Outrageous Government-Funded Incentives

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Knott for shining much-needed light on this issue and for the opportunity today to speak about some of the consequences of the Biden-Harris administration's irresponsible actions over the past 4 years and how Congress and the Trump administration are working to claw our way back to sanity for the United States of America.

We have lived through the most devastating border crisis in modern American history. Let's be honest. It wasn't a natural disaster, and it wasn't an accident. It was the direct result of bad choices made by the Biden-Harris administration.

This wasn't mere mismanagement. It was facilitation, it was incentivization, and it was done at the expense of our laws, our national security, and our people.

During their time in office, President Biden and Vice President Harris dismantled nearly every meaningful safeguard at the southern border. Their administration presided over a record surge in illegal immigration, over 700,000 illegal aliens were apprehended at the border from October through December of 2023 alone. That was more than any full year during the Obama Presidency when President Obama famously stated that over 1,000 illegal border crossings a day would be considered a crisis.

The Biden-Harris Harris administration frequently allowed in 6,000 a day.

Unfortunately, instead of restoring our control and protecting our sovereignty, they did the unthinkable. They rewarded the lawbreakers. Rather than empower border enforcement, the Biden-Harris administration threw open the Federal checkbook, funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to private nonprofits like Family Endeavors Incorporated, Southwest Key Programs, and Global Refuge. These NGOs didn't just shelter illegal aliens. They pampered them.

Those contracts paid for luxury hotel rooms, room service, 24-hour snacks, laundry, bilingual television, recreation, cultural events, and individual tutoring for mathematics and social studies. Most shockingly, it paid for pet therapy, music therapy, and horticultural therapy for illegal alien children.

In 2021 alone, Endeavors paid Christy Merrell, a music therapist, $533,000 for her services. In addition to this nonsense, the nonprofit conducted 1,656 people-plant interactions and 287 pet therapy sessions between April 2021 and March 2023.

This wasn't emergency aid. It was five-star treatment funded by hardworking American families, families that are struggling to pay their own rent and put food on their own table, much less providing themselves with music, plant, and pet therapy.

I know many taxpaying American families who would love to be able to provide their children with one-on-one academic tutoring but simply cannot afford it.

This all begs the question: Why are we investing in illegal families while stripping financial resources from our own citizens to do so?

In one case, Endeavors Incorporated, a Texas-based NGO, received a $1.3 billion contract from the Federal Government in a single year. Meanwhile their top executives are paid over $600,000 annually, and the group spends more than $700,000 on lobbyists all to keep the money flowing.

Contrast that with the conditions our military servicemembers faced during the same time: moldy barracks, sewage overflows, and rodent infestations to highlight a few. In 2022, a mere $56 million was spent on housing maintenance for military families, less than one-twentieth of what was spent for illegal aliens.

Who did the Biden-Harris administration care about? It certainly wasn't our men and women in uniform.

Unfortunately, the extreme misuse of funds wasn't their only slight to the American public. The Biden-Harris administration relaxed vetting standards for those who claimed to sponsor alien children. DNA testing was scrapped, and background checks were watered down. There were no public records checks required for other adults living in a sponsor's home, and tragic consequences followed.

In one case, a 24-year-old Honduran man posed as a 17-year-old child and was placed with a sponsor in Florida who he later murdered. Sadly, that was not a one-off failure. This type of senseless violence became a regular news story.

While Americans were working multiple jobs to afford rent and groceries, the Biden-Harris administration was funding a billion-dollar pipeline for unaccompanied aliens, and empowering NGOs that had no incentive to solve the crisis, only to profit from it.

They called it compassion, however, in reality, it was corruption, recklessness, and disregard for the rule of law.

The good news is this: Their time in office is over. However, the ramifications of their decisions persist. While our southern border is certainly more secure now, we have hundreds of thousands of illegal alien cases that will overwhelm our legal system for years. The nonprofit industry they supercharged is still bloated, and the American people are still waiting for real accountability.

Now is the time to fix what they broke. We must defund corrupt NGOs, restore vetting and enforcement, and put the American people first again. We owe it to our citizens. We owe it to our troops, and we owe it to the integrity of this Nation. The crisis wasn't spontaneous. It was built, funded, and incentivized. Let's make sure it is never repeated.

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