Joe Schaeffer
Political columnist
Right after the election, Liberty Nation News asked a simple question of the man Americans returned to the White House: “Will Trump Take On the Leading Enablers of Illegal Migrants?” That would be the elaborate and well-funded network of religious NGOs operating extensively in the US, Central and South America, and Europe. It didn’t take long to get an answer. President Donald Trump’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development, more commonly known as USAID, cut off a vital financial spigot for one of the largest of these zealously open borders organizations.
Your Tax Dollars, Courtesy of USAID
“Catholic Relief Services is bracing for massive cuts – as much as 50 per cent this year – because of draconian reductions in US foreign assistance ordered by the Trump administration, according to an internal email from the chief executive of the international relief organization,” leftist Catholic news site National Catholic Reporter glumly declared on Feb 5.
“Layoffs have already begun,” NCR relates, citing the astonishing fact that USAID “supplies about half of the Catholic organization’s $1.5 billion budget.” That’s billion, with a B. “We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year,” Catholic Relief Services president and CEO Sean Callahan wrote in the email.
This is a huge development. Religious NGOs enjoying lucrative government contracts have been an instrumental cog in the illegal alien pipeline into America. And a US Catholic Church dominated to a dangerous degree by progressive activists, especially in the leading clerical ranks, has contributed massively to the crisis.
As Liberty Nation News documented on Nov 9, Bishop Edward Weisenburger tauntingly replied to a concerned parishioner that his diocese has taken in “approximately 360,000” aliens in the past six to seven years after initial processing by federal border agents. Weisenburger has publicly stated that he finds the term illegal as applied to any “immigrant” to be “offensive.”
It’s been quite the money-making venture for the bishop. “Over the last five years, Pima County has received more than $98 million in federal dollars to shelter 500,983 people as part of a partnership with Catholic Community Services in Tucson,” The Tucson Sentinel reported in August.
Taking Illegals From Guatemala to Texas
Catholic Relief Services, thanks to that enormous pile of taxpayer money from USAID, has long been one of the major NGOs aiding “refugees and migrants” as they enter the nations of the West. “In the Middle East, as well as Eastern and Western Europe, CRS is working with hundreds of thousands of refugees to provide aid to help these vulnerable brothers and sisters as they search for safety,” the organization boasted back in 2016 as the mass influx of migrants that has now crippled Europe was gathering into a full storm.
A 2023 USA Today article noted that Catholic Relief Services has a “migration program officer for Mexico and Guatemala” to help illegals as they manage the long journey to the US southern border. As they near the end of their quest, Catholic Relief Services houses these migrants in Mexican shelters abutting the United States.
“Miguel Meza, the head of migrant programs for Catholic Relief Services, which has 26 migrant shelters across Mexico, estimated that about 55,000 migrants were in the border cities across from the US on [May 10],” the Associated Press reported in 2023. “The shelter space is ‘saturated,’ he said, and migrants were spilling into areas around them.”
In 2018, Catholic Relief Services head Callahan joined with Bishop Joe S Vásquez of Austin, Texas, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, and the CEO of Catholic Charities USA, to issue a statement declaring that “asylum is not a crime.” The progressive epistle came as a large migrant caravan that at one point contained more than 7,000 people was making its way toward the US border. “In El Paso, Texas, Catholic and other faith-based organizations are preparing for arrivals from the caravan while responding to the immediate needs of asylum seeker arrivals,” an article at the stridently leftist Catholic “social justice” Ignatian Solidarity Network stated.
“Mass deportations and actions to turn away asylum seekers and refugees are irreconcilable with Catholic moral teaching and thus present urgent public policy challenges,” the notoriously progressive establishment Jesuit Order’s flagship publication America declared Feb 6. “In the face of dangerous nativism and the possibility of state violence through deportation, family separation and the closure of the border to the vulnerable, the church will be challenged to offer a compelling and credible response.”
Gee, why so shrill about it? This may have something to do with it.
On Jan 24, “the US government announced an immediate suspension of foreign aid spending. This pause will disrupt critical programs in communities across the globe, including those led by our Jesuit partners,” Nate Radomski, executive director of American Jesuits International, wrote in a Jan 28 message to the Jesuit community.
By pulling the plug on the government funding gravy train that has fueled a leftist infiltration, Donald Trump may end up doing more to reform a battered US Catholic Church than any individual since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
This article was originally published by Liberty Nation News.
