Government-Funded Nonprofits Being Paid Millions to House Unaccompanied Minors

Capital Research Center gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by OpenTheBooks.com in compiling federal grant data for fiscal year 2017, which provided the impetus for this research. This piece is the second in an occasional series exploring the funding of nonprofit organizations by the federal government. Illegal immigration emerged as one of the foremost political issues of the 2018 midterm election and beyond. Debate over security and the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border invokes extremes ranging from President Trump’s national emergency declaration, to insistence that the emergency is fake, all the way to proposals to tear down existing border barriers. It’s an issue that, for some, seems to have transcended traditional measures of sound government policy—like effectiveness and cost—to become one driven more by emotion and opportunism. Of course, illegal immigration has costs, including direct expenditures of federal tax dollars. One such expenditure is a federal program administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Program (UAC Program).