UN Budgets Millions for U.S.-Bound Migrants in 2024

As this mural in Tapachula, Mexico, shows, UN agencies are well aware that their cash aid and assistance helps support illegal immigration over the U.S. southern border.

They named the U.S. taxpayer-funded United Nations as essentially a co-smuggler after seeing my reports that the UN was handing out debit cards and cash vouchers to aspiring illegal border crossers on their way north.

Now the UN’s 2024 update to the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan”, a planning and budget document for handing out nearly $1.6 billion in 17 Latin America countries, can cast a broad confirming light on the cash giveaways and much more aid for 2024 ahead – with the helping hands of 248 named non-governmental organizations.

In a nutshell, the UN and its advocacy partners are planning to spread $372 million in “Cash and Voucher Assistance”, and “Multipurpose Cash Assistance” to some 624,000 immigrants in-transit to the United States during 2024.

The $372 million in planned cash giveaways to the 624,000 immigrants moving north and illegally crossing national borders “Represents a significantly greater share of the financial requirements” for 2024, the RMRP says, but it is still only one part of much broader UN hemisphere-wide vision that aims to spend $1.59 billion assisting about three million people in 17 countries who emigrated from their home nations.

Without distinction, both populations get access to UN cash but also “Humanitarian transportation”, shelter, food, legal advice, personal hygiene products, health care, and “Protection” against threats like human smuggling, and much more besides cash in envelopes or debit cards.

The cash handouts will be in the mix during 2024 as the UN and its private partners incorporate an “Increased use of CVA” in the $184 million it plans to provide 1.2 million people, $122 million for rent support and also “Temporary collective shelter” for 473,000 people, and $25.8 million for “Humanitarian transportation” to 129,000 people crossing borders.

The NGOs actively participated in crafting the RMRP 2024 Update, which amends a 2023-2024 plan released back in 2022 that at the time foresaw a decline in illegal immigration after 2023.

Their plan frequently acknowledges the illegality, saying for instance, that one in three of the Venezuelan migrants the UN aims to help are in “Irregular situations”, including those “Who have crossed international borders without complying with all the legal and administrative requirements for entry and may not have the required documentation to do so”, as well as visa overstayers.

Someone took the trouble to add a footnote on that page noting that the map “Does not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the UN”. Why hand out hundreds of millions of dollars as cash and services to hundreds of thousands planning to illegally follow that red line through UN member states, to include crossing the US border, when those nations don’t like or want it and must bear the political controversies of it?

Over the past three years, I have visited UN waystations featuring long lines of U.S.-bound immigrants applying for aid from clipboard-wielding workers handing out cash cards and other goodies, from Reynosa and Monterrey in the north of Mexico to Tapachula in the far south.

The RMRP plan calls for distributing most of the cash, cash equivalents, and vouchers to migrants in Colombia and Ecuador, which are launch pads that sent 450,000 people through the Darian Gap jungle passage in Panama.