U.S. Border Patrol agents prepare to transport immigrants for processing next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence on January 19, 2025, near Sasabe, Arizona.
By John Cassara
Actions facilitating illegal immigration are committed with ‘full knowledge and deliberate consent,’ and they are even more egregious when the facilitator financially benefits.
The first piece of legislation that President Trump signed into law is the Laken Riley Act. This law mandates the federal detention of illegal immigrants accused of serious crime. The legislation is named after a Georgia nursing student who was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by a Venezuelan illegal alien who was previously arrested and paroled into the United States during the Biden administration’s “open border” policies.
It is well-documented that illegal immigration is responsible for various forms of human suffering and degradation. Murder, gang violence, human trafficking, sex trafficking, narcotics trafficking, theft, terrorism, organized crime, torture, rape, assault, kidnapping, corruption, money laundering, various forms of fraud, and environmental crime all result from illegal immigration.
Statistics are sterile. Like Laken Riley, each victim has a story. Loved ones are devastated. There are countless heinous and barbaric crimes linked to illegal immigration perpetrated against individuals, families, and communities. Some involve horrendous suffering, torture, and the loss of life.
Crimes against children are particularly abhorrent. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report that the Biden-Harris administration lost track of approximately 300,000 migrant children. Unfortunately, many of these children are undoubtedly trafficked, victims of sexual abuse, and/or are engaged in abusive child labor.
I previously wrote an article for Crisis Magazine discussing illegal immigration and the Catholic Church. I explained that from an investigator’s standpoint the key to solving criminal activity based on greed is to determine who benefits from the crime. In other words, follow the money.
During the Biden years, the U.S. Catholic Church accelerated its entanglement in the “illegal immigration complex.” Various Catholic charities and organizations facilitate the illegal immigration pipeline by providing food, clothing, shelter, transportation, legal services, counseling, and so on.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the charities and organizations it supports promote facilitating illegal immigration as “acts of mercy.”
Perhaps. But there is another way of looking at it. Let’s use an analogy.
The Catholic Church teaches that it is a mortal sin to facilitate a mortal sin. For example, if someone knowingly and willfully assists in facilitating an abortion by providing counseling, shelter, or driving the mother to an abortion clinic, the enabler is guilty of sin. The sin is even more egregious if the facilitator financially benefits. It is blood money.
Similar to the driver who committed a mortal sin by taking the expectant mother to an abortion clinic, the Church’s actions facilitating illegal immigration are committed with “full knowledge and deliberate consent.”
Making the matter even worse, the Church is accepting billions in what could reasonably be labeled blood money.
According to recent numbers obtained from Complicit Clergy, the Biden administration granted Catholic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charities nearly $3 billion in immigration-related funding over the past four years. In comparison, Catholic charities received $0.8 billion during the first Trump administration. Since 2009, Catholic Charities and related organizations have received over $5.2 billion tax dollars by providing immigration-related services to the federal government.
The total numbers are undoubtedly much higher. The above only includes money that is clearly earmarked for immigration. For organizations that are not subject to meaningful audits and oversight, money can be moved to and from other programs. The total also does not include money received from state and local sources. And the study only focused on entities that had “Catholic” as an identifier.
Is this blood money? Is the Church responsible?
We deserve straightforward answers. Unfortunately, there is a lack of transparency. We lack specifics about the assistance. This is partially by design. My area of expertise is anti-money laundering. The flow of money to Catholic Charities has many of the elements of the second stage of money laundering which is called “layering” or obfuscating the money trail.
The Biden administration funneling billions of taxpayer money to NGOs to facilitate their open border policies was done for two reasons: 1.) The federal agencies involved did not have the capacity to provide the logistics necessary for such a massive influx of people. 2.) Primarily because of issues of venue, jurisdiction, and NGO non-accountability, the federal money flow was not transparent. I believe it was intentional. The taxpayer money was effectively laundered in order to advance the Biden administration’s open border policies.
Apologists for the Church claim that the illegal immigrants have been “vetted”; they claim it is the government’s responsibility to approve who enters into the country. Once the aliens are admitted, the Church assumes that it has a green light to provide assistance.
That argument is fallacious. Some Catholic NGOs and nonprofits have been accused of assisting in the entry of the illegals. Regarding vetting, I have experience tracing and obtaining foreign national record checks. Simply put, it is impossible to effectively vet over 10 million illegal immigrants, many from failed and/or uncooperative states. Simply put, during the Biden administration, government and NGO due diligence did not happen.
Catholic Charities’ and the USCCB’s position is that they would never knowingly help a criminal alien. That position is also spurious for two reasons.
1.) By definition, illegal aliens are illegal. Every single illegal migrant has broken U.S. immigration law. They are all criminals. Similar to being a “cafeteria Catholic” or picking and choosing what Church teaching is valid, the Church cannot pick and choose what federal law is valid or decide who is a criminal and who is not.
2.) Approximately fifteen million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. under the Biden administration’s open border policies. Approximately 700,000 had criminal records before they even entered the country. Some are known murderers and rapists. Additional illegal immigrants were released from mental institutions and sent into the United States. Individuals on the terror watch list were admitted into the homeland. Chinese nationals of military age who are subservient to the CCP and possibly trained in forms of asymmetric warfare have flooded the country. Outside of Latinos, more Chinese have entered the country than any other ethnic group. There are also large numbers of illegals who committed horrendous crimes (human trafficking, smuggling, sexual predation, etc.) during the migration pipeline. Unknown numbers have committed crimes while in the United States. Many are recruited into criminal gangs. In other words, well over a million and probably many more have been involved with serious criminal and anti-American activity in addition to breaking immigration law. Rules of statistics and probability dictate with certainty that many of these criminal aliens were aided and abetted by Catholic Charities.
The Church has to know the above facts. Willful blindness is not a defense. In other words, there has been “full knowledge and deliberate consent.”
Contrary to what some claim, the illegal immigrants are not innocents. They made a freewill choice of bypassing the long legal pathway for a chance at expedited illegal entry. And as much as the media and the Church are going to emphasize the good that migrants do and put forward sob stories that play on our sympathy, from an enforcement perspective when one mixes illicit with licit the whole becomes tainted.
Similarly, the billions received by the U.S. Catholic Church and its NGOs and charities are also tainted. If nothing else, there is the appearance of impropriety. For example, is there a correlation between the $3 billion the Catholic Church received during the Biden presidency and the Catholic hierarchy refusing to criticize Biden and his policies that, according to George Weigel, could be “properly described, not simply as ‘un-Catholic’ but as anti-Catholic?”
Or is there any correlation between the $5 billion the Church has received from U.S. taxpayers to assist in illegal immigration and the $5 billion that Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the United States have spent in the past 20 years to settle the financial costs of the sex-abuse scandal?
Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic, looking at the financial record, said:
And so when the USCCB condemned Trump’s executive orders on immigration, did it have a pecuniary interest in doing so? … I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.
The Church does not need any more scandals. Nor does she need to jeopardize her direct funding from the laity. Many of us refuse to contribute to the USCCB and Catholic Charities because of the above issues. There are many other worthwhile and non-tainted charities that support the good work of the Church.
The USCCB should get ahead of this issue and end its involvement in the illegal immigration complex before President Trump does it for them.
Reprinted with permission from Crisis Magazine.
