Saturday, 23 November 2024

JASON KILLMEYER: Biden and Harris took money from homeless vets to house illegal aliens


That program is called the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP) and is administered by everyone’s favorite agency, FEMA.

President Trump has received no small amount of scorn from the expected quarters as he, in speeches and on his campaign website, promises the American people that he’ll reallocate spending on illegal aliens towards ensuring homeless veterans can find housing.

Surely these issues are not linked, say the corporate media. Surely, this is all demagoguery.

Yet as we’ve learned time and again, the uncomfortable truths Trump mentions tend to bear themselves out after their appropriate time as scandalous quotes or condemnable conspiracies. In this case, not only is Trump right to make that direct connection, it appears that the Biden administration has been specifically directing funds away from homeless vets and towards illegal aliens within the scope of a single program – a fast-growing program that most Americans have never heard of but that spent $425 million on illegal aliens in 2023 alone.

That program is called the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP) and is administered by everyone’s favorite agency, FEMA. While recent news reports highlight other FEMA and even possibly Veterans Affairs spending on illegal aliens that left American citizens high and dry in North Carolina and elsewhere, the EFSP program is a bit different in scope.

Established in 1983, it was specifically designed to help with the emergency of homelessness. The program’s reason for existing was to provide support to vulnerable U.S. populations, and in fact it was formally authorized under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987.

This essential grant program administered by a national board gives money to service providers with a special emphasis on housing and emergency support for U.S. veterans and others. According to that board, they also focus on our elderly and families with children, with the law once described as “the primary piece of federal legislation related to the education of youth and children experiencing homelessness.”

However, throughout the Biden-Harris administration, a new subsection to the program used in 2019 to combat a temporary surge in border crossings and apprehensions has ballooned into a massive illegal alien resettlement scheme that commands hundreds of millions of dollars.

What do we mean by massive? Not only does the spending dramatically shift the intent of EFSP away from U.S. citizens, the amount provided to illegal aliens appears, as of 2023 and possibly as early as 2022, to have eclipsed the amount provided to American citizens. Again, in an emergency program meant for the truly destitute.

In the program’s four decades of operation, it has doled out $6.6 billion in grants. In just four years, Democrats have used the program to funnel over 10% of that total value to illegal aliens. Damningly, the amount spent on illegal aliens in 2023 appears to be triple that spent on our vets and the other neediest Americans. In fact, the administration plans to spend less on this program for U.S. citizens in 2024 than it did in 2023.

Beyond the fact that this money might’ve been useful in North Carolina a few weeks ago, there is a greater concern at play and a greater response required. This degree of betrayal can not just be lost to the partisan fray.

If there is a change in government in November, starting in January, the United States government under Republican control will need to conduct hearings and other discovery processes to fully reveal to the American people what the Biden administration has done in their name, and with their dollars, often in secret. This effort should be modeled after reconciliation efforts in other countries where the public trust has shattered in the wake of conflict, corruption and other legitimacy-breaking events.

That violation of public trust, and the times we live in, are both extraordinary. It is extraordinary when one of our two political parties is actively declaring allegiance to a secondary category of individuals that they are not constitutionally or morally charged with assuming responsibility for. A portion of our American brethren, our political opponents, are literally contesting the demos in our democracy. They are doing so in a naked play for political power. The reconciliation that we will need after the fact will require much research, much sunlight, and much public communication from the administration entrusted to restore that trust.

For example, we can not just satisfy ourselves to trace the major nonprofits that the Biden administration deputized to facilitate the mass movement of people outside of any credible legal framework. We will also need to track every one of the small, local-level resettlement agencies across our cities and towns that participated in the trafficking exercise.

Further, we’ll need to not only dismantle this parallel, anti-constitutional infrastructure – the use of government contractors-masquerading-as-nonprofits to subvert the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) – we’ll need to conduct hearings, interview the outgoing heads of these agencies, interview the heads of the nonprofits and identify any RICO violations inherent in their spending, and try to claw back as many dollars as we can. Across these massive contracts, the accountability standards were exceptionally low and that was deliberate.

Statistics for the EFSP are proudly touted by the major nonprofits operating the national board. Together, they’ve provided grants to over 14,000 local organizations for housing and other emergency assistance.

Yet, despite the longstanding congressionally supported goals of this program, and in the midst of punishing inflation beset upon the people by the Biden administration, it was ransacked to pay for accommodations for illegal aliens.
They really did this. Trump was right, again.
 

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