“If they are in any way affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, they’ll never get anything from us again,” Suozzi said. “The CCP has tentacles trying to influence the distribution of information and disinformation throughout our society. There’s lesser-known examples like this, and [China] has a very sophisticated effort.”

Suozzi, co-chairman of a congressional caucus raising concerns over China’s persecution of Uyghur ethnic minorities, made the comments in an interview with the Washington Examiner after the outlet reached out to him with a list of questions about over $7,200 that his campaign dished out in February to a New York-based subsidiary of Sing Tao U.S. The payments to Sing Tao were earmarked under “print advertising” in New York.

That Chinese-owned newspaper was forced by the Biden administration in 2021 to register as a foreign agent engaged in “political activity,” according to records on file with the Department of Justice. The newspaper also reportedly shares ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which, according to the U.S. government, coordinates the party’s intelligence gathering and influence operations overseas.

News of the Sing Tao payments is likely to open Suozzi up to hypocrisy accusations as he looks to hold on to his House seat in 2024. The China critic won a special election earlier this year to replace expelled New York Republican Rep. George Santos. Suozzi has blasted the CCP for “egregious attacks on democracy and human rights” and often takes aim at China for its surveillance and detainment of Uyghur Muslims in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region that the State Department in 2021 determined to constitute genocide.

The congressman has also previously said the United States has a duty to counter Beijing’s efforts to “expand its sphere of influence” and “sophisticated plan to dominate the world.”

Reached by the Washington Examiner, Suozzi said he “unknowingly” advertised with Sing Tao. The situation, he said, appears to show “how insidious” the CCP is.

“If I’m a congressman and I didn’t know about it, think about what’s happening to regular citizens on a regular basis,” he said.

Mike LiPetri, the Republican nominee set to face off this November against Suozzi in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, said Suozzi’s payments warrant scrutiny. The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan elections tracker, rates the district as “likely Democrat” in 2024.

“NY-03 deserves a congressman who will stand up to China and its human rights violations, not line their communist pockets with cash that fuels their infiltration and influence-peddling schemes,” LiPetri, a former New York state assemblyman, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

Sing Tao U.S. is affiliated with a Hong Kong-based outlet said to have maintained leaders on China’s National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top CCP advisory body. Over half of Sing Tao’s content in 2021 was purchased by a company in southeastern China, DOJ filings show.

China’s government has one of the “world’s most restrictive media environments, relying on censorship to control information in the news, online, and on social media,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Sing Tao’s influence in the U.S. is under the spotlight following Newsweek reporting Sunday that its CEO helped organize a parade with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has faced scrutiny for accepting CCP-linked donations.

But the Suozzi campaign’s willingness to cut checks to Sing Tao is no anomaly among officeholders.

The Washington Examiner reported last August that eight other lawmakers paid $41,500 to Sing Tao, prompting one lawmaker, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), to say her aides were investigating the matter.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) paid Sing Tao in recent years and has touted doing so on social media. Another lawmaker who paid Sing Tao is Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY). There is no evidence these payments were made illegally, but they’ve raised eyebrows among some foreign policy experts focused on China.

“This may require a real bipartisan, top-down push inside the campaign industry to incorporate the Foreign Agents Registration Act into the due diligence process,” Richard Goldberg, senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said.

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Given the CCP’s influence campaign in the U.S., campaigns would be wise to issue written guidance to candidates so they “understand the risks associated with subsidizing or otherwise partnering with foreign government-controlled entities,” Goldberg told the Washington Examiner.

Sing Tao did not return a request for comment.

“There’s been too much gamesmanship here,” Judge Sidney Stein said ahead of jury selection in the high-profile trial. “Everybody has to operate in good faith here. I’m not sure I’ve seen that.”

Menendez, once one of the most powerful Democratic senators in Congress, sat silently in a Manhattan federal courtroom while Stein spoke. 

Menendez is accused of receiving bribes from 2018 to 2022. He’s also accused of extortion, fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt.

BOB MENENDEZ CORRUPTION TRIAL: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York told Stein that they expected to take up to 6 1/2 weeks to present their case. The trial itself could last around six to seven weeks, Stein told prospective jurors before outlining the 18-count indictment against Menendez and his co-defendants. 

Opening arguments could come as early as Tuesday.

This is the second criminal trial Menendez, 70, has faced. 

In 2017, he dodged conviction on a laundry list of other corruption charges, but legal experts claim this case, which was brought by the Justice Department, presents a bigger threat to Menendez and the country. 

“Any time an individual is indicted two times in a row for, let’s call it, public corruption, the odds are not in his favor,” Chris Adams, a defense attorney at the New Jersey law firm Greenbaum Rowe, which was part of Menendez’s 2017 legal team, told the Washington Post. “My view as a defense attorney is that this is a much stronger case for the government.”

Menendez has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. 

He is expected to pin much of the blame on his wife, Nadine Menendez, according to court filings. Nadine Menendez has also been charged and was supposed to go on trial with her husband. However, she had surgery and needed time to recover. Her trial is now slated to start in July. 

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The senator’s federal trial is taking place just a few blocks away from where former President Donald Trump is on trial linked to a $130,000 hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The New Jersey Democrat has pleaded not guilty. 

The longtime Democratic senator from New Jersey is expected to dig deep and reveal his penchant for hoarding big gold bars and his wife’s alleged lies and blame his father’s gambling problem and death for decisions that led him down a path that ended in a sprawling 18-count federal indictment, according to court documents. 

Menendez is accused of receiving bribes from 2018 to 2022. 

In exchange, he handed out political favors for the governments of Qatar and Egypt, as well as for co-defendants Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Jose Uribe, prosecutors claim.

Hana, an American citizen who emigrated from Egypt, had a string of failed business deals in New Jersey less than a decade ago, including a truck stop, an Italian restaurant, and a limo service, and had a friend who started dating Menendez. Soon thereafter, Hana’s fortunes started to turn around. He was introduced to a growing circle of top Egyptian officials by Menendez, who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hana won sole control over certifying all halal food being imported into Egypt. He had gone from being in debt and unable to pay medical bills to an international power broker who bragged about his luxury watch collection.  

