Corruption Chronicles
Judicial Watch
10/11/2011
The Obama Justice Department has recently awarded millions of dollars in politically-motivated grants with a chunk of the money going to community groups that help illegal immigrants, a Judicial Watch investigation has found.
“Nonprofits” that share the administration’s anti-capital punishment stance also got quite a bit of money from the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to grant announcements posted on the government’s spending website and analyzed in the course of JW’s probe. In fact, just last month the DOJ gave the Innocence Project of Texas its first federal grant, a whopping quarter of a million dollars. The group has worked endlessly to abolish the death penalty in the Lone Star State.
The Innocence Project of Florida, which strives to do the same in that state, has received two generous DOJ grants under President Obama in the last few years, for $195,025 in late 2009 and $297,000 in 2010. The Tallahassee-based group’s first allotment went to a wrongful prosecution review project. The second went to a backlog reduction program and to review wrongful convictions in Florida.
Outrageous as those may seem, the federal agency charged with enforcing the law and defending the nation’s interests dedicated even more taxpayer money to help illegal aliens in the last few months, JW found. Just last month the New York-based Vera Institute of Justice got nearly $3 million for a “legal orientation program” for detained aliens. The group, which gets significant funding from leftwing billionaire George Soros, had previously received millions of dollars in federal contracts in the last several years.
Other open borders groups also got money from the DOJ, including the California-based National Immigration Law Center, which is dedicated to fighting “draconian restrictions on immigrants’ rights” and boasts about having a “strong presence in Washington D.C.” The DOJ gave it $66,000 this year for “immigration-related employment discrimination public education.” Last spring the group got a similar DOJ grant for $65,453.
Earlier this year another Golden State group, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, got its first federal grant for $44,000, compliments of the DOJ. The money went to the group’s “Tenemos Derechos” (we have rights) program for immigrant communities and will be applied to “education and enforcement of the antidiscrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationalization Act,” according to the grant announcement dug up during JW’s analysis.
