The leftist woman Bishop who verbally accosted Donald Trump during church service runs an organization that receives tens of millions in taxpayer dollars yearly to bring in thousands of migrants, including many from Afghanistan; Trump could have ended the program during his last administration but chose not to do it

 by Edward Ulrich, February 8, 2025


[Much of this information was found in this New York Post article by Don Barnett.  Also see this article summarizing the refugee resettlement program.]

It has been revealed that the Episcopal church, whose woman Bishop Mariann Budde essentially verbally attacked Donald Trump and his family during church service, is being paid tens of millions of dollars per year by the government to bring in migrants via the “refugee resettlement program,” which is a program that Trump has appropriately paused and targeted for re-evaluation.

The federal contracting arm of the Church is called the Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), where in 2023 it earned $53 million to “resettle” 3,600 individuals, and in 2024 it sponsored 6,400 individuals from 48 countries, most being from Afghanistan and DR Congo.  The EMM’s budget figures for 2024 are not available yet.

The EMM also brings in “LGBTQ+” refugees and asylees in a special federal refugee program started during the Obama administration called “Preferred Communities,” where the program pays the contractors a premium to resettle “refugees experiencing social or psychological difficulties, including emotional trauma resulting from war and/or sexual or gender-based violence; survivors of torture; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees; refugees who are HIV positive; populations with physical disabilities or other medical conditions.”

The people who are brought in are called “refugees,” but more often than not they are simply “economic migrants” of demographics that the UN has decided that they want to increase in the United States.

Migrants who arrive through the program receive special government assistance, and they are eligible to receive all forms of welfare such as Medicaid and all of the cash assistance that U.S. citizens receive.

Additionally, under Biden’s recent expansion of the program they can immediately sponsor friends and relatives to be brought in.

[Also see this article which explains that Trump had the option to eliminate the program during his previous administration, but he chose not to do so.  The program had been configured to give the President all of the decisions regarding it, but Trump refused to stop it even though it is abused.  It could have been removed without fuss in the media because the program has been essentially a “secret” in the first place.  Let’s hope that he will eliminate it this time.]

The office of Refugee Resettlement was projecting 656,500 new arrivals in 2025, which is radically more than during previous administrations when the yearly total was usually under 100,000.

Funding for the program is based on the amount of people who are brought in, therefore the programs have an incentive to maintain or increase the number that is brought in each year.

The Church also receives an enormous amount of additional money through a public-private partnership program that is misnamed as “Matching Grant,” where EMM will receive $1 if it contributes 10 cents along with 90 cents of used cars, furniture, or donated time.  When the “Matching Grant” program was first established, it actually did require EMM contributing a dollar for each it received, but that has been changed.

The Episcopal Church also earns a commission for collecting on travel loans that are made to refugees resettled by the EMM, where taxpayers fund “loans” for the airfare for the refugee’s flights to America.  If the refugees pay the interest-free loan back, the Church (not EMM) pockets 25% of the money, and if the loan is not paid back the money is all paid for by taxpayers.

The EMM is the second smallest of ten “religious contractors,” where it is dwarfed by The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which received $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2021.