He earned so much money that he was able to use some of it to buy gold bars and bribe Menendez for other things, prosecutors allege. 

The real rub was whether Hana was an agent of the Egyptian government all along or just a very unlucky guy who suddenly hit the jackpot after meeting Menendez.   

In 2017, the 70-year-old dodged conviction on a laundry list of other corruption charges, but legal experts claim this case, which was brought by the Justice Department, presents a bigger threat to Menendez and the country. 

“Any time an individual is indicted two times in a row for, let’s call it, public corruption, the odds are not in his favor,” Chris Adams, a defense attorney at the New Jersey law firm Greenbaum Rowe, which was part of Menendez’s 2017 legal team, told the Washington Post. “My view as a defense attorney is that this is a much stronger case for the government.”

The Washington Examiner will break down some of the most pressing questions about the trial, what’s at stake, key players, and what his colleagues in Congress are saying about it. 

What are the charges?

Menendez faces 16 criminal counts, including bribery, fraud, and foreign-agent offenses. Prosecutors allege he took bribes of cash, gold, and a luxury car in exchange for using his considerable political influence to help secure military sales for Egypt and to promote Qatari interests.

He is also charged with accepting gold, cash, and gifts, including a Mercedes-Benz convertible for his wife, from a New Jersey real estate developer in exchange for the senator to have unrelated federal bank charges against the real estate agent go away. 

Menendez has since stepped down as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

Menendez, who may take the stand, has accused prosecutors of misrepresenting the normal work of a congressional office and predicted he would be exonerated. 

He has pleaded not guilty. 

If he wins, he has left open the possibility of running for reelection in November. 

Who are the key players?

Wael Hana

Prosecutors claim Hana was a central figure in the scheme to ensnare one of the country’s top politicians. They claimed he capitalized on his relationship with Menendez not only to benefit himself but also to steer aid and weapons to Egypt. 

He has pleaded not guilty.

Nadine Menendez

Menendez’s wife of less than five years is accused of being a go-between between her husband, Egyptian intelligence officials, and the men who were looking for political favors from the senator, according to prosecutors. Her trial was supposed to start on Monday but was postponed after she had surgery and needed time to recover. 

It is now slated to get underway in July. 

She has pleaded not guilty.  

Jose Uribe

The former New Jersey insurance broker pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit bribery, honest-services fraud, and obstruction of justice.

He admitted to seeking the senator’s help to make state insurance fraud investigations that involved his friends disappear. 

“I knew that giving a car in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation was wrong, and I deeply regret my actions,” Uribe said. 

Fred Daibes

Prosecutors claim the New Jersey real estate developer gave Menendez gold, cash, and furniture in exchange for the senator to have unrelated federal bank charges against Daibes go away. 

Some of the money was allegedly used to get the senator to help line up financing for a stalled real estate project. 

Investigators found 11 gold bars linked to Daibes during a June 2022 search of Menendez’s home. They also found Daibes’s fingerprints and DNA on 10 envelopes containing more than $80,000, according to court records. 

Three months before the search, Nadine Menendez sold two 1-kilogram bars of gold that were also traced back to Daibes and worth about $120,000. 

Daibes has pleaded not guilty. 

How long is the trial supposed to last?

Several weeks, until at least July.

What is Menendez’s defense?

Recent court filings indicate that Menendez’s defense strategy includes blaming his wife and claiming that the large amounts of cash and gold he had in his New Jersey home were a “coping mechanism” that can be traced back to his father. 

When federal investigators searched his home in June 2022, they found more than $480,000 in cash that had been stashed in envelopes and coats. They also found 13 gold bars worth more than $100,000. 

They also seized another $80,000 from Nadine Menendez’s safety deposit box at a nearby bank.

According to the senator, he had a “habit” of withdrawing thousands in cash each month from his savings account in case of emergencies.

He claimed it was due to his family’s experience as Cuban refugees who had their money and possessions confiscated by the Cuban government and were only left with a small amount of cash they had managed to stash in their house. 

Psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum, who is expected to testify, claimed in a letter sent to prosecutors that Menendez “experienced trauma when his father, a compulsive gambler, died by suicide after Senator Menendez eventually decided to discontinue paying off his father’s gambling debts.” 

She claimed Menendez developed a mental condition that was left untreated and “resulted in a fear of scarcity for the senator and the development of a longstanding coping mechanism of routinely withdrawing and storing cash in his home.” The name of the mental condition was redacted. 

Menendez may also throw his wife under the bus, arguing she was the mastermind behind the allegations of bribery.

“Senator Menendez intends to present a defense arguing [in part] that he lacked the requisite knowledge of much of the conduct and statements of his wife, Nadine, and thus lacks scienter and did not agree to join any of the charged conspiracies,” his attorneys wrote in a court filing. 

Who is representing him?

Menendez dropped his previous criminal defense team at Winston and Strawn and hired its rivals at Paul Hastings, Reuters reported. Menendez’s new lawyers include Adam Fee, who spent five years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Avi Weitzman, who spent nearly seven. Weitzman is a partner at Paul Hastings. 

What are Menendez’s colleagues saying?

Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and other high-ranking Democrats have called on Menendez to resign. 

He has refused.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) hasn’t held his tongue, referring to Menendez multiple times as a “sleazeball.”

When asked by CNN what it says about the upper chamber of Congress that Menendez is still in office, Fetterman quipped, “I don’t know what it says other than they guess they’re just OK with having a sleazeball in the Senate.” 

Menendez is the only senator to be indicted in two unrelated criminal investigations. 

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Only 12 U.S. senators have been indicted while in office. 

Six were convicted. 

VA Undersecretary for Health Shereef Elnahal signed off on bonuses for 148 executives averaging more than $60,000, according to the 92-page report from Inspector General Michael Missal’s office. Joshua Jacobs, who leads the Veterans Benefits Administration, gave away an additional 34 bonuses worth $50,000 to top-level executives.

At least seven executives received more than $100,000 in bonuses, but Elnahal reportedly did not inform Secretary Denis McDonough of the extent of the payments. It wasn’t until last September that VA Secretary Denis McDonough learned of the payments and then ordered all of the executives to repay the VA. However, Missal found that most had already spent their checks, and some were challenging the order.

