COLUMBUS—Government grants tallying in the hundreds of millions, $8 million in forgiven Paycheck Protection Program loans, $1.27 million executive compensation packages, swank Columbus condos, and $900,000 golden parachutes.
Those are highlights of just one Ohio group named in recent controversies surrounding immigration in the United States.
Facilitating the tide of immigrants to the United States is extremely lucrative. At least for those standing closest to the government money spigot.
The Story
An Ohio non-profit organization has come under fire for its role in facilitating the tide of immigrants to the United States, as well as red flags concerning child trafficking.
The National Youth Advocate Program, with offices overlooking the Scioto River on Watermark Island west of downtown Columbus, has drawn scrutiny for hundreds of millions in government grants to settle immigrants in Ohio and other states, and a pattern of outsized compensation and exit packages for executives.
According to GovTribe, “The organization primarily provides services related to unaccompanied immigrant minors through cooperative agreements with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement.”
The group’s CEO, Marvena Twigg, a social worker by training, collected a salary of $1.27 million in 2022.
The destruction of Springfield, Ohio inspired me to look at which organizations are being paid the most for refugee resettlement in the state.
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 12, 2024
A 501c3 called National Youth Advocate Project has been awarded $292 million by the Dept of Health and Human Services for assistance to… pic.twitter.com/vFBM4uPLN5
Standing near the government money spigot by doing pet policy legwork, such as immigrant and refugee resettlement, has its benefits. In addition to her $1 million-plus salary, Twigg lists an address at a swank Columbus condominium where units can list in the millions.
The National Youth Advocate Program’s previous CEO, Mubarak Awad, received a $900,000 severance package when he departed the organization in 2005, the Columbus Dispatch reported in 2007.
At the time, Franklin County Children’s Services was ‘aggressively monitoring’ the group’s finances to ensure taxpayer monies were protected in the event the group became insolvent, the Dispatch reported. The National Youth Advocate Program was handling a significant portion of Franklin County’s children’s welfare caseload then, working with nearly 1,000 children each year, per the Dispatch.
But that was before the agency expanded into federal migrant and refugee resettlement. If the group was already handling children’s social services for Franklin County, why not go after real money in the form of federal dollars?
In 2009, not long after Franklin County’s concern over the National Youth Advocacy Program’s solvency and taxpayer dollars at stake, the group registered to start receiving federal awards.
And there are lots of federal dollars to chase in the immigration pipeline. First the money started trickling in. Then came a flood. The group saw its first award in 2011, with the next seven or eight years muddling along at or under $1 million in awards each year.
Then, in 2019, the group’s federal awards increased tenfold, before ballooning with the immigration crisis in the 2020s. NYAP saw $232 million in grants in 2023, its biggest year so far. Many of the grants are for ‘mental health services’ in Illinois, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states where the group operates. But migrant resettlement is a huge part of the business.
According to GovTribe, the group’s recent awards included $14 million for residential long-term foster care services and a $100 million for “home study and post-release services,” under the Unaccompanied Children Program.
NYAP also made sure to collect $8 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans during the 2020 pandemic, which according to a government website was designated for payroll of its employees.
Humanitarian Crisis and Trafficking Children at the Border
The border, and a pipeline of immigrants, legal, illegal, and refugee, has become a flashpoint in the 2024 election. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, pose $12.5 trillion in net fiscal costs to the United States.
Beyond the costs of immigration, its strains on housing supply and affordability, and the suppression of wages through a cheap supply of labor, a humanitarian crisis persists. Where are the unaccompanied children, and what is their status?
A House Oversight Committee found in 2022 that the Department of Homeland Security referred 130,000 unaccompanied minors to HHS that year. At the time, 85,000 children had been reported missing between 2020 and 2022.
Rep. Jake LaTurner (R-Kansas), noted in the hearing 66% of unaccompanied children were working full time jobs, according to the New York Times. The committee also discussed “flawed vetting” of the children’s sponsors.
Back to Twigg and the National Youth Advocate Program. In February, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded Twigg and the National Youth Advocate Program comply with a Senate investigation into the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“The National Youth Advocate Program, Inc. (NYAP) has received millions of taxpayer dollars to support ORR over the past few years, and so it must provide an accounting to Congress and the American people for its handling of migrant children entrusted to its care,” Grassley’s letter to Twigg and NYAP said.
Grassley’s call for accountability to Twigg and NYAP and a dozen or so other grant recipients came on the heels of a letter Grassley sent to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray, alerting them to trafficking on the border and government oversight failures.
NYAP was among a dozen or so contractors contacted by Grassley’s office. His investigation, aided by federal whistleblowers has now said this month that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which administrates grants that NYAP and others received, “ignored warnings” that children were being trafficked.
According to Iowa newspaper The Gazette, Grassley called out “glaring failures by President Joe Biden’s administration over its handling of unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border for lacking proper vetting of foreign nationals, leading to exploitation and abuse of children.”
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan also subpoenaed officials for information about the programs.
The United States’ immigration policies have flooded the labor market, suppressing wages for U.S. workers, and squeezed affordable housing for Americans on the lower rungs. But, beyond the economics of a loose immigration policy, Americans will also have to consider cartel activity, fentanyl, and child trafficking as they weigh immigration as an election issue.
Ohio Stakes
A tide of 20,000 Haitian migrants brought the national spotlight on Springfield, Ohio, a small city of just under 60,000 residents. Springfield saw a flood of migrants a third of the city’s size. Springfield’s city manager penned a letter to Senator Sherrod Brown calling for help, saying the city was ‘set to fail.’
[READ: Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck’s letter to Sherrod Brown on Influx of 20,000 Migrants.]
How did 20,000 Haitian migrants end up in Springfield?
The cadre of nonprofit organizations and NGOs that have facilitated the flood of immigrants, legal, illegal and those with refugee status, to the United States, includes religious organizations like St. Vincent De Paul, Catholic Charities, nonprofits like the National Youth Advocate Program, and state groups like the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
And as long as the border is open, and resettling immigrants is attached to lucrative contracts and grants, it’s not liable to stop.
Here's the high level data for who has received refugee resettlement grant funding from the Administration for Children and Families since 2021, with 'place of performance' listed in Ohio
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 12, 2024
First table is primary awards, second is subawards (issued by primary awardees) pic.twitter.com/i0dbRc6J8k
Where is the money going?
A source familiar with refugee resettlement in Southwest Ohio told ohio.news the initial resettlement of refugees by NGOs and religious organizations usually includes sourcing a cheap apartment, supplying mattresses, and a few other sundries, but little else.
A local church, the source said, was now picking up the slack for several refugee families from the Democratic Republic of the Congo after a major religious charity organization brought the family to the Dayton area.
Whatever happens at the border, there are lucrative incentives to facilitate immigration, and immigrant resettlement.
That big business, with a slate of NGOs and nonprofits raking in millions from the government grant pipeline, is sure to continue apart from shutting off the spigot, or a change at the border.
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