Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.
That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation.
EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals.
EMM “sponsored” 6,400 individuals from 48 countries in 2024. The leading nationalities were Afghans under a special humanitarian program, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and others in smaller numbers from seven distinct special resettlement programs.
There is even a contingent from Vietnam. True, EMM resettles fewer than 10 individuals from Vietnam annually, but it raises the question: Why, 50 years after the end of the Vietnam war, we are still running a taxpayer-funded program to help people immigrate from Vietnam to the US?
Unlike everyday immigrants, these new arrivals receive government assistance and, most importantly, are immediately eligible for all forms of welfare, such as Medicaid and cash assistance, on the same basis as a US citizen.
Further, they can immediately sponsor friends and relatives under a recent Biden expansion of the refugee resettlement program.
Office of Refugee Resettlement was projecting 656,500 new arrivals in 2025, who would fall under its care. Clearly this is a program wildly out of control.
In an wild understatement, a 2012 Government Accountability Office report quotes an official noting that “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
Since EMM’s ability to lobby is restricted, the Episcopal Church itself, being a separate legal entity from EMM, lobbies in D.C. for more programs that benefit EMM.
EMM brings in LGBTQ refugees and asylees in a special federal refugee program started during the Obama administration called “Preferred Communities.”
This program pays a premium over standard refugee resettlement for contractors that resettle “refugees experiencing social or psychological difficulties, including emotional trauma resulting from war and/or sexual or gender-based violence; survivors of torture; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees; refugees who are HIV positive; populations with physical disabilities or other medical conditions.”
Then there is the public-private partnership program misnamed “Matching Grant.”
To get $1 of Department of Health and Human Services money, EMM must contribute just 10 cents, along with 90 cents worth of used cars, furniture, and monetized volunteer time.
When the program started out, it really was almost a true match of $1 of grant money for each dollar contributed by the contractor, but no longer. So much for attempting to incentivize private charity; public money has pretty much driven out private money in all resettlement programs.
The Episcopal Church also earns a commission for collecting on travel loans made to refugees resettled by EMM.
Here’s how it works: The U.S. taxpayer funds the International Organization for Migration, which loans money for airfare for the refugee’s flight to America. If the refugee pays the interest-free loan back, the church (not EMM) pockets 25% of the money. If the loan is not paid back, no one is the worse off, except the taxpayer.
According to its own financial reporting, the Episcopal Church has at least one “government-funded position.” E-mailed questions about the responsibilities of this position were not answered.
Of course, it is not fair to question the Episcopalians alone on this.
Their resettlement contractor is the second smallest of the 10 contractors in the industry. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) dwarfs EMM.
Forbes reported that USCCB affiliate Catholic Charities USA, which has its hand in all aspects of immigration and seems to get money from every government agency except NASA, received $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2021. That’s 68 times more than EMM got that year.
It was never intended that the sponsoring organizations, formerly known as “Voluntary Agencies,” would be purely federal contractors, with all the behavior, untoward incentives, money, and influence-peddling that this brings, not to mention questions of church-state relations which are never raised in this context.
Any re-tooling of our humanitarian immigration programs must put the bulk of responsibility back on the “sponsoring” entity and limit new arrivals’ access to welfare.
As for encouraging the church to practice true sacrificial charity, Bishop Budde may have put it best when she said in an interview with Rachel Maddow, “the first and primary role that we have is [to lead] by example.”
Don Barnett is a member of the board of the Center for Immigration Studies.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