“The missteps … clearly had the potential to damage the confidence placed in VA by veterans, employees, taxpayers, and members of Congress,” the report said.

Neither Elnahal nor Jacobs, appointed by the Biden administration last year, analyzed whether the bonuses were earned, per the report, nor was there any document or data showing that these executives were at risk of quitting, for the turnover rate for top executives was just 2.4%.

“There did not appear to be a valid retention concern supporting these incentives,” the report found, adding that because of this, “the blanket award of [bonuses] to all … central office executives at the highest allowable percentage without sufficient justification was inconsistent with both the PACT Act and VA policy.”

VA offices, such as human resources and the legal department, failed to flag these bonuses, which investigators found to be a “breakdown in leadership and controls and missed opportunities at multiple levels.”

Elnahal had allegedly told investigators that he had no idea that the health system has more than 150 senior executives when he signed off on the awards. “I had no idea that we had upwards of 150 of them,” he said, according to the report. “I think if I had known that, my management instinct would be to get the same level of justifications together and the costs [as for the field executives].” However, the report reveals that Elnahal received an email that included a spreadsheet listing each leader due for a bonus.

The report found that Deputy Counsel for Legal Operations Brent Pope was shocked when he reviewed the health system’s justification after the awards were questioned by the secretary

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“I honestly couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Is that all that was there?’” Pope said, noting the documents revealed that top executives “were all given 25 percent and the justification was … two sentences.”

The VA is in the middle of a legal review with hopes of receiving those misallocated bonuses. McDonough is calling on the VA’s Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection to determine if any disciplinary action should be brought against the leaders involved in the bonuses.

As federally qualified health centers registered as tax-exempt nonprofit organizations in Georgia, Indiana, and Arizona, respectively, they cater to low-income patients benefiting from Medicaid and Medicare. The FQHCs, along with their counterparts, are set for a windfall thanks to President Joe Biden earlier this year freeing up $4.4 billion for them, the most substantial annual funding increase in a decade.

The taxpayer-backed health centers, however, also have something else in common. Like hundreds of others scattered across the United States, they are partners of a little-known charity in Boston called Vot-ER behind a sprawling “nonpartisan” operation to register vulnerable patients to vote ahead of the 2024 election between Biden and former President Donald Trump.

But Vot-ER, according to a Washington Examiner investigation, is hardly middle-of-the-road. Funded by top Democratic-allied dark money groups, staffed by left-wing activists, and organized by a former White House fellow now sitting on a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel focused on outreach to “vulnerable and underserved patient communities,” Vot-ER is a progressive hub poised to play a key role in voter mobilization in the lead-up to November.

That mobilization effort is at the heart of a 2021 Biden executive order gifting unprecedented new tools to federal agencies to register voters with the help of “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials.”

And Vot-ER, according to documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act, appears to be directly linked to the White House’s efforts to make Biden’s order a reality. The documents indicate that two top staffers from the Boston-based charity were present at a 2021 meeting with representatives from the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Justice, and other agencies, as well as other outside left-wing groups, to plan implementing the order.

This report is one of several in the Washington Examiner exploring Biden’s March 2021 executive order on voter registration and left-wing groups connected to it. To conservative legal experts and Republican lawmakers, the order is unconstitutional and will be used as a partisan weapon to score Biden a second term unlawfully.

“Under the IRS Code, all 501(c)(3) organizations are strictly forbidden from engaging in voter registration or get-out-the-vote efforts in a partisan manner,” said attorney Stewart Whitson at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a right-leaning think tank. In a 2023 study, FGA’s advocacy arm found a 30-point swing favoring Democrats among current welfare enrollees compared to low-income voters who have never received welfare.

“But Biden’s executive order sets the conditions for groups like Vot-ER to do just that, a clear violation of federal law,” Whitson said. “With the DOJ controlled by the current president, the onus falls on Congress to step up and investigate this activity.”

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Vot-ER Executive Director Aliya Bhatia insisted her group adheres to all IRS regulations and operates in a nonpartisan fashion.

“We ensure that our voter engagement efforts do not support or oppose any political party or candidate,” Bhatia said. “Our focus is on connecting voter registration and health-related outcomes.”

‘Sacred’

Biden’s 2021 executive order, issued in March of that year, required every federal agency to hand over a plan to the president’s domestic policy adviser detailing how it would increase voter registration and participation. Conservative legal experts, including fellow Hans von Spakovsky at the Heritage Foundation, say that agencies generally have no business registering voters over a risk of the current administration using the full weight of the government to push a partisan agenda.

But moreover, there is a lack of transparency from the Biden administration about the criteria for “approved” outside groups coordinating with the government on voter registration, a fact that prompted congressional Republicans to launch an investigation. It’s unclear who fits under this approved umbrella, though internal documents provide a glimpse into how groups enlisted by the White House for advice during a July 2021 order planning call were overwhelmingly of the progressive Left.

Two staffers from the Boston-based Vot-ER were present on that July 12, 2021 call, according to internal meeting notes. On the call, the outside organizations suggested registering groups such as low-income people in public housing, prison inmates, welfare recipients, and illegal immigrants, with the latter being a topic Vot-ER has explored in videos published on its YouTube account.

One Vot-ER staffer listed as having been on the White House call, Aliya Bhatia, is the group’s executive director. The second, Leah Ford, is Vot-ER’s chief of staff. Bhatia, who says on her personal website that she “prioritizes diversity and inclusion in all her endeavors,” cut a $500 check to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Ford, who has also donated to Biden and other Democrats, is a former Democratic political campaign aide and previously worked for Planned Parenthood, according to Ford’s LinkedIn profile and Federal Election Commission filings.

In February 2021, just one month before Biden issued the executive order that prompted that call, Vot-ER became registered as a charity with the IRS. Its founder was listed on financial disclosures as Alister Martin, a physician and White House fellow from August 2021 to October 2022. Martin, who government visitor logs show has made trips to the White House since his departure, joined an HHS advisory panel in 2023, according to a Federal Register notice.

HHS spokeswoman Renata Miller confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Martin is still on the advisory board. Panel members are vetted by the Ethics Office before participation to ensure there are no conflicts of interest, Miller said.

