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The $27 million dollars spent on gift bags given to deported immigrants. [1]

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Date: 2025-02-16

One good “crowd sourcing” exercise is to debunk in real time all of the bull-shit talking points spewing from Republicans and Trump. I had a good example of this riding in the car today listening to some AM Republican radio program. Some MAGA type was defending Trump and his Musk-led advisory committee by complaining about their purported discovery that the federal government “spends $27 million in gift bags for illegal aliens when they are deported.”

We discovered $27 million spent on gift bags for illegals! This was cat-nip for the Republican I heard on the radio, and I knew it had to be that peculiarly Republican form of bullshit. So, I Googled it for about 5 minutes. As I suspected, sometimes we give someone a sandwich — and it is in a bag — so: a gift bag! It is that, but worse.

Initially, none of this was discovered by DOGE; it was publicly discussed (and disbursed during the first Trump administration), and criticized by Breitbart in 2018. So, this is recycled bullshit.



Before getting deeper into the substance, look closely at the photo above (from the 2018 Breitbart article ) to see what they are complaining about. During a time of a huge surge in unaccompanied minors at the border, some of the deported children were given a cheap nylon bag with a roll of toilet paper(!), tooth paste and a tooth brush, some crayons and (of course) a Barbie doll. Oh, the horror! We gave deported children one roll of toilet paper and a crappy doll.



As public GAO documents in 2018 disclose, these expenditures were part of a pilot program to reintegrate deported immigrants back into their home country so as to reduce repeated immigration attempts to the U.S. Put aside the toilet paper, most of the money was spent on construction costs for in-country “reception centers” and shelters, food (there are the sandwiches!), transportation from the airport, employment counseling, and for the respective governments to “collect data on returning migrants.”



The amounts spent were paltry. The cited $27 million figure covers from 2014 through 2017 or approximately November 2018 (it is unclear). So, rather than $27 million today, this amount was for a 3 to 4 year period beginning ten years ago. Thus, we had an annual expenditure of about $6.5 million to $9 million. That total amount was spread across El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. So, we were spending about $2.1 million to $3 million annually per country. There are scores of houses in my NYC commuter suburb that sell individually for more than that annual, by-country expenditure — for three of the most critical countries in this immigration issue.

It is crucial to break-down the spew of Republican lies and, as here, it often doesn't take much effort. Publishing on KOS can force mainstream outlets to actually report the facts (believe me, I have seen it many times from individual diaries), and it prepares you to engage whatever persuadable Republican friends you may have.

I know many here say that they don't engage at all with Republican friends, family or co-workers, but I do all the time. Now, I can’t wait for one of them to cite this $27 million gift bag nonsense. I can’t wait to explain to them the cost — and basic humanity — of toilet paper and tooth paste, or whether they want the federal government to spend less than the cost of one or two suburban houses on decreasing repeated unauthorized border crossings. Sure, many to most Republicans are hopeless, but not all of them. There are a bunch of these folks who once got Clinton, Obama and Biden elected. I wish they didn't need the help, but they do. And given the unabashed, avalanche of Republican dishonesty, I can’t think of any other response than a committed crowd-source response to help all of this in this debate..

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/16/2304191/-The-27-million-dollars-spent-on-gift-bags-given-to-deported-immigrants?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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