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.