“It is clearly a conflict of interest for someone so closely tied to the Biden administration and the HHS to be running a group that is actively benefiting from Biden’s executive order,” Parker Thayer, a charity expert at the conservative Capital Research Center think tank, argued.

Launching Vot-ER, which says it trains paid fellows to understand topics such as “health disparities and medical racism,” was made possible with the help of a cadre of deep-pocketed left-wing donors. Those include the Tides Foundation, Progressive Multiplier Fund, and the Windward Fund, a key cog in the $1 billion Arabella Advisors consultancy, the largest Democratic-allied dark money network in the country.

A Tides Foundation spokesperson declined to comment on the grants, though the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner the group has no plans for future giving. A spokesperson for Progressive Multiplier Fund said its grants to Vot-ER were for “development efforts,” while a spokesperson for a Windward Fund project, who declined to comment on any future giving plans, said its grants were for “nonpartisan civic engagement tools.”

In 2021 articles of organization documents filed in Massachusetts, Vot-ER described to the Commonwealth how it would “provide the tools, training, and community that support a growing movement to help patients and providers use their voices to improve America’s Democracy.” Vot-ER, in its own telling, “develops nonpartisan civic engagement tools and programs for every corner of the healthcare system — from private practitioners to medical schools to hospitals.”

Martin is now CEO of A Healthier Democracy Inc., which is legally the same entity as Vot-ER, according to tax records. The Vot-ER founder, who has praised the work of far-left “anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi, has made clear why he determines the healthcare space to be ripe for voter registration.

“There’s still something very sacred about the caregiving relationship,” Martin said in August 2023 during an interview with the left-leaning Aspen Institute, according to footage reviewed by the Washington Examiner. “And I think you can use that to take advantage of that to do some work upstream at the political and social determinants of health.”

In the interview, Martin described how a project connected to Vot-ER was purportedly moving federal funding “directly into the pockets of low-income patients” to “pay their rent, pay their phone bills, pay their heating and electricity bills.”

“And then,” he emphasized, “we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months, about voter registration.”

Now, the expansive registration push is taking place at hundreds of Vot-ER-tied health centers in Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Nevada, and various other states, according to Vot-ER. Partners, the charity says, are encouraged to conduct on-site voter registration and staff trainings in their workplaces.

But while Vot-ER has a tab on its website advising healthcare professionals to proudly wear Vot-ER badges with QR codes that direct patients to voter registration materials, Vot-ER has also appeared to promote conflicting messages about the legality of this endeavor.

Vot-ER’s website, separately, links to a “best practices” document on advising health centers not to allow “providers and other staff to wear the VotER lanyard with the QR code and text message while on the job” to avoid the appearance of partisanship.

The document was prepared by the legal team in Washington, D.C., for the National Association of Community Health Centers, or NACHC.

A taxpayer-funded voter turnout army

According to its website, Vot-ER is delivering grants of up to $10,000 to approved public health centers through its so-called community civic engagement program.

NACHC is partnered on the program, a 2024 application of which asks representatives from centers to provide information about whether their patients identify as “LGBTQIA+, Native American/Alaskan Native, Hispanic/Latinx,” or are “best served in a language other than English,” among other questions.

Vot-ER also lists hundreds of participating sites on its website that have coordinated with the group on voter registration, many of which are federally qualified health centers. Participating sites receive election-related materials from Vot-ER, including its badges with voting resources.

One group listed as a “participating site” on Vot-ER’s website is the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, the largest federally qualified health center in the Sunflower State. It services over 70,000 people, including in Oklahoma.

Footage reviewed by the Washington Examiner shows examples in which personnel at the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas touted their work turning out voters who ultimately rejected a 2022 anti-abortion referendum.

The videos call into question whether the health center has conducted itself in a nonpartisan fashion while being a participating Vot-ER site, according to Stewart Whitson, the attorney at FGA.

In a 2022 Vot-ER webinar, the center’s CEO, Krista Postai, said its “mostly female” and young “army” worked to send 65,000 text messages to patients about the referendum.

“And as you can see, we had an impact,” the CEO touted in the webinar, which also featured a Vot-ER adviser named Manisha Sharma, whose Zoom background depicted an image of feminist political activist and Marxist Angela Davis.

During a separate 2024 Vot-ER webinar about its prior partners, Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas Patient engagement director Leah Gagnon, who has made small-dollar donations to Biden and other Democrats, described how the center zeroed in on informing patients about the “reproductive healthcare” referendum. Gagnon said in the webinar that the group received a grant from Vot-ER and a matching grant from a related organization of Vot-ER.

Gagnon touted in the webinar how, after the referendum failed, Vot-ER was apparently thanked for its work by Lt. Gov. David Toland of Kansas, a Democrat.

“Kansas had some of the highest voting turnout we have historically had, especially for a primary election,” Gagnon said. “We were really excited about that. We got a cool little note from the lieutenant governor saying like, ‘Hey, that was badass, like you know, good job reaching your patients.”

Republican Kansas state Rep. Pat Proctor, who chairs the Elections Committee, told the Washington Examiner that Gagnon’s comments are cause for an investigation since it appears Toland may have acted partisan in his official capacity as lieutenant governor.

Reached by phone, Proctor said he’ll now be conferring with other lawmakers about sending a letter to the Democratic governor to demand answers.

“This is outrageous,” said Proctor, who supported a bill vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS) in April that would ban state agencies from using federal funds to administer elections without approval from the legislature. Kelly has notably received donations in recent years, including in 2022, from Postai, the center’s CEO, Kansas state records show.

Postai told the Washington Examiner she was unaware of Gagnon’s comments about Toland on the webinar. The CEO, who earned a salary of $404,760 in 2022, also claimed her center received no money directly from Vot-ER and said it is not using Vot-ER’s materials anymore to register voters.

“We do not take political positions or religious positions,” Postai said in a phone call. “I know people are analyzing to death what happened, but I don’t think it was about parties or politics. I think it was just women didn’t like being told — I don’t think anybody wants to be legislated.”

“You can’t legislate morality,” Postai said

Vot-ER did not respond to questions from the Washington Examiner about its relationship with Postai’s group.

