President Donald Trump’s deputies have frozen an expanding federal bureaucracy used by elite-run groups to import migrant workers via a private door in the nation’s borders.
The shutdown comes just before the private migration groups were to be aided by a $5 billion migration fund created by Congress in 2024 for additional migration inflows in 2025.
Trump’s deputies froze the bureaucracy by delaying the approval of paperwork needed by migrants to get into the United States. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced it is “pausing acceptance of Form I-134A, Online Request to be a Supporter and Declaration of Financial Support until we review all categorical parole processes as required,” the agency announced on January 28.
The form is critical to get migrants through the border doorway operated by the elite-backed, private-sector migration group Welcome.US.
The group claims to have already welcomed “200,000+ newcomers.” since it was approved in 2023 by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration, pro-investor border chief Alejandro Mayorkas.
The “Honorary Co-Chairs” of Welcome.US include Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
The group also boasts of a “Welcome Council” with many CEOs, Walmart’s PR chief, several journalists including NBC’s news chief, business lobbyists, many migration advocates, multiple Muslim leaders, and even former governor Jeb Bush.
The Welcome.US group also served as the PR face of President Joe Biden’s Welcome Corps government program. The program merged government and private efforts to further inflate the U.S. economy and stock market with an enlarged inflow of foreign workers, renters, and consumers.
The group’s migrants flood Americans’ workplaces, communities, housing markets, schools, and civic support agencies. That inflow lowers wages, raises rents, crowds schools, and jams waiting rooms — but also spikes stock prices for Wall Street investors.
Under Biden, this merger of government and private advocacy helped support roughly 100,000 people via the formal refugee programs. It was also expected to import 125,000 more refugees in 2025 — plus hundreds of thousands of additional picked migrants in the next few years,
But this expanded migration program damages the moral claim that justifies the refugee programs, said Nayla Rush, a migration expert at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Refugee programs are supposedly all about saving unfortunate people from poverty, crime, and war,
But the Welcome Corps program allows migrants to help pick the next wave of migrants, said Rush. For example, the program allows new migrants to provide refugee status — and then citizenship — to their siblings and cousins even when they face no dangers, or to grant that status to people eager to pay for green cards and U.S. citizenship, according to Rush.
“A program meant to ‘save [refugee] lives‘ had been turned into one that resettled people who [know]… somebody [who] made it to the United States and gotten a green card,” Rush wrote on January 24. She added:
By launching the “Welcome Corps”, a private sponsorship program within the [refugee program], the former administration chose not to resettle the most vulnerable, but rather to privilege those who happen to have friends or family who made it here before them. It opened the door to non-refugees to be picked for resettlement by non-citizens based in the United States.
Sponsored individuals did not need to actually be [endangered] refugees according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Refugee Status Determination, let alone in that subset of refugees determined by the UN to be in “need of resettlement”. And the sponsors could themselves be earlier refugees or other newcomers.
The “Welcome Corps” was further expanded to include the “Welcome Corps on Campus”, bringing “refugees” straight to U.S. campuses; the “Welcome Corps at Work”, bringing them straight to [employers and] U.S. jobs; and the “Welcome Corps for Afghans” allowing U.S.-based non-citizens to sponsor Afghan nationals through USRAP. Another branch, the “Welcome Corps for Refugees in Latin America”, offered individuals of any nationality who are in Latin America “a path to permanent legal status in the United States.”
The “Welcome Corps at Work” program recreates President George W. Bush’s “Any Willing Worker” program because it allows U.S. employers to hire cheap, subordinate, and government-funded migrants, regardless of the damage to Americans’ right to a fair labor market.
The Welcome Corps site said:
The Welcome Corps enables U.S. employers to recruit from a diverse, qualified pool of refugee candidates abroad. As an employer participant in Welcome Corps at Work, you will be able to review resumes from our pool of refugee candidates abroad, interview candidates, and offer employment to the refugee candidates directly. Welcome Corps at Work then helps those refugees navigate the process of being considered for resettlement in the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) …
Federal spending to import more people multiplied fivefold under Biden, Rush wrote:
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the estimated “Funding for Refugee Processing and Resettlement” totaled $2.8 billion in FY 2024 and were set to amount to $5.1 in FY 2025. For comparison, the estimated cost was $2.2 billion in FY 2023, $1.4 billion in FY 2022, $967 million in FY 2021, $932 million in FY 2020, and $976 million in FY 2019.
Much of the funding was intended to accelerate the inflow of migrants through the Department of State’s refugee programs and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In 2024, Biden’s deputies described their plan to spend the 2025 funds on the parole programs that were pulling many Haitians and Cubans into the United States:
In addition to refugee arrivals through the USRAP, ORR is projecting to serve 531,500 other arrivals in FY 2025, the majority of whom are expected to arrive as Cuban and Haitian Entrants through [supposedly] lawful pathways.
The ORR program has long been used by government agencies and cartels as a convenient waystation for delivering left-behind foreign children to their illegal migrant parents in the United States.
Congress also expanded the ORR rules to allow funding for job-seeking migrants from Cuba and Haiti, including the Haitian migrants who crowded into Springfield, Ohio.
The 2025 money would also have supported the “Labor Neighbors” program that was intended to import cheap workers from South America for jobs that otherwise would have gone to better-paid Americans.
The 2025 spending plan statement also described plans to import more diverse and expensive groups of people into Americans’ society:
Innovations and efficiencies made over the last three years have provided new hope and opportunities to refugee applicants in the USRAP, including longstanding refugee populations from Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria, as well as Rohingya refugees who are facing increased threats and dwindling assistance, among many others. In FY 2025, the United States will remain focused on these populations while continuing to expand the resettlement of other key populations of concern, including vulnerable people from Latin America and the Caribbean; Afghan allies; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) individuals; and individuals persecuted for their religious beliefs.
Biden’s deputies were “changing the meaning of resettlement, which was to save lives… [to allow] somebody, a friend or a neighbor or something, say ‘Hey, we want that person,'” Rush told Breitbart News. “It’s a good thing that [Trump is] just shutting down the whole system,” she added.
