How NGOs help migrant traffickers at the US border

The road to hell is paved with good intentions — as the involvement of American religious organizations with human traffickers across our southern border demonstrates. 

Witness Annunciation House, a Catholic NGO being sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over its failure to comply with document demands related to its alleged stateside role in the migrant crisis caused by President Biden’s disastrous policies. 

Annunciation House offers shelter to migrants; Paxton wanted to know if the group was crossing the line into enabling actual human smuggling itself and called for relevant documents. Annunciation House refused to comply — and Paxton’s suit seeks to strip the group of its ability to operate in Texas. 

Whatever the outcome, the issue raises thorny questions. 

Yes, helping the vulnerable is a noble goal. And yes, illegal migrants are among the most vulnerable groups in the nation. 

But their vulnerability comes precisely from their refusal to follow the law: They constitute a large and growing population without the real ability to work legally and usually without significant resources. 

Worse, migrants in many cases pay human traffickers to get them to the US border and across it. 

These traffickers are often employed by narco cartels.

Unfortunate as it is, the cartels’ business model depends on a massive infrastructure on this side of the border ready to help the migrants across and then along into destinations around America’s interior. 

Wittingly or not, in other words, Annunciation House (and numerous other charities involved in migrant aid at the border) may be indirectly aiding the cartels by helping illegal entrants — providing a goal at the end of the expensive and dangerous journey the traffickers extract their profits from. 

Don’t forget about groups like Catholic Charities, which not only shelters migrants but then helps buy them bus or plane fare (in numbers that exceed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s wildest dreams) — and gets taxpayer money via FEMA for doing so.

More broadly, a host of nonprofit-paid activists have spread the word far and wide on just what to say to have enough of an asylum claim to get released into the US interior.

But trafficked migrants often enter the country indebted to their traffickers, debts that must be repaid under threat of violence to the migrants or their family members.

Does aiding the progress of human beings into violent debt slavery count as a good work? 

And at what point does providing yet another way station in this process shade into actual complicity?

Keep in mind that the compassion these groups and their backers invoke as their guiding principle doesn’t show up very visibly in the result of their actions. 

Encouraging an influx that’s crushing small border towns to the breaking point, hurting big cities across the nation, and driving horrible crimes isn’t compassionate. 

Nor is greasing a path into sex work or the gray economy of app deliveries.

When progressives start shouting about compassion, in other words, beware: Human degradation is all but certain to follow.