‘Stinks to high heaven’

Meanwhile, Vot-ER also appears to have participating sites in various swing states before the November election.

Some are federally qualified health centers, such as Adelante Health Center in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Southern Nevada Community Health Center in Las Vegas. Other listed participating sites, such as Campesinos Sin Fronteras, are not in this category.

Campesinos Sin Fronteras, which calls itself “a grassroots social justice organization that promotes dignity and respect for Latino seasonal and migrant farmworkers and their families,” is located in a county in Arizona nestled on the U.S.-Mexico border. The registered charity reportedly helps transport and house undocumented immigrants.

It has also been linked to certain programs at public health centers in Arizona and received millions of dollars from the federal government.

To Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation legal fellow, a troubling fact of Vot-ER’s operation with public health centers is the appearance of nonregistered welfare recipients being taken advantage of by healthcare professionals they rely on for care.

Michael Chamberlain, director of the ethics watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, said it’s concerning that the Biden administration appears to be refashioning government programs into a sprawling get-out-the-vote operation to boost Democrats.

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The White House did not reply to numerous requests for comment.

“This stinks to high heaven,” Chamberlain said.

In a chain of emails obtained by the Washington Examiner, members of the Anthropology Department at UVA were discussing ways to express their condemnation Tuesday afternoon against President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom as the two school leaders held a virtual “town hall” to discuss the university’s response to protesters.

Over the weekend, Virginia State Police in riot gear were deployed to remove protesters forcibly from an encampment on university grounds, where officers made several arrests and used pepper spray. After backlash from faculty and students, Ryan and others decided to hold the town hall to create a dialogue about the decision-making process behind the crackdown.

Anthropology Department faculty members were weighing a public condemnation of university administration, the emails show, with professors saying a joint statement should accuse school leaders of actively stoking violence in order to justify a heavy-handed response.

According to the messages to faculty and others associated with the school’s Anthropology Department, the faculty members involved did not appear to have made a decision as to whether to send the statement from the whole department or to have specific faculty sign one. Some emeritus faculty noted that nontenured faculty could be at risk of “retaliation.”

Professor Kath Weston suggested the statement should accuse the administration of “elite panic,” an anthropological term that she said “describes what happens when the people formally in charge end up manufacturing the very violence and ‘disorder’ they claim to be working to prevent as they adopt increasingly authoritarian and potentially deadly command-and-control tactics to quell a fear and panic about the situation that is to be found nowhere but in themselves.”

The discussions come just days after dozens of History Department faculty wrote an open letter condemning the actions, calling the crackdown a “repression of a peaceful protest of our students by armed state police in riot gear.” Anthropology professors appeared to be seeking to model their message after the History Department letter.

Action from the anthropology professors remains unclear, as they appeared to be still discussing how to proceed, but criticism of the town hall itself snowballed quickly into talks of more sweeping action.

“Our outrage is surely more correctly aimed squarely at the fact that our ‘administration’ called in State troopers in the first place,” professor Eve Danziger said, asking her colleagues for ideas on how to use anthropology to make an appeal in the same way the History Department invoked Thomas Jefferson. “The Town Hall is an ephemeral matter. We should instead put our efforts toward coordinating a more general response to the events of Saturday.”

One of the anthropology concepts offered was Weston’s “elite panic,” which George Mentore, associate professor and director of graduate admissions, said in the email chain was “exactly my take on their orchestrated collective response.”

“I was most shocked and insulted by the high jacking of MLK and Gandhi on peaceful protests to then argue that the students brought on the violence because they resisted arrest,” Mentore said. In a separate email, Mentore suggested that Ryan’s willingness to use “violent force” came out of “self-interest … possibly by way of retribution from [Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA)].”

The move was the same “preemptive use of violence we hear all the time from those who speak in the name of justice,” Mentore said.

Mark Sicoli, associate professor and director of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics, slammed the school’s decision to address the issue in a town hall.

“The anthropology department does not recognize the ‘town hall’ being staged by President Ryan and Provost Baucom as a legitimate forum in which to discuss the arrests of our colleagues and our students and the terrorization of many faculty, staff, students, and community members who witnessed the take-over of campus by militarized state police with long-guns, chemical agents and aggressive tactics on May 4th against a small encampment of students protesting genocide,” he said. “Calling this event a ‘town hall’ uses the language of democratic participation as cover for a carefully curated media event that maintains a safe distance of upper administration from the hard questions and difficult conversations needed right now.”

Sicoli also asked for Anthropology Department members to reach out to colleagues in other departments to join the boycott. In the UVA Anthropology Department email thread, Sicoli and others pointed out that the town hall allowed participation from registered attendees, saying the school administration was “pre-selecting and screening questions” to avoid accountability.

In the town hall, which was led by Ryan, Baucom, UVA Police Chief Tim Longo, Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wagner Davis, and Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer Kenyon Bonner, Ryan described the weekend events as a “terrible and terribly sad and upsetting day. It was traumatic, I know, for everyone involved and it was far from the resolution I or any of my colleagues had hoped for.”

While faculty members in the History and Anthropology departments described the protests as peaceful, Longo, the university’s police chief, told a different story in which students were breaking rules, unwilling to engage in dialogue with administrators, and resisting police and administrators by any means necessary.

“It was made clear to me through their voice, or at least the voice of one who appeared to be acting on behalf of the group, and these are their words: They had a duty to fight for their cause, they had a duty to win, and they had nothing to lose,” Longo said. “Their actions and words caused me to conclude that voluntary compliance with my request wasn’t an option they’d be willing to consider.”

Longo and the other university leaders on the call did mention that the protesters were compliant with requests for the first few days before changing their tune.

Bonner said the students rejected pleas from the university to open a dialogue and noted that the students ended up working through faculty intermediaries to deliver messages. After deliberation, the protesters rejected all offers to enter discussions and instead curated a list of demands.

The administration also pointed to some outside agitators taking part in the encampment and the leaders of the protests calling in others from the outside to join them.

