by Stu Cvrk
How sanctuary policies, activist lawsuits, electoral vulnerabilities, and dark-money recycling make the invasion self-sustaining.
Sanctuary City Machines
Sanctuary policies are a strongly partisan phenomenon at the jurisdiction level, concentrated in Democrat-controlled (“blue”) areas. Roughly 90–95 percent of the sanctuary cities in the United States are located in Democrat-run cities, based on available data from lists of sanctuary jurisdictions (cities, counties, and states that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, such as by restricting ICE detainers).
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the net cost of illegal immigration for the U.S. at the federal, state, and local levels was at least $150.7 billion at the start of 2023, costing each American taxpayer $1,156 per year.
Major sanctuary jurisdictions became primary expenditure nodes. New York City has paid $5.22 billion for the care of new arrivals since 2022. Chicago, which reported 51,643 new arrivals, spent $574.5 million. In fiscal year 2024, New York committed $3.07 billion to immigrant care. A $2.1 billion New York state fund paying unemployment and stimulus benefits to illegal aliens was exhausted in just three months.
Federal money meanwhile continued flowing into sanctuary jurisdictions. In 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) awarded approximately $300 million to sanctuary jurisdictions under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, and the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program—representing more than 40 percent of available funding—despite those jurisdictions having adopted policies to obstruct immigration enforcement.
As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 illegal aliens with criminal histories free in the United States, a number reflecting only those known to ICE. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the federal government spent over $1.45 billion reimbursing local jurisdictions and NGOs providing travel, shelter, and other services to illegal aliens encountered and released by law enforcement.
Activist Lawfare Groups
The legal resistance architecture is well funded and institutionally coordinated. United We Dream, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Abundant Futures Fund launched the Defending Our Neighbors Fund, a $30 million initiative to scale up financial support to legal organizations nationwide providing representation to immigrant families facing deportation.
The Acacia Center for Justice (ACJ), the primary contractor for the federal Unaccompanied Children Program (UCP), received federal dollars under a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule providing “legal representation for unaccompanied alien children in both immigration-related and non-immigration-related contexts.” The ACJ openly bragged in its 2024 Year In Review about being the primary UCP contractor. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan described the arrangement as one that involved “hundreds of millions of dollars” in taxpayer funding flowing to groups providing social services and legal representation to illegal aliens to help them remain in the country.
At the municipal level, the pattern was well established long before the 2025 enforcement surge: Philadelphia budgeted $300,000 to publicly fund immigration attorneys for aliens facing deportation; the New York City Council budgeted $16.6 million for the same purpose.
Cartel Transport Corridors Subsidized by the UN and NGOs
The cash infrastructure described above directly subsidized cartel transport routes by eliminating the financial barrier to migration. According to Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Senior National Security Fellow Todd Bensman, all the money, vouchers, and UN/NGO assistance was intended for illegal aliens who would otherwise not make the caravan journey due to fears about food and safety—effectively removing the economic deterrent to crossing. The UN’s own murals in Tapachula, Mexico, prominently advertised UN agency presence and assistance along the northward migration corridor.
The IOM’s cash-based interventions program increased by 77 percent between 2019 and 2020, with critics arguing that Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policies were a motivating factor—the UN/NGO infrastructure was being expanded specifically to counter U.S. enforcement measures.
H-1B Visa Corruption and Labor Replacement
A Trump administration proclamation in September 2025 documented that the H-1B program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” with the “large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse” undermining both economic and national security. The number of foreign STEM workers in the U.S. more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, from 1.2 million to nearly 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment grew only 44.5 percent in the same period.
A CIS investigation documented “industrialized” fraud in the H-1B system, with a Foreign Service officer describing firsthand systemic fraud at U.S. consular posts in Chennai, India, where officials adjudicated 220,000 H-1Bs and 140,000 H-4 family visas in 2024 alone—including forged degrees and falsified employment credentials. The DOL launched 175 investigations into H-1B abuse, uncovering over $15 million in calculated back wages, and documented “benching”—where H-1B holders are paid nothing between work projects in violation of program requirements.
Ballot Infrastructure and Electoral Ecosystem
The electoral dimension is the most contested analytically, with a meaningful distinction between the structural conditions enabling noncitizen registration and the proven scale of actual illegal voting. The structural vulnerabilities are documented.
