ORR Fed $ to Migrants-Open the Books ‘Every Dime-Online-In Real Time’

What follows in Part I is from an email from Open the Books to this writer for MHProNews and for

this Patch. If this sounds a bit like what is emerging from the discoveries being revealed about USAID or FEMA, that may be part of the point in Open the Books timing for the release of this information. More on that and other topics in Part II.

Part I - According to Open the Books email

CASH FOR MIGRANTS: FEMA NOT THE ONLY AGENCY SPENDING BIG

The Office of Refugee Resettlement has faced questions over transparency, conflict of interest.

OpenTheBooks Feb 13 [2025]

Elon Musk reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent $59 million last week alone – all on immigrants in New York City. Part of that was for housing, including luxury properties like The Row and The Watson, meant for tourists headed to see the marquees of Broadway. (Later the feds clawed back $80M from the city).

Open the Books previously reported that FEMA had an enormous $8 billion shortfall in its Disaster Relief Fund following the catastrophic damage of Hurricane Helene.

Well, FEMA is not the only agency that’s been spending gobs of taxpayer dollars on the immigration crisis. Programs span various agencies.

Included is the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), housed inside the Department of Health and Human Services subagency called the Administration for Children and Families.

ORR has spent over $22.6 BILLION since 2020 on grants to nonprofits providing everything from help accessing Medicaid to help building credit, help with home and auto loans, and cash assistance. Yes, cold hard cash!

WHAT IS ORR?

While Department of Homeland Security is often thought of as the main agency in charge of migration policy and spending in the United States, ORR spends tens of billions a year setting up refugees in the United States. Programmatic activities had a focus on, but were not exclusive to, unaccompanied children.

As Open the Books previously reported, one ORR program helped participants save for car and home purchases, another gave out business and personal loans to help them build credit. Another program helped with “legal assistance,” “cultural orientation,” and “emergency housing support.”

These acted as giant magnets for those seeking to cross the border and claim asylum.

As spending from ORR exploded, Open the Books also identified instances where the agency was expanding the scope of criteria for individuals eligible for its funding. For example, in its 2023 Congressional Budget Justification, the agency suggested the following changes to expand its mandate:

• Advocating that “Special Immigrant Juvenile Minors” within the “Unaccompanied Refugee Minor” (URM) program access the same benefits as refugees, which include access to Medicaid and the same foster care services as American children.

• Expanding legal assistance to Ukrainian and Afghan children and other URM-designated youth to legal assistance ensuring permanent residency.

• Giving cash assistance to full-time college or technical school student refugees.

• Removing the need for refugees to obtain economic self-sufficiency “as quickly as possible.”

Total amount of new grants awarded by ORR, from FY 2020-2024

2020: $2,682,493,224.22

2021: $2,352,120,351.54

2022: $3,378,055,499.50

2023: $10,035,487,466.68

2024: $4,207,541,746.00

UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN

ORR came under increased scrutiny in 2023 after the New York Times reported 85,000 unaccompanied children lost after being sent to agency-approved “sponsors.” Then-ORR Director Robin Dunn Marcos said in a related Congressional hearing that she did not believe the vetting system was inadequate and would not affirm if the 85,000 figure is accurate.

Tom Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the first Trump administration, and now President Trump’s “Border Czar,” estimates the number of missing unaccompanied children to be around 300,000. One of his mandates is finding these children and ensuring their safety.

CLOSE TIES WITH TOP GRANTEE

Notably, two of ORR’s top grantees were also the former employers of Dunn Marcos: The International Rescue Committee (IRC), where Dunn Marcos spent 23 years, including eight as Senior Director for Resettlement, Asylum, and Integration; and Church World Service, where she spent four years.

Given the astounding increase in funding both nonprofits received from ORR, Open the Books asked the agency if Dunn Marcos was involved in decisions regarding her former employers, particularly IRC.

We were told by an ACF spokesperson: “Consistent with the Ethics Pledge, Robin Dunn Marcos is recused from participating in particular matters involving specific parties in which IRC is or represents a party. That recusal obligation lasts for two years from her date of appointment, which was September 11, 2022.”

IRC was awarded grants worth $598 million since 2020, over half of which ($336,915,216) came between 2023 and 2024. $112 million of it was discretionary grants, making IRC the top awardee during that period.

Church World Services was awarded grants worth $355 million in that same time since 2020.

SIDENOTE: In 2023, IRC received funding for the first time from ORR’s Unaccompanied Children program: $13,005,424 for “home studies and post-release services”

But even before then, the nonprofit worked in some capacity with unaccompanied children.

According to one article “IRC Los Angeles...[provides] assistance with school enrollment, acquiring state medical insurance, and obtaining pro bono legal services from local partner organizations.”

As spending at ORR swelled to new heights, IRC benefitted handsomely. The organization received over $235 million in spending in FY 2023 compared to $22 million in FY 2021.

FAILURE OF TRANSPARENCY

While it would be nice if taxpayers could take ORR at their word that Dunn Marcos was recused, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any emails she exchanged with anyone working IRC. This request was made in May 2023. We still have not received a response.

According to the most recently available FOIA Report from HHS (2023), ORR’s parent agency, the Administration for Children and Families, has a median wait time of 1,065 days for pending simple requests. For comparison, the Centers for Disease Control wait time is 22 days. Both agencies have roughly the same number of full-time FOIA staff (ACF has 21 compared to CDC’s 25). At the end of the 2023 fiscal year, ACF had 913 backlogged requests compared to CDC’s 186.

We reached out to ACF as to why this agency has unique issues filling FOIA requests, and what reforms could make it more effective. We did not receive a response.

