Complicit Clergy: Federal Catholic Immigration Funding: It’s Worse Than We Thought

By Complicit Clergy Staff, February 21, 2025 

After publishing our original analysis of federal immigration funding of Catholic NGOs on January 24, we were alerted to a number of NGOs we missed in our original analysis.

Under the Biden administration, Catholic NGOs were awarded nearly $3.2 BILLION in immigration funding. That’s more than QUADRUPLE the level of funding under Trump’s first administration and more than DOUBLE the amount awarded under the Obama administration over the course of EIGHT YEARS!

Since 2009, Catholic NGOs have pocketed nearly $5.6 BILLION in federal immigration funding.

Please keep in mind that this figure is likely understated due to the facts that:

• our analysis only includes federal programs that are clearly associated with immigration – NGOs are likely using funds from non-immigration related programs to serve the migrant community;

• our analysis does not include state-funded programs, such as the money being provided to Catholic university Seton Hall which offers legal services to illegal aliens;

• our analysis does not include non-Catholic organizations – we saw evidence of state agencies sharing their funding with Catholic NGOs without specifically making a subaward to these organizations;

• while we did our best to include all Catholic NGOs in our analysis, we undoubtedly missed some Catholic organizations which lack Catholic identifying characteristics in their names.

It should come as no surprise that Catholic Charities has been the top recipient of this federal funding, with their network of NGOs harvesting nearly $2.9 BILLION of federal funding for immigration-related services. We should also not be surprised to learn that the illustrious United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) came in second place, reaping over $1.6 BILLION.

Looking at individual recipients by their unique entity identifier (UEI), the USCCB comes out on top, followed by Catholic Charities of Fort Worth, Texas.

Another interesting view of the data is the breakdown by the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) which tracks the type of assistance provided for each the federal grant. The top three programs provided funding to Catholic NGOs are 93.566: Refugee and Entrant Assistance (nearly 41%), 93.567: Unaccompanied Alien Children (nearly 17%) and 19.51: U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (just over 12%).

Perhaps most disturbing is the amount of money being awarded through the Unaccompanied Alien Children program. Since 2009, Catholic NGOs have received nearly $1 BILLION to process unaccompanied minors.  It is unfathomable how our federal government has allow Catholic NGOs to process so many minor children given the U.S. bishops horrific record in covering-up the sexual abuse of children.

We want to encourage our readers you to review our complete Catholic immigration funding analysis (simply click on the tabs at the top of the chart to see different views of the data).  We are also providing a link to our analysis of federal immigration funding for all organizations (including both Catholic and non-Catholic entities). Here’s a link to an explanation of the analysis.

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