Holy cow! This storyat the New York Timesyesterday was revealing and that was because, first and foremost, it says to me that there is discord, and there are leakers willing to leak about that discord, inside the Biden/Harris administration!
The entire issue of refugee resettlement had gone into sleep-mode in recent months, so I’m surprised that the topic is now front and center, not so much because of refugee numbers per se, but because it is giving us a window into an extremely dysfunctional (back stabbing) administration.
Is Biden a racist?
Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the foot-dragging and flip-flopping, and I am happy to see so many Open borders pushers with their undies in a wad, but it is disquieting to see such an erratic decision-making process.
Not to mention, if Biden’s rationale is that he doesn’t want to piss-off more voters (or members of Congress) on immigration issues before the mid-term elections, that ship has sailed.
Everyone already knows he has unleashed the invasion.
We are being overrun by illegal aliens and the average American isn’t sitting out there saying, well, we can cut him some slack because at least he isn’t bringing in tens of thousands of legal refugees from across the entire globe.
See my post yesterday about how the border and the refugee admissions program have long ago been “conflated” in peoples’ minds.
Here is a bit of what theNew York Timesis saying in what is likely the first, hopefully not the last, reporting on the bloom-off-the-rose for Biden. It is long, and likely only the wonkiest of refugee wonks will read it all.
Forgive me for my fixation on this, but I have never seen anything quite like this mess in all the years I’ve been writing about the US Refugee Program, and I especially love to see the Lefties at each others’ throats!
An Early Promise Broken: Inside Biden’s Reversal on Refugees
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to President Biden.
(If Biden brings in fewer refugees than Trump did in a year, will they call Biden a “racist?” Just wondering!)
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden.
Ha! Is it Blinken’s team doing the leaking?
In the meeting, on March 3, Mr. Blinken implored the president to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
But Mr. Biden, already under intense political pressure because of the surge of migrant children at the border with Mexico, was unmoved. The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this?
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House, according to an account of his decision making from more than a dozen Biden administration officials, refugee resettlement officials and others.
Mr. Biden was eager for the praise that would come from vastly increasing Mr. Trump’s record-low limit, people familiar with his thinking said, and he decided to increase the cap even earlier than the usual start of the fiscal year, Oct. 1.
If Chief of Staff Ron Klain thinks holding refugee numbers down will bring some bipartisanship in Congress and brownie points for the midterm elections, he has very seriously miscalculated.
But only weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, immigration and the border had already become major distractions from his efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and to persuade Congress to invest trillions of dollars into the economy — issues championed by aides like Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, as more central to his presidency.
[….]
The exchange on March 3 took place shortly after Mr. Biden had dispatched Mr. Blinken and two other cabinet secretaries to formally tell Congress that he would increase refugee admissions during the next six months to 62,500 people from the annual 15,000-person limit set by Mr. Trump.
Instead, the president undercut his emissaries and left hundreds of refugees in limbo for weeks.
For the next month and a half, Mr. Biden’s aides stalled, repeatedly telling reporters and refugee advocacy groups that the president still intended to follow through.
[….]
On Feb. 12, the president delivered on the specific commitment to Congress, pledging to resettle 62,500 refugees fleeing war and persecution at home. Mr. Blinken delivered the message to lawmakers along with Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, and Norris Cochran, the acting health secretary at the time.
Hetfield is surely the leader of the pack as he stirs the political pot and I’m guessing the ringleader in guiding the NYT reporters with the help of his sources in the State Department.
“They went there and presented a really thoughtful plan, and we were so thrilled,” said Mark J. Hetfield, the chief executive of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a resettlement agency.
“And then,” Mr. Hetfield said, “it just evaporated overnight.”
[….]
As the weeks stretched into months, it became clear that Mr. Biden’s presidency would not be the panacea some had thought.
The biggest knife-cut of all! Biden wanted to stick with Stephen Miller‘s cap!
Instead of making good on his promise to significantly expand refugee entry into the United States, Mr. Biden was sticking to the cap engineered by Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.
“This reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses,” Mr. Miller tweeted, adding that if it were still up to him, “Refugee cap should be reduced to ZERO.”
The idea that Mr. Miller and Mr. Biden were in agreement about anything was anathema to most of the president’s supporters, many of whom flew into a rage.
[….]
By Friday evening, the White House was in full damage-control mode.
Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, held an emergency conference call with refugee advocates at 7:30 p.m., emphasizing that the administration would work to welcome in the refugees with haste.
That is enough to show you what a hash the administration has made of the refugee admissions program and immigration in general!
