Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency
By Mark Krikorian on June 4, 2025
During the 2021-2025 administration of President Joe Biden, the United States devoted significant taxpayer funds to a network formed in 2019 that consisted of United Nations agencies and non-government organizations (NGOs). The partnership established aid waystations all along Latin American illegal-migration routes, and it encouraged and facilitated at least 10 million foreign nationals from 180 countries to cross the U.S. southern border during those four years – at U.S. taxpayer expense.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has documented that this vast UN-NGO support network operated (and still does as of this testimony, albeit at reduced capacity) as the “Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela”, which expanded to assist non-Venezuelan migrants after its 2019 establishment. What CIS has learned about this transnational organization’s financing, the 240 NGOs as of 2025 partnering with 15 UN agencies, their aid-distribution strategy, and programming comes from field reporting and annual published budget projections and needs analyses the network calls the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan.”
Although migration along the routes has been substantially deterred under detain-and-deport policies of the second Trump administration, the UN-NGO network is able to resume its migration-facilitation activities in the countries of South America, Central America, and Mexico in the future.
https://cis.org/Testimony/Public-Funds-Private-Agendas-NGOs-Gone-Wild
