Last July, the National Council of La Raza changed its name to UnidosUS. The switch failed to draw much news coverage but it holds significance for American taxpayers.

Cecilia Muñoz served as National Council of La Raza vice president before the Obama administration tapped her for White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. In 2011, PBS interviewed her for its “Frontline” documentary Lost in Detention , which contended that under the Obama administration “deportations and detentions have reached record levels” and “families have been unfairly separated.”

As Muñoz explained, “Even if the immigration law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.” As it turns out, that separation policy was intentional, and the Obama administration exploited the kids to enrich cronies.

Juan Sanchez, a National Council of La Raza board member, is CEO of Southwest Key Programs. KXAN of Austin reports that Southwest Key has received $995 million in federal funds since 2015 to house migrant children. Over a three-year period, Southwest Key had “more than 200 violations at its facilities,” including a resident failing to receive proper treatment for a sexually transmitted disease (STD).

As Fox News reports, Southwest Key operates “the largest licensed shelter for immigrant children in the United States. A 250,000-square-foot facility at a former Walmart superstore in Brownsville, Texas, today houses some 1,500 boys between the ages of 10 and 17 who illegally entered the U.S.”

CNN notes that Southwest Key operates 83 detention centers across the country and has pulled in $1.5 billion in federal contracts. Southwest Key boss Juan Sanchez bags a cool $1.47 million a year “which makes him one of the highest paid charity CEOs in the country.”

Mark Owen of the IRS nonprofit division told CNN that Sanchez’s salary is “extraordinarily high” and his wife also pulls down $262,000. Clearly, the separated kids are cash cows for cronies from the National Council of La Raza. Despite the name change, serious racial issues remain.

La Raza derives directly from La Raza Cosmica, by Mexican education minister and presidential candidate Jose Vasconelos, republished in 1979 by the Chicano Studies department at Cal State University at Los Angeles. This a public school supported by taxpayer dollars.

According to Vasconcelos, students from English, Dutch and Scandinavian backgrounds are “slower, almost dull,” compared to “mestizo children and youths from the south.” Blacks are “uglier stocks” and part of the “inferior races.” The Mongol, “with the mystery of his slanted eyes,” is part of an “exhausted people” that lacks the “boldness for new enterprises.”

According to La Raza Cosmica, the fusion of Spaniards and Indians is a new race “infinitely superior to all that have previously existed.” That is the raza replacing those awful “Anglo-Saxons” code for all non-raza peoples who speak English, and who “are gradually becoming more a part of yesterday.”

La Raza Cosmica is the core curriculum of Chicano Studies and the basis for demands that public university admissions and state jobs should be allocated on the basis of ethnicity. Whatever the test scores, as the theory goes, the raza students are just better people.

In a nation of 325 million there are bound to be racists. A ballpark figure for the public funds they should receive is zero. It is for good reason that California law, the 1996 Proposition 209, forbids racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment and contracting.

Meanwhile, unaccompanied minors crossing the border have plenty of problems. They should not be a cash cow for millionaire political cronies from the National Council of La Raza. Taxpayers should not be fooled by the switch to UnidosUS.

Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute. He is the author of Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and his most recent crime book is Lethal Injections: Elizabeth Tracy Mae Wettlaufer, Canada’s Serial Killer Nurse.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.