I’ve wondered for over a decade why Biden’s Delaware never welcomed refugees in any numbers.
Only a handful have ever been placed there and no one seems to know why. It isn’t because it is a small state, because Rhode Island is smaller and has welcomed thousands more than Biden’s home state.
According to the US State Department data base at the Refugee Processing Center, Delaware has only ‘welcomed’ 171 refugees since the beginning of fiscal year 2003. (Data before 2003 is not easy to access.)
Well it is a small state you say!
It is twice the size of Rhode Island which took in 3,122 poor third worlders in the same time period.
And, if you want to have some say, it means you are “unkind” and “un-American” according to Mark Hetfield CEO of the supposed non-profit group HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).
HIAS is one of the groups which financially benefit from the resettlement of refugees as your tax dollars fund their work of changing America by changing the people. This is what Hetfield said last yearat the time of the lower court ruling against the President.
“An overwhelming majority of governors and municipalities have already expressed their desire to continue welcoming refugees. To those few who have not, we say not only is it unkind and un-American to ban refugees from your states and towns, but it is unlawful.”
Hetfield, his organization and eight other federal contracting groups like HIAS***, have been deciding for decades where the impoverished third worlders we fly into the country will be placed and they want to keep making those decisions. After all, you are all a bunch of boobs and racists in their minds.
This is not a surprise. As much as I have been a Trump fan, and as much as I admire his effort to allow local governments and state governments to have a say, his initiative was not well-thought-out. And, he was blind-sided by feckless Republican governors. In fact, almost all Republican governors thumbed their nose at the President’s offer to give them a say.
Included among those governors who did not back the President were Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem. Only Gov. Abbott of Texas supported the President. I believe Kemp (GA) and Desantis (FL) were silent. (Someone correct me if I am wrong about those last two).
The recent Appeals Court decision ends any hope of consideration for your views about the placement of refugees and you will be back to only using your voice (ha! ha!) as they work to add more impoverished and potentially ill people to your towns and cities.
You really must involve yourselves in local politics!
As the incoming Biden Administration has said, they want to ‘welcome’ 125,000 refugees to Americain year one to make up for what they will call the lost Trump years.
4th Circuit Upholds Ban On Trump’s Order Allowing States To Refuse Refugees
SAN DIEGO (CBSDFW.COM/AP) — An executive order by President Donald Trump had aimed to give state and local governments the ability to shut out refugees, but the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a ban on the order.
The three-judge panel said the executive order that required both state and local entities to give their consent before allowing refugees to be placed in their areas “would cause inequitable treatment of refugees and undermine the very national consistency that the Refugee Act is designed to protect.”
Tomorrow Biden/Harris will be coronated and the entire federal government structure will turn to the job of pouring more migrants of all stripes into the American heartland, indeed into every small and medium-sized city from sea to shining sea.
Those migrants, including supposedly “vetted” refugees will need jobs or welfare that will further increase joblessness among already strained citizens in the wake of a worldwide pandemic. They will also need healthcare as they are not tested in advance for COVID-19 and other communicable diseases.
Americans Last!
*** For new readers these are the Progressive groups, some claim they are ‘religious’ charities, that put the wellbeing of refugees and illegal migrants ahead of struggling Americans.
Some of these federal contractors have been busy for four decades changing the demographic make-up of the United States and they are back in power!
Endnote: I have been busy writing at my other blog Frauds and Crooksabout the Great Election steal of 2020 and other issues. I will be picking up the pace here at RRW as new readers will be arriving as Biden and Harris go into high gear, supported by the entire structure of the federal government, to change America.
I have been writing here since July 2007 (except for the brief period in 2019 when the speech police took me down) and have archived 9,577 posts (so far) on the refugee industry here and abroad.
Last Friday “faith based” groups huddled (virtually) with demented Joe‘s proposed head of Homeland Security and declared themselves “refreshed” by promises from their dear leader.
According to Religion News Service, here are the attendees, in addition to Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), who are especially thrilled at the prospect of more impoverished Muslims and other third worlders expected to arrive in the US beginning in January:
(I have highlighted some of my personal favorites)
According to a Biden transition official, the meeting also included representatives from Catholic Charities USA, Emgage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints[Mormons—ed], Code Legal Aid, Christian Churches Together, Jesuit Refugee Services USA, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Arab American Institute, Bridging Cultures Group, Esperanza, the Ismaili Council for the USA, the Secure Community Network, the Islamic Society of North America and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Those are ‘faith’ groups along with HIAS that DO NOT PUT AMERICANS FIRST.