The Motor-Voter law (NVRA, 1993) was identified by the Center for Immigration Studies as a primary facilitation mechanism, with provisions explicitly forbidding officials from taking “any action the purpose or effect of which is to discourage applicants from registering to vote”—meaning officials cannot discourage ineligible non-citizens who don’t realize they aren’t eligible. States offering driver’s licenses to illegal aliens (California, New York, and others) feed directly into automatic voter registration systems.
The structural argument is distinct from the voting question: the mass importation of illegal alien populations creates permanent demographic and political pressure for open-border policies and amnesties, reshaping the political landscape independently of any direct voting by non-citizens.
Some Democrat-dominated jurisdictions have gone further—New York City in December 2021 extended the right to vote in municipal elections to lawful permanent residents and other non-citizens authorized to work in the United States.
ActBlue and Foreign Money Laundering
ActBlue is the leading online fundraising platform that enables Democrat candidates, progressive organizations, and nonprofits to collect and distribute small-dollar donations efficiently from grassroots supporters—and, as we are discovering, from foreign (illegal) sources. A House investigation found that ActBlue detected at least 22 “significant fraud campaigns” in recent years—nearly half of which had a foreign nexus. Over a 30-day window during the 2024 election cycle, ActBlue detected 237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards. The investigation revealed that ActBlue trained employees to “look for reasons to accept contributions” even in the face of suspicious activity.
Within four months following the 2024 election, ActBlue’s entire legal and compliance team was gone—having resigned, having been fired, or having stepped out on extended leave. A House joint committee report characterized this as a direct consequence of ActBlue’s “knowing and willful acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up.”
The Republican-led inquiry documented at least 237 overseas transactions using prepaid cards between September and October 2024, from Brazil, Colombia, India, Iraq, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. ActBlue’s own outside counsel, Covington & Burling, warned in a February 2025 internal memo that “it could be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections” in violation of federal law.
Five depositions of key ActBlue fraud-prevention and legal personnel were conducted by the House committees. Employees invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to every single substantive question—146 times in total. President Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the attorney general to investigate, and Texas AG Ken Paxton filed suit against ActBlue in April 2026.
Concluding Thoughts
The system’s architecture is not accidental: it is layered, legally defended, institutionally entrenched, and self-reinforcing—with the legal-lawfare layer actively resisting enforcement, the electoral layer protecting the political coalition that funds it, and the campaign finance layer recycling foreign and domestic money to sustain pro-open-border political infrastructure. The political coalition includes the entirety of the Democrat Party and their Republican allies who seek to exploit cheap labor.
The architecture spans every level of government and every sector of civil society. At the international level, the United Nations and its migration agencies—primarily funded by U.S. contributions—distributed cash, debit cards, and logistical support to hundreds of thousands of migrants moving northward through Latin America toward the U.S. border.
At the federal level, the State Department, USAID, DHS, HHS, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement functioned not as enforcement or humanitarian agencies in any neutral sense, but as funding conduits routing billions of dollars annually to a network of NGOs whose operational purpose was migrant facilitation, interior resettlement, and legal resistance to deportation.
At the state and local level, sanctuary jurisdictions (~95 percent Democrat) provided a territorial shield—refusing cooperation with federal immigration enforcement while delivering taxpayer-funded housing, healthcare, legal representation, and income support to illegal alien populations, often reimbursed in part by the same federal government whose laws they were obstructing.
U.S. taxpayers have been unwittingly underwriting the network that is destroying their own constitutional republic. This must stop!
Photo: ANTELOPE WELLS, NM - MAY 18: A large group of migrants walk and stand while being detained by border authorities in the early morning hours after crossing to the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border and turning themselves in, at the Antelope Wells port of entry, on May 18, 2019 in Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Migrants are frequently turning themselves in and asking for asylum at the location after crossing the border. Approximately 1,000 migrants per day are being released by authorities in the El Paso sector of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Stu Cvrk retired as a
captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active
and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the
Middle East and the Western Pacific. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval
Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as
the key foundation for his geopolitical commentary.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/24/the-open-border-funding-and-facilitation-network-part-ii-entrenchment-lawfare-and-the-political-money-loop/
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