County Gives $100k To Group That Aids Illegal Immigrants

In a disgraceful waste of tax dollars, a community group that assists illegal immigrants in the U.S. and helps them evade arrest has received $100,000 from a county that ironically has increased immigration enforcement in the last year.

The public funds went to Progreso Hispano, a nonprofit in Fairfax Virginia that proudly helps illegal aliens and aims to empower them and improve the quality of their lives and communities. The charity also counsels illegal immigrants who get arrested and offers a handy guide for “undocumented” residents dealing with federal agents.

Progreso Hispano openly advices the area’s illegal aliens to refrain from providing government officials with information about their immigration status, not to carry papers from another country, not to open the door if authorities come to their home, not to run and to sway co-workers to collectively remain silent and ask for an attorney in the event of an immigration raid.

The Fairfax County Supervisors that recently approved the public funds aren’t bothered by Progreso Hispano’s work and predict it won’t negatively affect future allocations, according to the local newspaper that broke the story this week. One supervisor says she has no problem with “extending outreach” that informs people on how to comply with the law.

Fairfax County is the most populous jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area, an upscale zone in northern Virginia with about 1 million residents. The median household income is among the highest in the nation and more than half of its adult residents have college degrees or some sort of educational attainment.

The county is generous with the community funding pool that just gave Progreso Hispano a hundred grand, annually allocating millions to social and human services causes. Lawmakers say they give Progreso Hispano public money because it’s a service-oriented group that offers English and citizenship classes and shies away from advocacy events such as street marches.

Mingling public funds with illegal immigrant causes has gotten Fairfax County in trouble before. A few years ago Judicial Watch took legal action against a taxpayer-funded day laborer site in the Fairfax County town of Herndon. The camp subsequently shut down and the county was taken to task for planning to allocate public funds to similar projects.