As I told Neil Munro at Breitbart (and I plan to post this comment every time I write about the America Lasters, fake humanitarians):
There’s no sense trying to argue with [progressives] except to turn it back and say; ‘What about our own poor people? Why aren’t they interested in taking care of our poor Americans? Our homeless? Why are refugees and immigrants somehow cooler and more desirable to take care of than our own poor people? Have we run out of poor Americans to take care of?’ No, clearly, we have not run out of poor Americans.
Biden DHS nominee has ‘refreshing’ meeting with faith groups about immigration, refugees
WASHINGTON (RNS) — President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security held a roundtable meeting with an array of faith groups on Friday (Dec. 18), a gathering participants described as “refreshing” and a shift away from the Trump administration’s combative relationship with religious organizations regarding immigration and refugee policy.
The long list of attendees huddled virtually with Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban American Sephardic Jew and former refugee Biden has tapped as his DHS nominee.
They are especially jazzed at Biden’s promise to open America’s gates to migrants from Muslim countries that hate us!
A Biden transition official noted there was significant energy at the meeting created by Biden’s promise to overturn President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which advocates characterize as a “Muslim ban.” They also discussed laws and regulations governing asylum claims.
Biden says he will one-up Obama!
Biden recently announced at a gathering of the Jesuit Refugee Service that he would raise the refugee ceiling to 125,000, above even the 110,000 cap former President Barack Obama set in his final year in office.
“The door just has not been open for discussion for the last four years for many of us in the human rights community,” Mark Hetfield of HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, told Religion News Service after the meeting. “It was nice to actually have a meeting where you can discuss issues — that’s a 180 degree change from what we’ve been enduring for the last four years.”
HIAS has been the ringleader of the anti-Trump ‘faith’ groups since before the President was elected in 2016. They sued the President over Trump’s attempt to give local governments a say in refugee placement. HIAS, Church World Service, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service want to decide if your town will be a resettlement site. They have been making those decisions for decades!
Last year, three faith-based groups, including HIAS, sued the Trump administration over an executive order granting state and local officials the authority to block refugee resettlement.
“I honestly feel there is no better person in the country to serve in this role than Alejandro,” Hetfield said of Mayorkas, who has served on HIAS’ board.
First, HIAS and the United Nations have formalized their relationship according to apress announcement from the UN yesterday. Supposedly it is the first ‘faith’ group to do so.
Zionists zing Hetfield!
Also, yesterday, a press release from the Zionist Organization of America trumpets that HIAS misleads its supporters and the public on several fronts:
ZOA Urges HIAS: Stop Misleading Statement That HIAS Is “Jewish Refugee Agency” and That “HIAS’ Board is 100% Jewish”
HIAS Falsely States Its Partner “Islamic Relief” Is “Apolitical Humanitarian Group” When IR Is On Israel’s and UAE’s Terrorist Lists
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) released the following statement:
The ZOA urges HIAS and HIAS’ President, CEO, and Board member Mark Joseph Hetfield to stop falsely stating that “HIAS’ Board is 100% Jewish”; to stop misleadingly implying that Hetfield is Jewish and speaks for Jews as a Jew; to stop misleadingly claiming that HIAS is a “Global Jewish Refugee Agency,” when in fact approximately 99% of HIAS’ refugee clients are non-Jews (largely Muslim); and to stop falsely stating that HIAS’ partner, “Islamic Relief,” is an “apolitical humanitarian group.” In fact, Israel, the UAE, and others designateIslamic Relief as a terror organization.
As Americans continue to struggle due to the Chinese virus, I figured it is time to highlight once again the salaries of those who are doing well by doing good.
Parents tell your children to grow up to be charity workers.
Again, if HIAS was a legitimate private ‘charity’ it would be none of our business what they pay their employees. However, since they took in over $20 million in taxpayer dollars reported in this Form 990, nearly half of their income for the year, it is our business.
They anticipate the immediate arrival of the promised 125,000 refugees to America. But, heck I am thinking that they don’t even need more immigrant voters when they can just make up any needed votes by distributing millions of ballots in key cities!
I’ll report as the refugee contractors come in with expressions of joy over the media’s pronouncement of a Biden/Harris victory.
See yesterday’s post–Over 27,000 from Muslim ban countries in the pipeline for immediate resettlement.