Davis, UVA’s chief operating officer, read out arrest statistics; police made 27 total arrests, 12 of which were of students and eight of which involved people unaffiliated with UVA. One of the eight unaffiliated people was charged with assault. In addition, four UVA employees were arrested, and three others who were either former employees or former students were taken into custody.

Despite the anger from history and anthropology professors, other faculty have come out in support of the administration.

Lee Coppock, an economics professor at UVA, posted to X that while “reasonable people may differ,” he is “grateful” for Ryan’s leadership.

“Jim [Ryan] cares deeply about free expression and so it must have been hard to have the protesters removed from Grounds on Saturday,” he wrote. “The protesters were peaceful and within University rules for several days. When they failed to continue to do so, they were given several chances and then the rules were enforced.”

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The Washington Examiner reached out to Weston, Mentore, Sicoli, and Danziger for comment. Shortly thereafter, Danziger replied in the email thread that she refused to respond because “Wikipedia tells me the Washington Examiner is a U.S. conservative news outlet.” Danziger did not respond directly to the request for comment.

UVA spokesman Brian Coy pointed the Washington Examiner to Ryan’s remarks during the town hall in a request for comment about the Anthropology Department’s plans.

GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly worried that an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2021, which mandated that federal agencies develop voter registration plans with “approved” outside groups, will be unlawfully weaponized this November to boost Democratic turnout. The Biden administration has framed the unprecedented operation as nonpartisan, though internal documents show the government hosted a July 2021 order planning call that appeared to serve overwhelmingly as a platform for left-wing organizations to suggest sweeping election policy changes.

“President Biden’s EO is an overreach of the executive branch’s constitutional authority and disregards the Constitution’s federalist election system,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner. “The states set the time, manner, and place of their own elections, and this EO must be looked at seriously.”

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said the internal meeting notes reveal “illegal coordination” between the Biden administration and progressive activists to plot “election interference,” adding that lawmakers are investigating the 2021 executive order “to ensure our elections are free and fair.” Stefanik is widely considered as in the running to be former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024.

According to a RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Biden by roughly 1 percentage point. To Republicans, who have launched investigations into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s funding of a progressive-left group that lawmakers say helped tilt the 2020 election for Democrats, the 2021 “Bidenbucks” order is legally questionable. The order directs agencies to solicit and facilitate the approval of “nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”

The order, in the minds of lawmakers and conservative legal experts, is unconstitutional and flouts numerous federal rules, including the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending funds beyond those approved through Congress, and the Hatch Act, a law restricting government employees from engaging in certain political activities.

The meeting notes reviewed by the Washington Examiner, which were obtained through separate records requests by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and Foundation for Government Accountability, show attendees from activist groups discussed topics such as registering illegal immigrants and integrating voter registration into public housing as a requirement under federal law. The Oversight Project said in a memo last week that it’s clear the 2021 executive order is a partisan “attempt to influence the outcome of future elections through the use of federal resources, infrastructure, and reach.”

The 2021 meeting was virtual over the platform Zoom and attended by representatives from the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice, among other agencies, as well as staffers from groups such as the Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, End Citizens United, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Stewart Whitson, an attorney who works for the Foundation for Government Accountability, said the touted proposal related to public housing is evidence of a coordinated effort between the White House and left-wing activists to target vulnerable populations determined to be likely Biden voters through the unlawful order. The housing proposal was mentioned at the 2021 meeting by Laura Williamson, a then-employee at the left-wing Demos think tank who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. GOP lawmakers have said Demos crafted a document in 2020 that ended up appearing “nearly identical” to the Biden order.

Like other lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said the meeting notes reveal a coordinated and since-secretive effort by Biden to work with progressives “to figure out a way to leverage federal resources and enhance Democrat political power.”

“It’s all political in nature, and it’s totally wrong,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the Washington Examiner.

At the 2021 Zoom meeting, a representative from the League of Women Voters urged agencies to register people to vote at citizen and naturalization ceremonies run by federal courts.

Meanwhile, one representative from the Sentencing Project, a left-wing group that supports defunding prisons, called for the use of federal resources to register inmates to vote in prisons, noting, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”

The 2021 executive order at the center of the meeting has also prompted an investigation by the GOP-led House Small Business Committee, which is looking into the Small Business Administration over its voter registration efforts.

One lawmaker on the panel, Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA), said it’s clear Biden is working hand in hand with progressives — not nonpartisan groups — “to enlist the federal government in a national voter registration operation” that is likely unlawful.

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The House Small Business Committee is, in particular, “extremely concerned that the Biden administration is using the SBA as a campaign arm in the battleground state of Michigan,” according to Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), the panel’s chairman.

“My colleagues and I are troubled by this alleged electioneering and allocation of taxpayer dollars to activities blatantly outside of the SBA’s jurisdiction,” Williams said. “The committee will continue to use every tool at our disposal to stop these blatant political acts.”

Onward Together, which Clinton launched after losing the 2016 election, says it’s “committed to lifting up emerging organizations and leaders who are fighting for our shared progressive values and defending our democracy.” That pledge apparently includes funding Climate Emergency Fund, a charity backing groups leading demonstrations to bring awareness to climate change by vandalizing fine art, blocking major roads, gluing themselves to sports cars, and engaging in other extremist forms of protest.

Between April 2022 and March 2023, the nonprofit advocacy arm of Onward Together granted $200,000 to Climate Emergency Fund, according to Onward Together’s tax forms filed in 2024.

CEF, which during the preceding fiscal year received $300,000 from the Clinton-tied group, is based in Beverly Hills and props up activists at groups like Just Stop Oil that, in 2022, splattered tomato soup on a Vincent Van Gogh painting at London’s National Gallery estimated to be worth $84 million. In March 2024, activists for Declare Emergency, which along with Just Stop Oil is part of a coalition primarily funded by CEF called A22 Network, were charged with vandalizing the display of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives.

Moreover, CEF funds the Washington, D.C.-based Climate Defiance, the activists of which have also been arrested for unorthodox protests. This upcoming Tuesday, Climate Defiance will host an event in the district for its one-year “birthday” alongside progressive Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), according to an event invitation.

“Anyone who cares about public safety and preventing vandalism should be deeply concerned that money connected to Hillary Clinton is propping up these radicalized eco activists,” said Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the Power the Future energy advocacy group.

