President Donald Trump has a popular mandate to deport illegal immigrant criminals, an essential response to the border crisis in which more than 9 million illegal immigrants entered the United States under former President Joe Biden.
Yet some of the same leftist groups that urged Biden to open the border in the first place are gearing up to oppose Trump — and some of the groups have been bankrolled by your tax dollars.
Catholic Charities, for instance, released a video on Trump’s first day in office, urging illegal immigrants to “know your rights” and directing them to avoid answering questions if Immigration and Customs Enforcement stops them in public.
“If you are asked where you were born or how you entered the United States, you may refuse to answer, you may remain silent,” Barb Graham, an attorney at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, says in the video. “You may refuse to show identity documents that say what country you are from.”
“You may refuse a search if you are stopped for questioning, but are not arrested,” Graham adds.
Catholic Charities has a financial incentive to support open borders and oppose deportations. This nonprofit organization has received billions in federal grants, in part because Catholic Charities helps house and transport illegal immigrants across the country. As I lay out in my book The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government, Catholic Charities is part of the immigration industrial complex, a network of nonprofit groups that transports illegal immigrants across the country and receives a large part of its funding through federal grants.
According to Forbes, Catholic Charities USA received $1.4 billion of its $4.7 billion in revenue from government support, more than the $1 billion it received in private donations, in 2022.
Other nonprofit organizations that help move illegal immigrants across the country, abetting the border crisis, also received millions in federal grants — in many cases, far more than they received in fundraising. The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, for example, reported receiving the vast majority of its revenue, $117.4 million of its $121.7 million, through government grants in 2020.
My book also exposes the activist nonprofit groups that are arguably responsible for the border crisis in the first place. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress, and a pro-immigration group called America’s Voice form part of the network I call the “Woketopus,” and they influenced the Department of Homeland Security as former President Joe Biden geared up to take office.
The Center for American Progress urged the DHS to treat “immigration as an asset to be managed rather than a crime to be enforced against.” The ACLU urged Biden to “reject our existing immigration system’s reliance on the punitive, enforcement-based approach driven by mass detention and mass deportation” and instead create “a humane and effective system focused on helping people navigate a byzantine immigration system and a pathway to citizenship.”
While this change sounds humane, the open border policies it inspired have wreaked havoc on America. The Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy has involved allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country. This influx has allowed Venezuelan gangs to take over U.S. streets and enabled the horrific death of Laken Riley, among many others. Biden’s policies also worsened the fentanyl crisis. Opioid overdoses took the lives of more than 80,000 people in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl accounted for 88% of those deaths.
The Woketopus may have lost some of its impact in the federal government, but it is gearing up to oppose Trump’s deportations from outside the government.
The ACLU sued the Trump administration on its third day, aiming to block the administration’s “plan to massively expand fast-track deportations without a fair legal process.”
The ACLU often makes legal claims on behalf of illegal immigrants who unlawfully entered the country, suggesting that these people have rights that outweigh America’s right to protect its territorial integrity.
The National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, held a webinar on Jan. 17 advising teachers on how to protect “undocumented” students from federal immigration authorities. The NEA has also funneled union dues to the Woketopus, supporting the Center for American Progress, among others.
The Service Employees Industrial Union, which told supporters it would help legal immigrants apply for U.S. citizenship in order to “vote for worker power” ahead of the 2024 presidential election, has vocally opposed Trump’s deportations. The SEIU condemned Trump’s Day One immigration executive orders, accusing him of aiming to “criminalize immigrant families and execute his mass deportation agenda.”
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Just before Trump’s inauguration, the SEIU condemned Trump’s deportation plans as “an attack on all workers,” sharing a blog post urging union workers to oppose the Trump agenda. That blog post celebrated an SEIU branch in Minnesota that negotiated a contract requiring employees to notify workers about any inquiries into workers’ documentation and protecting workers’ jobs for 120 days while any issue is addressed.
As Trump attempts to remove the worst of the more than 9 million illegal immigrants that entered the country under Biden, these organizations are gumming up the works, attempting to stop Trump’s return to sanity at the border.
Tyler O’Neil is a senior editor at the Daily Signal. He is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center and, most recently, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.