After a tense nationwide wait since Election Day, HIAS congratulates President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Mark Hetfield CEO of HIAS
“The election of Joseph Biden marks a return to (American) values, an acknowledgement that refugees and immigrants have always been a benefit, not a burden to our great country,” HIAS President and CEO Mark Hetfield said in a special video message.
“HIAS looks forward to building back better the U.S. refugee resettlement program in partnership with the U.S. government, and to restoring America’s rightful place in the world as a leader for people seeking asylum and for human rights,” Hetfield continued, “but we also do need to acknowledge that the closeness of this election and the incredible level of support that both candidates received, demonstrates that America remains a highly polarized and divided country.”
Biden has a proven track record of standing for refugees, Hetfield said in a written statement. As a Senator, Biden co-sponsored The Refugee Act of 1980, which codified the U.S. refugee resettlement program and asylum system.
Biden also has made a number of promises to undo some of the anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration.
“Mr. Biden has pledged to return to normal and resettle 125,000 refugees a year in our country; to end the harmful Remain in Mexico policy that has stranded thousands of people at our Southern border; and to reunite the 545 children still separated from their parents as a result of the current administration’s practice of taking children — including babies and toddlers — from their asylum-seeking parents,” Hetfield said in the statement.
I have ahuge archive on HIAS as they were a leading US taxpayer-funded ‘non-profit’ working tirelessly from before Trump won the White House to defeat him.
With 70 million Americans now on record to oppose Biden/Harris and their plans to open American borders, no doubt HIAS will have a harder time placing refugees in certain US towns and cities (assuming Biden and Harris are actually legally certified).
In a piece designed for emotional impact The Associated Press reported this week that President Donald Trump has eviscerated the four-decades-old US Refugee Admissions Program.
Cry me a river: the US is no longer the world leader in admitting questionable refugees for American taxpayers to care for!
From AP:
Under Trump, US no longer leads world on refugee protections
For decades, America led the world in humanitarian policies by creating a sanctuary for the oppressed, admitting more refugees annually than all other countries combined.
That reputation eroded during Donald Trump’s presidency as he cut the number of refugees allowed in by more than 80%, and Canada replaced the U.S. as No. 1 for resettling people fleeing war and persecution.
Trump has arguably changed the immigration system more than any U.S. president, thrilling supporters with an “America first” message and infuriating critics who call his signature domestic issue insular, xenophobic and even racist.
Before November’s election, The Associated Press is examining some of Trump’s biggest immigration policy changes, from halting asylum to stepping back from America’s humanitarian role.
The pain from a dismantling of the 40-year-old refugee program reverberates worldwide, coming as a record 80 million people have been displaced by war and famine.
[….]
Stephen Miller, left, with then Senator Jeff Sessions. Miller got his big break when he went to work for the Senate’s leading advocate for immigration restriction, Sessions.
Trump has lowered the cap for refugee admissions each year of his presidency, dropping them to a record low of 15,000 for 2021.
The State Department defended the cuts as protecting American jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, said the administration has sought to have refugees settle closer to their home countries and work on solving the crises that caused them to flee.
When Trump is reelected one of his top priorities must be to cement this concept of keeping refugees close to their homes until whatever conflict or environmental crisis has occurred is rectified.
You are going to hear more and more about “climate refugees.” Remember they are not by definition refugees under existing international treaties.
The AP continues….
As many as 1,000 refugees who were ready to travel now may not be eligible because they don’t fit into one of the categories, said Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a refugee resettlement group. For example, many Syrians may no longer qualify because no category is for those fleeing war, he said.
[….]
Democrat Joe Biden promises to raise the annual refugee cap to 125,000 if he wins Nov. 3.
If you are wondering what Hetfield is referring to (in red type above), see this year’s report to Congress that accompanies the Presidential Determination. It reiterates the definition of a refugee in the opening paragraphs.
A refugee by definition is someone personally escaping persecution.
Moving around the globe because of a war (or weather) is not, and has never been, a part of that legal definition. Over time, the Open Borders pushers have simply expanded the definition to suit their agenda with the help of their complicit media.
WHO IS A REFUGEE?
Under Section 101(a)(42) of the INA, a refugee is an alien who, generally, has experienced past persecution or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Individuals who meet the statutory definition may be considered for either refugee status under Section 207 of the INA if they are outside the United States, or asylum status under Section 208 of the INA, if they are already in the United States or present themselves at a U.S. port of entry. Both refugee and asylum status are forms of humanitarian protection offered by the United States.
And, if you want to have some say, it means you are “unkind” and “un-American” according to Mark Hetfield CEO of the supposed non-profit group HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).
