Unholy Alliance: Christian Charities Profit from $1 Billion Fed Program to Resettle Refugees, 40 Percent Muslim

Though they are officially “non-profit” organizations, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and several other Christian organizations are profiting from lucrative contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States.

Of the 100,000 refugees resettled in the United States in 2014 under the Refugee Resettlement program, an estimated 40 percent were Muslims.

In FY 2015, the State Department, through the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, spent more than $1 billion on these programs, which settled international refugees “vetted” by the United Nations High Commission on International Refugees in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars more than that on refugees, however. The Department of Health and Human Services also provided a number of “entitlements” to these refugees.

Much of this $1 billion in annual revenue goes to voluntary agencies (VOLAGs), several of which are Christian non-profits, such as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, World Relief Corporation, Church World Service, and Domestic and Foreign Missionary Service of the Episcopal Church of the USA. (also referred to as Episcopal Migration Ministries), who are contracted on behalf of the government to help these refugees get settled in their new homes in America...

As Refugee Resettlement Watch reported, there are multiple ways for these VOLAGs to generate revenue from this program:

a. $1,850 per refugee (including children) from the State Department.

b. Up to $2,200 for each refugee by participating in a U.S. DHHS program known as Matching Grant. To get the $2,200, the Volag need only show it spent $200 and gave away $800 worth of donated clothes, furniture, or cars.

c. The Volag pockets 25 percent of every transportation loan it collects from refugees it “sponsors”.

d. All Volag expenses and overhead in the Washington, DC HQ are paid by the U.S. government.

e. For their refugee programs, Volags collect money from all federal grant programs – “Marriage Initiative,” “Faith-based,” “Ownership Society etc., as well as from various state and local grants.

The program is so lucrative that in some towns the Catholic Church has lessened support for traditional charity works to put more effort into resettlement. It uses collection offerings to promote the refugee resettlement program.

Despite claims that these Muslim refugees have been “vetted” to keep out terrorists, numerous reports, including those by the Department of Homeland Security and FBI, indicate that this process is flawed, especially for refugees from countries like Syria, where virtually no data bases to perform background checks exist.

Of the approximately 2,000 Syrian refugees who have come to the United States over the past several years, an estimated 97 percent are Muslim...

CAIRCO Research

Syrian refugees and national security

The Refugee Resettlement racket