Tag Archives: illegal aliens

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Picking Seniors’ Pockets: Deceptive Online Political Fundraising Is Dialing Up Discord

I’ve written some of this story before.

Last time I wrote about how a local Missouri politician running for a county office is raising millions through deceptive online advertising that relies on highlighting inflammatory national issues.  

This time I’m writing about how he and his online marketers are dialing up discord while cynically targeting deceptive fundraising pleas at overly trusting and vulnerable retired seniors, exploiting them in a new form of elder abuse other politicians across the country may be tempted to emulate.

William C. (Bill) Eigel, a conservative former state senator from the 23rd District in Missouri’s St. Charles County, lost in 2024’s Missouri Republican gubernatorial primary. Now he’s running to be St. Charles, Missouri’s County Executive, probably to establish a political perch to mount another gubernatorial race in 2028.

William C. (Bill) Eigel

To support his Charles County campaign, Eigel is soliciting contributions for his Believe in Life and Liberty political action committee, BILL PAC. Why doesn’t the PAC’s name say it’s connected to Eigel?

“Some states require PACs backing single candidates or with specific donors to include the politician or the funders in their name,” the Missouri Independent has explained. “Not Missouri. Instead, PAC names can be a set of initials used for a reason no one can remember, a feel-good name that doesn’t have anything to do with the interest being promoted or even the name of a favorite television character.

Not only is Eigel blurring his association with BILL PAC, but his online nationwide fundraising campaign is reaching out to potential supporters by emphasizing inflammatory national hot-button issues, not St. Charles County concerns. Recent email pleas focus on “mass deportations” and deporting “criminal illegal aliens”, federal payment of $5,000 “DOGE checks” to citizens, and “mandatory voter ID in ALL 50 states”.

A BILL PAC email that came today urged me to sign a petition to deport Ilhan Omar, a controversial Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota. An email I received recently went so far as to urge recipients to support President Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act, an alarming move that would gives him broad powers to authorize uses of the military in the domestic sphere while providing neither a role for Congress nor a basis for serious judicial review. Eigel’s message:

We only have until midnight to act, so sign our petition in support of using the Insurrection Act to destroy Antifa once and for all and reclaim our cities from these anarchists.

The Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC) requires that political candidates file quarterly reports on their fundraising and spending. The reports filed by Bill PAC in 2025 reveal that about 99% of the contributions Eigel has reported receiving have come from people who live out of state and identify themselves as “Retired”.  It’s clear that retirees outside Missouri are Eigel’s primary target. 

Seniors are a prime target for all sorts of online scams due to factors like social isolation, a trusting nature and declining cognitive function. Many also live alone, have significant savings and have no one overseeing their spending. (By the way, I’m retired, which is probably why I’ve been getting Eigel’s emails.)

The most recent emails I received from BILL PAC focused on deporting undocumented immigrants and “defunding a United Nations Global Climate tax”, issues that are hardly within the purview of St. Charles’ County Executive.

The deportation email said only:

“122 residents of your neighborhood have signed the GOP petition to deport every illegal alien, but your name is MISSING!

 Join your neighbors ASAP:

JOIN YOUR NEIGHBORS: SIGN NOW“

If you “Sign Now” you’ll be asked for a donation of $12.50 to $250 and up. And if you don’t uncheck a yellow box, you’ll be committing to making a recurring monthly donation of your initial pledge Ad infinitum. This is a practice the ACLU says  “routinely takes advantage of older donors and first-time donors who are unfamiliar with navigating campaign fundraising platforms”.

Most individual online donations to Eigel detailed in reports submitted to the Missouri Ethics Commission in 2025 have been in small amounts, but they add up over time.  Frequently, individuals have been making multiple contributions on the same day, almost as though they have been stuck in a loop, forgetting they’d already given that day:

For example, a retired man from Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey made six separate donations ($10, $2.50, $2.50, $2.50, $2.50, $4.75) on June 29, 2025. Another retired man from Spokane, WA made seven contributions ($20.24, $35, $10, $10, $10, $9.50, $10) on April 27, 2025.

Many prolific contributors seem almost addicted to online donations. An 86-year-old  retired woman from Lititz, PA made online donations to Bill Eigel’s Believe in Life and Liberty political action committee, BILL PAC, 26 times.[1] A retired woman from Dalton, Georgia made donations 28 times[2].

Then there’s a retired man from Reston, VA, a consistent donor to Republican state and federal candidates and committees, who made an astonishing 65 separate online donations to BILL PAC, according to reports submitted to the Missouri Ethics Commission in 2025[3].

Organizations including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Council on Aging and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) repeatedly warn seniors about financial scams targeting them. The warnings, however, usually caution seniors about things such as funeral scams, phony investment schemes, telemarketing/phone scams and impersonation scams. 

Clearly, it’s time to warn seniors about political fundraising scams, too. 