The $200,000 grant to CEF was one of seven grants that Onward Together disbursed in its most recent fiscal year, along with support to the affiliated Onward Together charity, left-wing Voter Participation Center, NextGen America founded by billionaire climate investor Tom Steyer, and others.

However, the grant to CEF was by far Onward Together’s largest — with others ranging between $25,000 and $50,000.

“Congress would be wise to immediately investigate the shady origins and dastardly flow of this tainted Clinton cash,” Turner told the Washington Examiner.

Onward Together is hardly alone in funding CEF, which receives donations from Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Hollywood producer Adam McKay, actor Jeremy Strong, and Abigail Disney, daughter of ex-Disney executive Roy E. Disney, among others, the Washington Examiner reported.

Onward Together has an affiliated political action committee that backs congressional Democrats, Federal Election Commission filings show. According to filings, a PAC affiliated with “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) directed $9,000 to CEF in 2021.

Meanwhile, another key funder to CEF is billionaire philanthropist Aileen Getty, who can thank Big Oil for making her donations possible.

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She’s an heiress to the Getty family’s petroleum industry fortune.

Climate Emergency Fund and Onward Together did not reply to requests for comment.

The documents, which have not been reported on until now, are a window into how nonprofit organizations have coordinated with the highest levels of the government on bringing President Joe Biden‘s executive order to fruition. Republican lawmakers and conservative groups have heavily scrutinized the legality and constitutionality of the March 2021 order, which calls for “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”

And following the 2020 election, which drew GOP-led investigations in Congress over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wiring hundreds of millions of dollars to a progressive-left group that boosted Democrats, Republicans are concerned the 2021 “Bidenbucks” order will unlawfully appropriate federal funds in 2024 to promote Democratic voter turnout. The order, lawmakers say, may violate the Antideficiency Act, a law barring federal agencies from spending funds beyond those approved through Congress, and the Hatch Act, which restricts government employees from engaging in certain political activities, among other laws.

“The Biden administration continues to spend taxpayer dollars on partisan voter registration initiatives,” said Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chairman of the House Administration Committee, which oversees elections. “Not only is this shady, but it does not instill trust in our elections.”

Biden’s March 2021 order mandates federal agencies develop plans to provide the public access to voter registration services with the help of “approved” outside groups, as well as assist the public in filling out these forms and mail-in-ballot applications. Concerned GOP lawmakers have since sent letters to the Biden administration asking it to turn over any potential criteria for approved entities.

At the same time, internal meeting notes reveal some of the topics left-wing organizations discussed during a July 12, 2021, “listening session” for the March order. Previously released records revealed a snippet of the agenda of the virtual meeting, which was attended by representatives from the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Justice, and other agencies.

One 2021 meeting attendee, for instance, was Jose Morales, a former Biden-Harris transition team staffer who is listed on the 2021 meeting notes as a representative for the left-wing Fair Fight Action. Morales, ex-chief of staff for the failed 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams campaign, urged federal agencies in the meeting to make sure they’re “prioritizing opportunities for helping people to fill out voting forms” and to vote by mail. He also stressed that federal employees should receive a day off to vote and assist election workers, who Morales said are under “assault.”

Then there’s Laura Williamson, a then-employee at the left-wing Demos think tank who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the 2021 meeting, Williamson told agencies they shouldn’t “stop at registration.”

“It’s just the first hurdle,” said the then-employee at Demos, which GOP lawmakers say crafted a document in 2020 that ended up appearing “nearly identical” to the Biden order. Demos notably counted Barack Obama in 2001 as a founding board member, according to tax forms.

At the meeting, Williamson offered that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should “consider integrating voter registration into public housing” as a requirement under federal law, the notes say.

It’s a proposal that Stewart Whitson, an attorney who works for the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability, said is evidence of a coordinated effort between the White House and activists to target vulnerable populations seen as likely Biden voters through the unlawful order. FGA and the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project separately obtained the same meeting notes through records requests to the Department of Justice.

Another 2021 meeting participant was Nikolas Youngsmith, then an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which appears to support illegal immigration and also awards scholarships to undocumented students. Youngsmith, now a Democratic congressional aide, said at the meeting that his group backed voter registration efforts for “immigrants and noncitizens,” meeting notes show.

“We also want to make sure that they are done in a careful way,” Youngsmith said, according to the unearthed documents. “All fed[eral] employees must be well-trained in this. Need to trust people are acting in bounds of the law. Especially when there are language issues. Federal employees need to know who should be properly registered and not. Don’t want someone to face charges based on bad info[rmation].”

Meanwhile, the “nonpartisan” 2021 meeting fielded presentations from staffers from the League of Women Voters, including registered lobbyist Jessica Jones Capparell. Meeting notes say Capparell, a former campaign aide to ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill, urged agencies to register people to vote at citizen and naturalization ceremonies run by federal courts.

Capparell lobbied in 2023 on behalf of the League of Women Voters against appropriations bills seeking to prohibit agencies from using funding in connection to Biden’s 2021 executive order, congressional filings show.

So did her lobbyist colleague, Celina Stewart, who attended the meeting that year, according to meeting notes.

“Agencies need more funding to make sure this happens,” Stewart, who discussed voter registration, said at the meeting.

Two presenters were also Keeda Haynes of the Sentencing Project, a left-wing group that supports defunding prisons, and Dana Paikowsky, then at the left-wing Campaign Legal Center watchdog. Both discussed reforms to the Bureau of Prisons, according to meeting notes.

“Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression,” Haynes, a recent Democratic congressional candidate, said at the 2021 meeting. She called for the use of federal resources to register inmates to vote in prisons.

Paikowsky, who says on her LinkedIn profile that she now works at the Justice Department, said in the meeting that the Campaign Legal Center made recommendations to the Bureau of Prisons on certain issues.

The agency was “excited,” Paikowsky apparently said during the meeting.

The 2021 meeting was also attended by representatives from the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, End Citizens United, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, Black Voters Matter, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and other major left-wing activist groups, documents show.

Ahead of the 2024 election, which will feature a rematch between Biden and Trump, various nonprofit organizations bankrolled by top Democratic dark money groups and linked to this 2021 meeting are launching “nonpartisan” campaigns to mobilize voters.

But to Hans von Spakovsky, a senior Heritage Foundation legal fellow, the reason the order is concerning isn’t solely because groups helping to shape it are partisan.

Fundamentally, the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of voter registration, von Spakovsky told the Washington Examiner.

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“There’s too much risk of the party that controls the executive branch using that to manipulate who gets registered,” he said.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

That’s the message several counties around the Denver metro area delivered to Colorado’s capital city after it welcomed more than 41,424 illegal immigrants in less than two years.

They view Denver, a city of 710,000 residents that has spent an estimated $120 million taking care of the border crossers, as a cautionary tale and don’t want its migrant crisis, which has nearly depleted city resources, to become theirs.

Cautionary tale: Counties blame Denver for open arms

Douglas County, El Paso County, Weld County, and Aurora have all taken steps to prevent officials from using funds for undocumented migrant services. All have made it known that they have no plans to take in any migrants, arguing their budgets will buckle under the strain.

Douglas and El Paso went a step further and sued the state and its Democratic governor, alleging that two laws prohibiting local governments from working with federal authorities on immigration enforcement violate Colorado’s Constitution. 

COST OF THE MIGRANT CRISIS: DENVER HOSPITALS BUCKLE UNDER VOLUME OF PATIENTS

“I don’t blame the Venezuelan migrants,” Douglas County Commissioner Abe Laydon told the Washington Examiner. “I blame bad public policy because Denver held up a big sign saying ‘Welcome.’ When you put that big welcome sign on your state and on your city, I don’t blame Venezuelan migrants for saying, ‘Well, they said it was a sanctuary city.'”

Alyssa Gross, a retail worker in Douglas County, believes the reasons behind the county’s actions are more nefarious than elected officials are letting on.

“People will talk about our population being too high, how inflation affects us, housing, all of that, but at the end of the day, if the migrants were white, it would not be an issue,” she told the Washington Examiner. 

Laydon, a Denver native and Douglas County’s first Latino commissioner, strongly disagrees. He said he’s aware of how the county comes across to outsiders but insists its motives are being misrepresented.

“It does not mean that we aren’t compassionate and it does not mean we don’t care about the plight of those seeking asylum,” he said. “It means that we are prioritizing legal citizens first, including legal immigrants, including people of color.”

COST OF THE MIGRANT CRISIS: DENVER SCHOOLS TESTED TO THEIR LIMIT

Laydon recently met with a Venezuelan migrant in his district named Gheiber. Gheiber came to Douglas County with his mother several years ago. Both of his uncles had been assassinated and his mother was almost abducted twice. When he arrived in Douglas County, he went through the proper immigration channels and was welcomed.  

“He has a bit of an accent and people would say, ‘Where are you from?’ and he would say, ‘Venezuela,’ and the response was, ‘Fantastic, wonderful, great!'” Laydon said. “Fast forward to 2024 and he’s getting harassment, persecution, people frowning and scowling in certain circumstances. His comment to us is that it has impaired the rights of legal immigrants the most.”  

Most Coloradans agreed that immigration is a critical concern but were divided on how to address it, according to a poll by the independent Colorado Polling Institute. Sixty-two percent of 632 likely voters referred to the situation at the U.S. southern border as a “crisis” or “major problem.”

While Congress and President Joe Biden got some of the blame, nearly one-third of voters pointed to Denver’s own open arms policy for feeding the crisis. Fifty-one percent said Colorado’s resources are being “overwhelmed” taking care of illegal immigrants and that they should be turned away, while 49% said they should be met with compassion and allowed to stay.

COST OF THE MIGRANT CRISIS: DENVER’S ROCKY ROAD AS A SANCTUARY CITY

Douglas County resident Lynne Clements said she’s heard people referring to the illegal immigrants as “criminals.”

“We’re the eighth richest county in the United States of America,” she said. “I feel we have a moral obligation to be welcoming to people who have come from a country that we have no idea about, living in Douglas County.”

‘Money pit’: Frustration boils over in Lakewood

Residents in Lakewood, a town seven miles west of Denver, had a different view.

Their frustration over the migrant crisis has reached a boiling point, with people packing city council meetings to air their views.

“We don’t have the tax base to handle it,” one angry resident said during the seven-hour meeting. “It’s a money pit and you guys are responsible for our money. Don’t screw it up. You guys are famous for screwing things up!”

Another resident called out, “The citizens of Lakewood are drowning and you’re talking about adding more water!”

Colorado’s third most populous city, Aurora, reaffirmed its status as a non-sanctuary city in February, asserting that it “does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis.” 

Like Lakewood, several residents came out to have their voices heard.

Nayda Benitez said her family migrated to Colorado out of necessity and found it “incredibly infuriating” to hear the city council push an anti-immigrant resolution. 

One resident, who supported the resolution, blasted others for having “no clue.”

“I get angry when people sit here and think we can feed every person in the world that pours across our southern border,” he said. “We simply cannot afford it. It will bankrupt our city.”

Jon Ewing, a Denver spokesman, told the Washington Examiner the whipped-up frenzy over illegal immigrants is unfounded and that Denver has not diverted busloads of undocumented migrants to places like Douglas County.

“We haven’t and we won’t,” he said. 

Window washers pushing patience

In Denver, some residents and business owners said their patience with the newcomers has been running thin. Many have flooded medians to offer windshield-washing services — washing first without asking and then demanding money.

“They washed my car four times!” resident Penelope Waters told the Washington Examiner. “I get to an intersection and pray the light isn’t red. It’s awful!”

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At its height, the illegal immigrants that came to Denver erected rows of tents near pricey apartment buildings, in the parking lot of an amusement park, or anywhere else they could. Several stood in medians begging for money, stalked customers at grocery stores, offering to carry their bags for them for a price, and acted as vehicle watchers, charging drivers at public parking lots money to keep their cars safe.

“I can’t begrudge someone who stands on the corner for seven hours a day to make $7 to feed his family,” Waters said. “I also shouldn’t be made to feel bad if I don’t want to empty my wallet and give all my money away to everyone that asks every time I go to the store or run an errand.”