Illegal immigrants hoping to cross the U.S.-Mexico border are receiving over $1 billion in money cards, envelopes of cash, and other benefits paid for by U.S. taxpayers as part of President Joe Biden’s pro-immigration programs, according to a watchdog investigation.

In funds provided by the State Department and U.S.-backed United Nations outlets, religious-based and other humanitarian groups are paving “migration trails” with cold cash and free “loans” to help ease the hardships immigrants face as they head to the border, like over 300,000 did in December.

According to an investigation by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based watchdog group, State handed out some $1.4 billion to international humanitarian groups in just the last year.

The group said that freely available government information showed that the programs have been operating fully funded even though the president claims that he is doing everything he can to stop illegal immigration into the U.S., mostly through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

“Biden is directly footing the bill for at least part of facilitating the most voluminous mass migration crisis in U.S. history, now in its fourth straight year,” said the report from CIS senior national security fellow Todd Bensman.

His examination of more than 30 faith-based nonprofit groups representing Jewish, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, and nondenominational evangelical organizations shows that the State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and the U.S. Agency for International Development “have been mainlining taxpayer funds to these groups, which then distribute them to keep hundreds of thousands of migrants comfortably moving toward illegal U.S. southern border crossings.”

The administration has also provided $1.4 billion to the International Organization of Migration, the United Nations group that helps immigrants get to the U.S. border from Central and South America.

“The State Department openly acknowledges issuing guidance to field staff on budget and planning coordination for the Latin American effort, and it has turned over operation of major U.S. government policy initiatives in Latin America, such as an expansion of ‘refugee’ centers and management of a no-interest ‘international travel loan’ programs,” Bensman said.

He added that the program is causing immigration concerns on the border and inside the U.S., where hundreds of thousands have been relocated under Biden’s open-borders agenda.

“It hurts the country by easing the northward path for mainly economic immigrants who voluntarily make the journey knowing in advance that all of their basic needs will be provided for and that border policies virtually guarantee their entry and long-term stay,” he wrote in his investigative report.

Among the numbers he discovered were that well over half a million immigrants have received some of the money from the U.S. and distributed by U.N. groups and nongovernmental organizations.

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“The U.N. has entrusted faith-based establishment NGOs with handling a lot of the $372 million in ‘Cash and Voucher Assistance’ and ‘Multipurpose Cash Assistance’ the broader endeavor will hand out to an estimated 624,000 migrants ‘in-transit’ to the United States during 2024. That money is most often handed out, other U.N. documents show, as pre-paid, rechargeable debit cards, but also hard ‘cash in envelopes,’ bank transfers, and mobile transfers that the U.S. border-bound travelers can use for whatever they want,” said Bensman.

He added, “Language in the U.N. plan for Latin America in 2024 leaves no doubt that its architects in both the U.N. and U.S. agencies are in lockstep about one thing: aggressively expanding the ranks of NGOs working on the migration trails, which if logic follows, would portend even greater diversions of U.S. taxpayer money to support them.”