US Taxpayers Help Fund Illegal Immigrants Travel to Southern Border with UN Bank Cards.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), which receives billions in U.S. taxpayer money, is handing out cash debit cards and other funds for lodging and prescription medicines to U.S.-bound migrants who spill out into this southern Mexican city by the hundreds of thousands, according to news sources, the US taxpayers are progressively supporting the passage of a regular stream of migrants who end up crossing the border illegally.
Every day, word of the UN’s cash assistance draws long lines of hopeful U.S.-bound migrants to a large, grey building staffed by application-takers and interviewers who determine who gets the money.
Thousands of migrants congregate in southern Mexico to seek asylum, which allows them to travel freely across Mexico. The majority then proceeds to the US border, where they illegally cross and request refuge once more.
In a report by The Epoch Times:
Migrants there are issued debit cards that reload each month, according to Todd Bensman, who is reporting from the city of Tapachula at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Bensman is the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
In Tapachula on Jan. 14, a Haitian man was waiting for his 3,600 pesos owed (about $180), Bensman said. A Honduran woman said her cash card provided 2,500 pesos a month for four people.
In the northern Mexico border city of Reynosa, families were receiving the equivalent of $400 every 15 days, he said.
“The United Nations began ramping up CBI [cash-based interventions] in 2019, spending $60 million on 29,000 migrants in Latin America, and then doubling the outlays in 2020, with plans to vastly increase its use in the Americas during 2022 and beyond,” Bensman said.
In fiscal year 2021, the United States contributed nearly $1.9 billion in humanitarian assistance to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), according to the State Department.
The United States funds about 20 percent of the total United Nations budget, which comprises 193 nations, and 40 percent of UNHCR’s revenue. according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. The UNHCR budget for 2022 is $8.99 billion.
Cash-based interventions have been used by UNHCR for several decades.
They are “often a more dignified way of assisting affected populations, as they empower people to determine their own needs and the best way of meeting them,” according to the UNHCR.
Sources: 100percentfedup, Theepochtimes, Washingtonpost, Unhcr.org