January 1, Report: Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Given to Left-Wing ‘Behemoth’

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY…
1913: British House of Commons accepts Home Rule for Ireland (but the Great War gets in the way of it happening)

A new report has found that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars went to a left-wing nonprofit group.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) granted the Vera Institute of Justice, a progressive criminal justice advocacy group, a $158 million contract in 2021 to “provide immigration related legal services to unaccompanied minors.”

“The Vera Institute of Justice is a behemoth progressive nonprofit based out of New York City with well over a $140 million budget, which they use to fund a slate of progressive causes and initiatives across the country,” said Jason Hopkins, an investigative associate with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. “Whether that be criminal justice reform, bail reform and also immigration.”

Hopkins told Fox News that the federal government provides roughly half of the institute’s funding. Between 2019 and 2020, $137 million of the group’s $174 million in revenue came from government grants.

“The $158 million is just the latest in the hundreds of millions that they provided to Vera for their services,” Hopkins said.

Fox News, who first reported the story, said the contract began on March 30, 2021, with a potential end date of March 30, 2022.

Every year, “thousands of immigrant children are placed into court proceedings in which government prosecutors seek to deport them unless those children can prove they have a right to stay in the United States,” a Vera Institute spokesperson told the outlet.

The Immigration Reform Law Institute estimated that taxpayers spend at least $5.6 million in some cities for a Vera-affiliated deportation legal defense initiative.

“Vera Institute of Justice has an initiative called Safety and Fairness for Everyone,” Hopkins said. “This began several years ago, and it focuses on providing taxpayer-funded legal representation to aliens – even illegal aliens – that are placed in deportation procedures.” 

“What they’ve done is frankly very smart,” he added. “It’s sort of a bottom-up approach.”

“Instead of being funded by the federal government and kind of trickling down, this is more of a grassroots approach where they’re going from city to city, county to county and getting these local city governments to create a deportation fund that’s in part funded by taxpayers,” he continued.

Hopkins noted that Vera’s website states that it’s “committed to ensuring that every person facing deportation receives legal representation regardless of … history with the criminal legal system.”

“That really opens up the door to—is this an illegal alien who’s been charged, convicted of murder, rape and any other heinous crime? Vera is very open that they really don’t care about their criminal history,” Hopkins said. 

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Source:

Left-wing group secured $158 million taxpayer-funded contract to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation