Claims that the United States bishops conference profits from its partnership with the US government to assist refugee populations that qualify for federal assistance are “just wrong”, says the bishops’ migration director. Source: OSV News.
William Canny, executive director of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, made the comments on January 30 in the wake of remarks by Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump’s press secretary.
Mr Vance, who is Catholic, questioned the motives of the bishops’ criticism of Mr Trump’s new immigration policies in a January 26 interview – including reducing restrictions on raids on churches and schools.
He asked if the bishops were actually concerned about receiving federal resettlement funding and “their bottom line”.
The same week, in her debut press briefing as White House press secretary on January 28, Karoline Leavitt, also a Catholic, suggested the Trump administration would seek to strip federal funds from non-governmental organisations, including Catholic Charities, as part of its effort to enforce its immigration policies.
In that exchange, Catholic Charities was accused of facilitating illegal immigration, claims the domestic charitable arm of the Church in the US has long denied.
The USCCB website states that its Migration and Refugee Services “is the largest refugee resettlement agency in the world” and that in partnership with its affiliates, it resettles approximately 18 per cent of the refugees that arrive in the US each year.
Audited financial statements by an outside firm show that the USCCB received about $US122.6 million in 2022 and about $US129.6m in 2023 in funding from government agencies for refugee-related services.
But the same statements show that the USCCB spent more on those services than the government gave them, meaning the conference did not profit from the grants, according to the conference’s auditors.
“We have an obligation to the federal government, when we take these grants, to report back to them, to monitor the activities that these agencies carry out. We’re talking food, housing, clothes, medical attention, et cetera, so we have an obligation to monitor that,” Mr Canny said.
“The conference does not profit from this money. And in fact, we cannot, we do not run these programs without putting also in some private funds. So there’s absolutely no profiting from these federal grants.”
FULL STORY
Audited financials show claims the Church profits from refugee work ‘just wrong’ (By Kate Scanlon, OSV News)
