deserve a chance to make claims of protection here, though they did not go through the formal refugee process.
ORR’s Refugee and Entrant Assistance Grants program spent just $33.4 million in 2021, according to the new watchdog report. By 2023, it rose to $615.6 million.
The program funds medical screenings and help with emergency housing, applying for work permits or public assistance, and referrals for legal help or mental health care.
ORR’s overall funding was $8.9 billion in fiscal year 2022, and $10.9 billion in 2023. That included billions in emergency infusions as the migrant crisis worsened.
The dollars coincide with a massive workload increase.
In 2022, ORR counted more than 470,000 new arrivals eligible for some sort of assistance from the agency. In 2020, the last full year under President Trump, that number was less than 80,000, according to OpenTheBooks.
Some of the increase is deliberate. The Biden administration increased the annual cap for official refugees from 18,000 in 2020 to 125,000 now. The number of unaccompanied juvenile migrants also exploded, from about 15,000 in 2020 to 113,495 in fiscal year 2023 — the result of more welcoming Biden policies.
Mr. Biden is now before Congress asking for more money for ORR in his national security supplemental spending bill. Congressional Republicans are resisting that money, demanding it be coupled with major changes to border policy that might reduce the flow of people.
OpenTheBooks said a large chunk of the agency’s spending has gone to the International Rescue Committee, which is where Robin Dunn Marcos, the current head of ORR, spent more than 20 years.
The IRC received more than $235 million in grants from ORR in 2023. That’s up from $138 million in 2022, and less than $23 million in 2021.
OpenTheBooks said it filed an open-records request last May for Ms. Dunn Marcos’ emails with her former employer, but the agency has yet to respond.
The watchdog said ORR, in a statement, said Ms. Dunn Marcos is recused from decisions involving the IRC. The recusal lasts four years from her start as agency director in September 2022.
Mr. Andrzejewski said there’s still “at least an appearance of conflict” in having Ms. Dunn Marcos oversee so much money going to her former employer.
“Under the Biden administration, the mandate and spending are growing in ways that must be satisfying for aid groups but are costly to the taxpayer,” he said.