LEADERSHIP CHANGE

As of February 2025, it may be little surprise that Robin Dunn Marcos’ email now returns an automated response indicating she is no longer at the agency. Colleagues are instructed to contact Marcela Ruiz, the ORR “Principal Deputy Director.” Ruiz did respond to an email but indicated questions should be directed to the ACF media team.

Very little can be learned about Ruiz from the ACF and ORR websites, but her posture towards her work can be approximated by her background. Ruiz’s previous work is in immigration policy and advocacy; before joining ORR in March 2024, she was Director of the Office of Equity at California’s Department of Social Services. In one of her presentations from 2021 she advocates for “implicit bias training,” a “racial equity working group,” and “listening sessions and affinity groups” for her department. Yes, this is more of the DEI worldview that has taken root in every nook and cranny of government over the past decade.

News reports indicate veteran Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Mellissa Harper has been tapped to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement, on detail from her position at ICE. Reports indicate Harper may be the first director of ORR to come from ICE. It is unclear if Ruiz is still serving as the ORR director’s deputy.

We reached out to the ACF media team with questions about Ruiz’s current work and have not received a response.

CONCLUSION

While Dunn Marcos may have disappeared from ORR, our questions remain over whether certain nonprofit organizations received special treatment amid the billions in grants furnished by the government office. What’s clear is that ORR has funded a constellation of NGO’s deployed in border states and nationwide, who give out aid designed to attract even more migrants.

Like FEMA, DOGE ought to take an exhaustive look at the Office of Refugee Resettlement and determine what is life-saving aid, and what funding simply prolongs the border crisis by attracting more migrants.

And like too many agencies across the federal government, ORR’s parent agency needs to live up to the transparency moment and give taxpayers answers – way sooner than a thousand days.

Part II - Additional Information with More Analysis and Commentary, plus Other Topics

This writer has been following Open the Books for several years. They produce useful research on what various governmental entities are spending. The term "watchdog" for this organization is appropriate. Long before Trump 2.0 began Open the Books was revealing the sorts of things that DOGE and other parts of the new administration have been sharing and spotlighting.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna (FL-R) has been placed in what may be a key House commitee leadership role, as was covered in the article linked below.

Trump nominees Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have both been confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

"Trump, simply put in a word, he's winning" when it comes to his Cabinet nominees. RFK Jr./Gabbard look like they'll get confirmed. Rest are all but assured.

At least so far, Trump is getting more of his picks through than the average president in the modern era (since 1993). pic.twitter.com/DDtU5Vlazd
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/Forecaster... 4, 2025

Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI is another promise President Trump kept to MAHA.

RFK Jr. “strongly recommended” to Trump before the election that he include Gabbard in his Transition Team.

Trump took Kennedy’s advice, and then went a step further, nominating Gabbard to… pic.twitter.com/iONZlLLawz
— American Values 🗽 (@AVPac_US) February" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/AVPac_US/s... 12, 2025

On Manufactured Home Pro News we took a deeper dive earlier today on CURE President Star Parker and related insights on the early developments for Trump 2.0, Trump's newly appointed HUD Secretary E. Scott Turner, and how those steps could broadly impact the American people and the affordable housing market.

Let's ponder manufactured housing briefly, because the nation has an affordable housing crisis and 50 years after HUD was put in charge of HUD Code manufactured homes, the industry is still very misunderstood. HUD bears some responsbility for that situation. So do others, which will be considered in an upcoming report. But oddly, several larger firms that play an outsized role at the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) arguably are behaving in a corrupt fashion that keeps the industry underperforming. That's important for all those who hope to end renting and want to own an affordable home. It is also important for those who want to see housing become more affordable or who want to see federal, state, and local spending on housing to go down. The Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) has openly said that MHI fumbled the first Trump term (or worse than fumbling, they helped subverted Trump 1.0).

As a disclosure, this writer was an MHI member for about 7 years and was elected by industry peers to be on the MHI supplier's division board of directors. I know that association from the inside. As I began asking - politely at first - questions about MHI's obvious misses, their leadership apparently decided that they didn't want authentic discussion of issues their. Now that we have artificial intelligence (AI) MHI's behavior can be examined through the proverbial 'eyes' of sources like Copilot and Gemini. AI has said on numerous occasions that MHI's behavior is contradictory to their stated claims.

Years of problematic behavior by MHI and MHI members ought to be brought to the attention of HUD Secretary E. Scott Turner because those corporate and staff leaders are either unable or unwilling to debate these concerns publicly. That apparent pattern causes the industry to steadily consolidate into the hands of a relatively few companies that have an outsized role at MHI.

No wonder that problematic and notorious MHI member Frank Rolfe said that he "blames" MHI for the low state of sales in the industry. Rolfe also said that there are "special interests" that do not want to solve the affordable housing crisis.

When a teenager can figure out that 50 years of talk on solving the affordable housing crisis is apparently an obvious cautionary flag.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been saying for decades that the system is rigged. But what has not happened in any serious way for years has been a leader that would take on the rigged system with the intention of unrigging it.

The health care system has been rigged.

The military industrial complex has been rigged in their own favor.

The housing system has been rigged.

More and more Americans have come to believe that these things are true.

Will Trump 2.0 and MAGA or MAHA supporters bring true reform to the federal system? Time will tell. But there are reasons for optimism.

Thanks for checking in again. To learn more, see the linked and related reports.

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L. A. “Tony” Kovach is a publisher who has earned multiple awards in history. He and his family live in a manufactured home on private property in Winter Haven, FL. He is the co-founder of Manufactured Home Living News.com (MHLivingNews.com) and Manufactured Home Pro News.com (MHProNews.com), trade publications serving segments of the manufactured home industry. Having worked in several segments of the manufactured home industry for over 3 decades, Kovach is a widely acknowledged and often praised expert on manufactured housing. ###