WASHINGTON (RNS) — A House investigation launched by two Republican congressmen into dozens of religious organizations and denominations, from the U.S. Catholic bishops to the Unitarian Universalist Association, is being called a violation the groups’ religious liberty.
On June 11, U.S. Rep Mark E. Green of Tennessee, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, and Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, who is also part of the committee, announced plans for a probe of more than 200 nongovernmental organizations they accused of being “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.”
The lawmakers unveiled a letter they planned to send to all of the organizations. Among other allegations, the letter argues the Biden administration’s reliance on nonprofit groups signaled “those who arrived illegally or without proper documentation that they could expect such assistance, all expensed to American taxpayers, once they arrived in the United States.”
The letter included a link to a lengthy questionnaire asking the groups if they had received any “grant, contract, or other form of disbursement from the federal government” or provided “legal services, translation services, transportation, housing, sheltering, or any other form of assistance” to undocumented immigrants or unaccompanied immigrant children.
They were also asked whether they had sued the federal government or filed any amicus briefs in legal proceedings since the beginning of the Biden administration “to the present.”
Green and B …