Billions of taxpayer dollars were awarded during Joe Biden’s presidency to radical, far-left non-profit groups that used the funds to, among much else, feed, house, advise, transport, and defend millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally between 2021 and 2024, according to expert testimony provided recently to Congress.

Oversight Project President Michael Howell told the House Committee on Homeland Security during a July 16 hearing that during President Joe Biden’s four years in the Oval Office, federal immigration officials relied heavily on 230 non-governmental organization (NGOs) non-profits in implementing his open borders policy.

“Simply put, under the Biden administration’s open border policies, the government could only do so much to facilitate mass illegal migration, welcome the illegal aliens to the United States, and move them around the country. It needed help, and open borders organizations jumped at the opportunity to fill the void. The Biden administration repaid them by driving an estimated $6 billion to a conglomerate of 15 U.N. agencies and 230 NGOs, as recently calculated by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), to do this work for them,” Howell testified.

“In doing so, the Biden administration turned the Border Patrol into nothing more than a welcome center, a day care, and glorified Uber drivers that ferried illegal aliens to open borders organizations. In turn, the open borders organizations facilitated mass migration of illegal aliens throughout the interior of the United States,” Howell added.

Prior to forming the Oversight Project, Howell was Oversight Counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as counsel to then-House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

As an independent watchdog group, the Oversight Project “has uncovered instance after instance of seedy behaviors at open borders organizations promoting illegal immigration. In New York, we discovered a taxpayer-funded shelter providing false residency documents to illegals. In Mexico, we discovered flyers at an illegal alien staging camp encouraging illegals to remember to vote for Biden when they got to the United States,” Howell said.

“In Arizona, we found a former Mexican consulate official at an NGO advising illegals to lie to law enforcement to evade ICE — a probable violation of [U.S. law]. Additionally, we have produced documentary evidence of noncitizens admitting, on camera, to being registered to vote in Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, and New York,” Howell continued.

But, as Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), testified the day before to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, those 230 NGOs helping the Biden administration to flood the country with millions of illegal immigrants were a small part of a vastly larger universe of 35,000 radical, far-left-oriented non-profits using hundreds of billions of tax dollars to advance their ideological goals.

Those goals include trying to stop President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate unnecessary federal spending, make the government more efficient and less costly, and to spark a renewal of economic prosperity and individual liberty that benefits every American.

“Just in the first month of the current administration, 15 groups who had received federal cash from the previous administration sued the current administration, mostly to protest cuts in their receipt of tax dollars, which totaled $1.6 billion,” Walter told the subcommittee.

“Four of the 15 had enjoyed support from the Justice Department: the American Bar Association, the American Federation of Government Employees union, Church World Services, and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Three of the 15 had received support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Journalism Development Network, and Management Sciences for Health. Since then, many more federal grantees have piled on with still more litigation, using our tax dollars to try to ensure they receive ever more tax dollars,” Walter explained.

Other examples cited by Walter included the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which makes little effort to conceal its ties to the Democratic Party. The NDLON also “attacks Republican politicians in vicious terms. For instance, it helped its Biden paymasters when Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate by having its general counsel write a blog post calling Vance “reprehensible,” a “menace,” and a “Trump-certified white nationalist.”

Similarly, the National Urban League was awarded $80.3 million worth of grants between 2021 and 2024 by the Labor Department, and so in 2023 government grants accounted for 40% of its total revenues, Walter explained.

“As my colleague Robert Stilson reports, the League is a reliable ally of the radical left-wing agenda. It has characterized our criminal justice system as plagued by ‘brutality,’ praised President Biden’s death row commutations,

described voter ID laws — which are supported by every racial group — as ‘racially-targeted voter suppression tactics,’ attacked objections to DEI policies as ‘white supremacist,’ urged new gun control legislation such as a federal assault weapons ban, and called the overturning of Roe v. Wade ‘horrifying,’” Walter said.

Among its rewards for such consistent loyalty, he noted, the League’s president was rewarded with a featured speech to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, a speech that the League boosted over its social media even though, as tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, it is forbidden to intervene in elections.

Howell and Walter contend Congress must take a much harder stance and insist on tax-exempt non-profit NGOs to stay out of politics, even as the homeland security panel continues its probe of the role of the groups in the border crisis during the Biden administration.

“Congress needs to legislate the obvious: No money can ever go to any organization that in any way helps illegal immigrants in this country. If they want to do better, they can make it explicitly illegal to provide such services to illegals. Illegal immigration and illegal presence are illegal. This isn’t rocket science,” Walter told The Washington Stand.

Walter also told TWS Congress and the Trump administration should quickly move to “demand much greater transparency in federal grants, contracts, and loans. That includes reforms like requiring tight deadlines for federal agencies to report to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for uploading to USASpending.gov; improving that website’s usability; and especially adding to the site the tax ID numbers (EINs) of nonprofits.”

The CRC chief also says much more transparency should be required of subgrantees. That would include both secondary groups that receive grants from primary NGOs getting federal grants and contracts. He would also include transparency requirements on subgrantees at the state and local level when they receive federal dollars.

“Foreign funding and similar foreign ties raise more issues: American citizens have a right to privacy in their giving, but foreign nationals do not. Universities and political nonprofits, especially 501(c)(4)s, should face stricter requirements to disclose foreign ties and, in the case of political nonprofits, foreign funding should limit their ability to engage in politics,” Walter told TWS.