Last week’s executive order from President Trump halting refugee admissions into the U.S., combined with a State Dept. “stop work” order suspending all funding to resettlement agencies, is highlighting a much larger problem than illegal immigration alone.
Numerous nonprofits and non governmental organizations (NGOs) who work with refugees who have already arrived in the U.S. say they depend upon those taxpayer dollars distributed through the State Dept.
Journalist Nate Hochman, who helped produce the immigration crisis documentary “Erasing Charleroi” last year, says the reason for the panic is that very few of these groups are self-sufficient and they depend on “the federal tax-dollar gravy train.”
Hochman also points out that these are the same NGOs and nonprofits who have been actively transporting migrants into the country, fighting border enforcement efforts, supporting open border policies and actively resettling migrants in American cities and towns.
Those efforts, done on the taxpayer’s dime, include providing transportation to the U.S. border, waypoints with medical services and shelter along the way, maps showing the best routes to the U.S. and legal services to help migrants evade immigration laws when they arrive here.
They provide “humanitarian transportation” to ferry immigrants up to our border, waypoints with shelter and medical services along the way, Spanish-language maps showing the best route to the U.S., and legal services for immigrants to beat our immigration laws once they get here. pic.twitter.com/ZfuKr7gAIn
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) January 28, 2025
Hochman says part of the services provided by these NGOs and nonprofits is the amount of cash cards, vouchers and straight up envelopes of cash that are handed directly to immigrants by these agencies.
Ten of these major immigration NGOs, known as voluntary agencies or VOLAGS, have contracts with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration which gives them the taxpayer funding to resettle migrants in the U.S.

Hochman states that most of these groups are able to operate only because of the funding they receive from the federal government.
He points out that refugee NGOs have become a kind of fifth column in American politics where they can act as an extension of the federal government and that nearly every VOLAG is involved with the border crisis.
A federal judge may have paused President Trump’s executive order to freeze the federal grants that these NGOs have counted on but the bigger problem of American taxpayers being forced to subsidize the immigration crisis with their own money is finally coming into view.
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