If Vice President Kamala Harris truly wishes to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration, she should look at the massive left-wing influence campaign I call the Woketopus.
The left’s vast dark money funding apparatus not only helped the anti-Israel protesters on college campuses but also bankrolled the pressure groups that helped set open-borders policy in the Biden-Harris administration.
Activist groups behind the scenes want to transform America into a ‘sanctuary country’ that puts legal immigrants at the back of the line.
A network of left-wing foundations — including the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundations, the nonprofits founded by Arabella Advisors, the Tides Foundation, and others — bankroll woke nonprofits that have deep ties to the administrative state. Bureaucrats go from government to these nonprofits and back, and these nonprofits often draft policies that agencies go on to implement.
At least three nonprofits helped shape policy at the Department of Homeland Security, aiming to transform the DHS’ mission. This transformation enabled at least 10 million illegal aliens to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Center for American Progress — which Politico dubbed “the most influential think tank of the Biden era” — urged a “reorientation of cultural norms at DHS.”
The CAP called for the DHS to shift “toward a more service-driven department that treats immigration as an asset to be managed rather than a crime to be enforced against.”
Similarly, the American Civil Liberties Union urged the DHS to “reject our existing immigration system’s reliance on the punitive, enforcement-based approach driven by mass detention and mass deportation” and instead create a system “focused on helping people navigate a byzantine immigration system and on a pathway to citizenship.”
Finally, the nonprofit America’s Voice claimed that “undocumented immigrants” are “essential to our economy and essential to our democracy.”
When Biden put together his transition team for the DHS, he tapped America’s Voice’s Ur Jaddou and the ACLU’s Andrea Flores. Jaddou currently leads U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The CAP’s former vice president for immigration policy, Tom Jawetz, became general counsel at the DHS in March 2021.
These groups’ influence did not begin with Biden, nor will it end with him. But the Biden-Harris administration’s extreme record on immigration highlights their impact.
Not only has the Biden-Harris administration loosened border enforcement, halting wall construction, pausing deportations, and eliminating Trump-era policies that required asylum seekers to “Remain in Mexico” while their cases worked through U.S. courts, but it has also directed more funding to what I call the “immigration industrial complex.”
Many non-governmental organizations — most of them faith-based — receive hefty grants from the U.S. government to house and resettle illegal aliens throughout America. According to an analysis from the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, immigrants who went through these resettlement agencies have found their way to 431 of America’s 435 congressional districts.
Let that sink in.
The Biden-Harris administration is using your tax dollars to resettle illegal aliens throughout the country, after working with groups that call illegal aliens “essential to our democracy.”
Americans believe in helping the less fortunate and in providing a home to refugees who really need it, but the activist groups pulling the strings behind the scenes want to transform America into a “sanctuary country” that puts legal immigrants at the back of the line.
These activist groups shouldn’t be dictating policy in Washington.