Biden Admin Is Paying Illegal Immigrants And ‘Sponsors’ For Their Travel To Settle In US, Document Shows | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Luke Rosiak.

    The Biden Administration is paying upfront cash or reimbursements to underage illegal immigrants or their relatives to cover their travel to communities across the U.S., a federal document obtained by The Daily Wire reveals.

    The Department of Health and Human Services document, which deals with settling "unaccompanied minor" illegal immigrants in the U.S., says under the category "Sponsor Travel Support" that U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill if the minor can't.

    "Historically, [Office of Refugee Resettlement] had a 20% funding cap on travel for sponsors if a sponsor was unable to pay," the document states. "This cap has been lifted and supplemental funding requests are now permitted. As of March 22, 2021, ORR can pay for the sponsor, UC [unaccompanied child], or escort's travel upfront as well as reimbursements."

    That's part of a "Transfer of Physical Custody" in which once HHS' Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) "approves an UC for release, the care provider collaborates with the sponsor to ensure physical discharge happens within 3 calendar days. Whenever possible, sponsors are expected to come to the are provider or to a designated offsite location with identification."

    The document says the "Unaccompanied Children Program" includes children who travel "to the United States seeking refuge from poverty" and that "By law, HHS ORR has custody and must provide care for each UC." It says it has done so for more than 400,000 children.

    It says it attempts to unite the children with sponsors such as relatives, but for nearly 8% of children, none can be found. Those children are released at age 18.

    HHS' Administration for Children and Families, whose logo is on the document, did not immediately return a request for comment.

    The last-mile unification expenses come on top of travel that taxpayers are already funding to bring illegal immigrants from the border to cities across the interior of the U.S. A Daily Wire investigation published this week used aircraft data to show hundreds of charter flights, affecting nearly every state, that appear to be ferrying illegal immigrants across the U.S pursuant to government contracts.

    On Christmas night, for example, two flights carrying some 240 migrants from Texas landed in eastern Pennsylvania, prompting one lawmaker to observe that the border crisis was now a national problem. "Wilkes Barre and Scranton are now border cities as a direct result of the Biden administration's policies," Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) remarked.

    That analysis focused on small airlines offering charter services that appear to be running special immigrant-only planes for the government, including Avelo, iAero (Swift Air), World Atlantic, and Global Crossing.

    "This is good money for the airlines, that's why they don't want it to stop," an airline employee with insight into the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. He said the migrant flights kept airlines like Avelo in business during the pandemic.

    For months, illegal border crossings have been at record levels. Yet as of December 2021, there were zero migrant families held in U.S. detention centers.

    Data on illegal immigrants under the Biden Administration has been so suspicious that a nonpartisan academic group that has long tracked immigration stopped processing data on what happens to minors who cross the border illegally because it has determined the data is "too faulty to be trusted." It says the Biden Administration has ignored its warnings about flaws.

    The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which is affiliated with Syracuse University, said 50,000 asylum files disappeared, allowing the Biden Administration to "falsely report that its asylum backlog had been reduced this past year when in fact it had markedly grown."