[1] $36.44, $36.44, $36.44; $18.22; $36.44; $36.44; $36.44;$33.25; $15, $15, $20, $20.82, $10.41, $10.41, $15; $12.50, $13.01, $6.51, $6.51, $15; $12.50, $3.25, $3.25; $12.50; $15; $15.

[2] $10.41, $7.81, $7.81, $7.50, $7.50, $7.50, $20, $14.25, $10, $5.21, $5, $2.50, $5, $10.41, $3.75, $3.75, $3.75, $19, $12.50, $15, $15, $10, $15, $5, $12.50, $10, $15, $10

[3] $5.87, $5.87, $5.87, $6.11, $3.06, $6.11, $4.57, $5.87, $6.11, $3.06, $3.06, $3.06, $4,  $12.50, $13.01, $6.51, $3.25, $18, $9.37, $4.68, $10, $5.21, $5.21, $10.41, $4.16, $4.75, $10.41, $5.21, $5.21, $10.41, $15.62, $15.62, $15.62, $15.62, $15.62, $4.75, $5.87, $6.11, $6.11, $5.87. $6.11, $6.11, $3.06, $6.11, $4.57, $5.87, $6.11, $3.06, $3.06, $3.06, $4, $12.50, $13.01, $6.51, $3.25, $18, $9.37, $4.68, $10, $5.21, $5.21, $10.41, $4.16, $4.75

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Chaos: America’s immigration fiasco

“There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-present of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fiasco, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.” Elizabethtown -2005

  • Contradicting a common assumption that most of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States came across the US-Mexico border illegally, almost half of all undocumented immigrants in the United States came into the US legally with a visa, often on fiancée, tourist or education visas, and then overstayed their visa time limit. They became what are simply labeled “overstayers”. A 2017 study by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated visa overstays in 2014 accounted for 42 percent of the total undocumented population, or about 4.5 million people. It also projected that overstays made up about two-thirds of the total number of people who became unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. that year. There’s a strong case that, until the recent upsurge in border crossings, visa overstayers accounted for a larger share of the overall total of unauthorized immigrants. Complicating matters, the government doesn’t even compile information on the millions of overstayers, leaving it to others to piece together a snapshot of who they are and where in the U.S. they live.

So much for homeland security.

  • Contrary to assumptions that asylum applications have been going up, until recently asylum applications received by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were actually down, not up, for the third straight year. Approximately 92,800 affirmative asylum applications were received by (USCIS) in FY 2020, the lowest number in five years, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
  • Whether to count undocumented immigrants in the 2020 census matters. About half of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2018 resided in just three states: California (24 percent), Texas (16 percent), and New York (8 percent). If unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded based on population change alone.
  • You may think that once an immigrant makes an asylum claim, action is prompt. Not so. Due to the large application volume and limited resources, both the affirmative and defensive asylum systems have extensive backlogs. As of December 2020, according to USCIS, there were 350,000 affirmative cases pending; the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) reported over 570,000 pending asylum cases. EOIR is a sub-agency of the United States Department of Justice whose chief function is to conduct removal proceedings in immigration courts and adjudicate appeals arising from the proceedings.
  • You may assume that when unaccompanied children are allowed to stay in the United States under Biden’s presidency and are placed with sponsor families, at least those families are in the country legally. Not necessarily. According to UPI, The Biden administration announced on March 12 it was terminating a policy of checking the immigration status of caregivers who come forward to sponsor unaccompanied migrant children because it discouraged caregivers from coming forward to sponsor the children. HHS and the Department of Homeland Security signed an agreement to promote “the safe and timely transfer of children” to sponsors, which the administration said was usually a parent or another close relative who crossed the border before their children.
  • Despite common assumptions that Mexicans and Central Americans are the entire illegal immigration problem. MPI has estimated that of all unauthorized immigrants during 2014-18, about 1.5 million (14 percent) were from Asia; 783,000 (7 percent) from South America; 648,000 (6 percent) from Europe, Canada, or Oceania; 406,000 (4 percent) from the Caribbean; and 230,000 (2 percent) from Africa. In one week of Dec. 2019, U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Del Rio Station in Texas apprehended 56 migrants trying to cross into the United States from African countries, including Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. During FY 2019, Del Rio Sector agents apprehended a total of 1,211 people from 19 African nations. Just a few days ago, a man was sentenced in federal court after three Chinese migrants, including a mother and her 15-year-old son, were found dead in the trunk of the man’s BMW in August 2019 after he crossed into the United States through the San Ysidro Port of Entry. On March 21, 2021, the New York Times reported that a center run by the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio had recorded about 1,325 migrants so far in March, more than three times the number in February, said Tiffany Burrow, its director of operations. About 70 percent of them are Haitians, she said, with many others coming from Africa, “from Ghana down to Angola plus the Congo.”
Litter and bedding covers the floor of the hard-top shipping cargo container used to smuggle Chinese nationals to the United States.
  • In his eagerness to roll back President Trump’s immigration policies, President Biden has exacerbated the problems at the U.S.-Mexico border, creating a massive surge of migrants and numerous economic and security risks.  

What a mess.