During a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TX) questioned Mark Krikorian, Executive Director at the Center for Immigration Studies, about U.S. humanitarian aid.
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00:00...lady yields, and for the record, the Heritage Foundation receives no federal funding.
00:05I now recognize Mr. Burchett from Tennessee.
00:08Thank you, Chair Lady.
00:09I think the irony of our ironies here is that our friends across the aisle keep bringing up Elon Musk
00:15and what a great person he is, and I guess about a week ago they were out to kill him.
00:21So this is a backwards day, as always.
00:24Mr. Krakorian, Alexandro Mayorkas served as the United States border czar for four years.
00:35What did he do before his appointment?
00:39He's an attorney, and he was on the board of, among other things, HIAS,
00:44which is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which is one of the nonprofit groups that resettles refugees
00:49and was also involved in this movement of illegal immigrants up through Latin America.
00:54Okay.
00:56You think it's a good thing that Mayorkas served at an NGO whose goal it was mass migrant resettlement in the U.S.?
01:05Well, I disagree with the goal, obviously, but no, I think it was a problem because there's a kind of, you know, conflict of interest there.
01:15I mean, he was essentially implementing in government policy and having these nonprofit groups like HIAS but many others sort of as proxies to promote the policies that the administration was trying to implement.
01:28Well, in 2021 alone, this organization received over $40.9 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, State and Homeland Security.
01:41Don't you think that is a direct conflict of interest?
01:44Yeah, in the sense that some of that was spent on migration causes, yes, I think so, and that probably was at least part of the reason that the House impeached Secretary Mayorkas.
01:57I guess it's a little bit like a congressman becoming a lobbyist.
02:00Kind of, I guess, nothing personal against anybody here.
02:05That's all right.
02:06Well, none of us better be lobbyists or we need to go to jail.
02:09At what point do you believe humanitarian aid and assistance becomes material support for illegal activity?
02:17I'm not sure I'd be able to draw kind of a specific line and say here's where it is, but at this scale, there's simply no way that these organizations did not see themselves as part of a network to subvert U.S. immigration law.
02:35You know, the occasional provision of, you know, water to somebody who's in real distress is one thing.
02:42But setting up a network, essentially a kind of aid station network, a pipeline from South America to the border, is not something that you, it's not comparable in any way.
02:55It's not just different in scale, it's different in kind.
02:58Yeah.
02:58Myself and the chair lady, she is my co-sponsor on a bill to literally defund the Taliban.
03:05As it turns out, we're sending them close to $40 million a week.
03:08I have a State Department document that was classified documents, become unclassified.
03:16We have given them close to $5 billion with a B, although that's not big numbers here.
03:22I can assure you in East Tennessee that's a whole heck of a lot of money.
03:26Would you have any idea how many, any of y'all have any idea how many NGOs that we believe could be working out of Afghanistan right now?
03:34Anybody have a shot in the dark?
03:36No, I have no idea, I'm afraid. Sorry.
03:38Would you believe close to $1,000?
03:40$1,000.
03:41Yes.
03:42And yet, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has taken almost, we're working on two years now to get this bill out and get it to the Senate and get them to pass it.
03:53To me, it is criminal.
03:55It is criminal what these organizations are doing.
03:58It is criminal, $40 million a week to the Taliban.
04:00They throw gay folks off of buildings.
04:05They rape women and children.
04:08Then they stone the women after somehow it's their fault.
04:13I mean, these are godless creatures, and we are funding them with our tax dollars, and Americans, I believe, are getting rich off of it.
04:22I believe that some of the money is flowing back here through some of these NGOs, and I would sure like to see that paper trail solidified in my mind so I could point to it.
04:36And if it's a member of Congress, again, they need to be let out of here in handcuffs.
04:41I want to thank you.
04:42Any of you like to comment on any of that?
04:45I would like to say, sir, that nonprofit organizations, if they are working in Afghanistan, it's to meet the tremendous humanitarian needs that exist.
04:53I can assure you that, ma'am.
04:54And I think conflating nonprofits with the Taliban is deeply dangerous.
04:59Well, they actually, ma'am, they actually take a cutoff of everything that goes through there, just like the mob would.
05:05There's three major banks, and they get their money off.
05:07It's been documented by government officials, and I've run out of time.
05:12Chairlady, I yield nothing back to you.
05:14Thank you, Mr. Burchett.
05:16Honored to be a co-sponsor of your defund the Taliban bill.
05:19I now recognize Mr.