Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis

[Brian4Liberty]

Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis
Federal funding has turned the business of resettling migrant children into a goldmine for a handful of NGOs—and their top executives.
By Madeleine Rowley - May 12, 2024

While the border crisis has become a major liability for President Biden, threatening his reelection chances, it’s become a huge boon to a group of nonprofits getting rich off government contracts.

Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.

And with the recent massive influx of unaccompanied children—a record 130,000 in 2022, the last year for which there are official stats—the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs.

“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “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: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. 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. 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.

Consider Global Refuge, based in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2018, according to its federal disclosure form, the Baltimore-based nonprofit had $50 million in revenue. By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million—$180 million of which came from the government.
...
Now Global Refuge employs over 550 people nationwide, and CEO Vignarajah said in January that the nonprofit plans to expand to at least 700 staffers by the end of 2024.

Vignarajah, a former policy director for Michelle Obama when she was first lady, took the top job at Global Refuge in February 2019 after she lost her bid to be elected governor of Maryland. She has since become one of the most prominent advocates for migrants crossing the southern border, appearing frequently on MSNBC and other media as an immigration advocate. Her incoming salary was $244,000, but just three years later, her compensation more than doubled to $520,000.

In 2019, Global Refuge housed 2,591 unaccompanied children while spending $30 million. Three years later, the NGO reported that it housed 1,443 unaccompanied children at a cost of $82.5 million—almost half the number of migrants for more than double the money [Inflation? - B4L].
...
The man with the $1 million salary is Dr. Anselmo Villarreal, who became CEO of Southwest Key Programs, headquartered in Austin, Texas, in 2021. (Villarreal took a drop in pay compared to his predecessor, Southwest Key founder Juan Sanchez, who paid himself an eye-popping $3.5 million in 2018.)

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, Southwest Key continues to operate—and rake in big government checks. In 2020, the year of Covid-19, its government grant was $391 million; by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.

Southwest Key’s federal disclosure forms show that in 2022, six executives in addition to Villarreal made more than $400,000, including its chief strategist ($800,000), its head of operations ($700,000) and its top HR executive ($535,000). Its total payroll in 2022 was $465 million.

Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, is run by Chip Fulghum. Formerly the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, he signed on as Endeavors’ chief operating officer in 2019 and was promoted to CEO this year.

In 2022, Fulghum was paid almost $600,000, while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.

Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border.
...
More: https://www.thefp.com/p/nonprofits-make-billions-off-migrant-children

 

[PAF]

This is exactly why border walls will not work, and never will work.

The only solution is to cut off funding, while defending and protecting the Bill of Rights and the freedom to travel freely.

The federal government is creating this chaos, using humans beings as pawns for profit [them and us], so that people scream for more government "solutions", ie Police State.

Otherwise, keep spending, building, and more spending, with no end in sight.


And for Trump to preach his border wall spending mountains of tax payer dollars for it, and not address the very root of the problem, he is neither a fiscal conservative nor an advocate of freedom. It is always the costliest and draconian solutions that seem to be embraced.

 

[WarriorLiberty]

The only solution is to cut off funding.

Exactly, cutting off the funding of those "NGOs" this is what other countries are doing to such NGO organizations and groups.
You have go to the source of the problem..

 

[Two.L]

And if the funding is private?

 

[acptulsa]

And if the funding is private?

These criminals are way past doing it on their own dime. They're tapped into the old Fed printing press. They're going to run that thing until they break it.

 

[PAF]

I was afraid this thread would end up at the bottom of the heap - low view count and number of comments.

Typical mentality:

1. Now that you have only just caught on that fed.gov is responsible for funding all of this: a) there is nothing that we can do about it. b) they must have good reason. [Throws hands in air.]

2. Now that folks are on to the realization that armed-to-the-teeth military trained to SHOOT-TO-KILL-ON-SIGHT won't solve the problem, nobody is interested anymore.

3. Now that folks are on to the realization that a Wall won't fix the problem [Ron was right yet again], let's forget about this and move on to something else that we can spend globs and globs of money on.

4. DHS, NGO's, well, that's the way our system of government works, so, who cares now.