The Biden-Harris administration is handing out more hundreds of millions to bail out localities reeling from the crisis it created

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on August 28 that it will hand out an additional $380 million to localities through its Shelters and Services Program (SSP). This program is intended to offset some of the political ramifications associated with high levels of illegal immigration by providing funding to localities that are “providing critical support such as food, shelter, clothing, acute medical care, and transportation” to inadmissible aliens recently released from DHS custody — despite federal laws that require most border-crossers’ continued detention pending the completion of their immigration proceedings.

This $380 million allocation is in addition to the $259.13 million in SSP grants DHS gave out just four months prior in April 2024. In fiscal year 2023, DHS gave out more than $780 million through SSP and the Emergency Food and Shelter Program – Humanitarian Awards (EFSP-H) to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and localities across the country for the same purposes.

Of course, these costs do not include the costs the federal government pays to process inadmissible migrants through the immigration system. Those costs include, but are not limited to: transportation; shelter, detention, or administrating the expensive and generally ineffective “alternatives to detention” program; food; medical care; education programs for arriving children; translators; increased hiring, training, and salaries for asylum officers to conduct credible fear screenings; and the separately expensive immigration court system under the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which includes operating costs and salaries needed for immigration judges, DHS attorneys, and administrative staff for lengthy and complicated proceedings.

The results of these proceedings are often appealed to DOJ’s Board of Immigration Appeals or the judicial branch’s federal court system when decisions are not issued in aliens’ favor, and of course these court systems have their own expensive administrative and legal costs. Unaccompanied alien minors (UACs) create their own, unique set of costs — as should not surprise anyone given the acute vulnerabilities of this population.

And these are just costs borne by DHS, DOJ, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the office charged with the care and transfer of UACs with sponsors (i.e., foster families). Not included in this round-up are the costs of taxpayer-funded public benefits migrants will become eligible for as a result of being unlawfully paroled into the country by the Biden administration; the public benefits costs that any children they may have in the United States are automatically eligible for regardless of the manner of entry of their parents; the costs that states incur to provide services to this population; and the increased housing costs in areas where large numbers of migrants have settled.

These costs also do not include $4 billion the Biden-Harris administration sent to Central America to “address the root causes” of illegal immigration. (My colleague Andrew Arthur has recently broken down the strategy to show how addressing only “push factors” for illegal immigration, but not any of the “pull factors”, has been ineffective in deterring illegal immigration to the United States.)

These costs also do not include the massive impact open-borders policies have had on the legal immigration system. Historic backlogs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have forced applicants for immigration benefits, their families, and their employers to incur serious costs (and frustration) associated with the agency’s historically long processing times.

Open-borders advocates often point to the taxes that are paid by aliens living illegally in the country to justify these policies, but, as CIS’s research team emphasizes, that is only half of the story. As my colleague Steven Camarota recently explained, “Their generally low incomes also allows many of them to qualify for means-tested welfare programs, which they often receive on behalf of native-born children. In other words, illegal immigrants are a net fiscal drain on public budgets for the same reasons that legal immigrants and native-born Americans with low levels of education are: They receive more in benefits from the system than they pay into it.”

Illegal immigration is expensive. That should be obvious, but it bears repeating. DHS’s recent allocation to localities via another big SSP grant, unfortunately, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Written by Elizabeth Jacobs for Center for Immigration Study ~ August 31, 2024