Maine: The go-to state for immigrant marriage fraud, etc. etc. etc.

What happened to Maine?  First we learned it is attracting hordes of Somali welfare moochers, then phony asylum-seeker schemers and now marriage fraudsters.

The word must be all over Africa—get to Maine!

Rashid Kakande hatched the marriage fraud scheme

Busted!  The Bangor Daily News reports that it is (was) one of the most sophisticated marriage fraud rings in the country.  And, on top of the marriage fraud, the cheats have gone one step further and claimed fake spousal abuse to assure they get to stay in the good ol’ USA (land of suckers!).

Editor’s plea to readers:  We would love to approve your comments, but you must keep them free of foul language.  We have had a couple lately (one from Maine) that are so filled with certain unnecessary words that we can’t post them.  I know you are frustrated, but you can say it without cursing and threatening.

Bangor Daily News (Hat tip:  crime sleuth ‘pungentpeppers’):

BANGOR, Maine — One of the country’s most sophisticated marriage fraud schemes officially ended Tuesday when a federal judge sentenced the last defendant to a year in prison.

Margaret Kimani, 30, of Worcester, Mass., was one of 28 defendants convicted in Maine of being part of a scam that paid American citizens living in Maine to wed African immigrants so they could more easily obtain permanent residency status, known as a green card, and achieve citizenship more easily, Maine’s U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Delahanty II said at a press conference after the sentencing.

“America’s legal immigration system is not for sale and we will move aggressively against those who willfully compromise the integrity of that system simply to enrich themselves,” said Bruce Foucart, special agent in charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in Boston, whose office headed the investigation that led to the prosecutions.

“HSI’s message is very simple,” he said at the press conference. “U.S. citizenship is not for sale and there are consequences for those who commit marriage fraud. If you commit marriage fraud, there isn’t going to be a honeymoon.”

The investigation was launched in 2005 and identified more than 40 sham marriages in the Lewiston/Auburn and Newport areas between U.S. citizens in Maine and nationals from Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Cameroon. Prosecutions began in 2010.

There is more.  Read the rest of the tortured tale.

Our extensive Maine archive is here.   Lewiston, Maine has produced many stories all by itself, click here for more on Lewiston.

Burmese refugees struggling in Iowa

The thing that amazes me most about articles like this one, about how there aren’t enough ‘resources’ for the large numbers of refugees arriving in ‘welcoming’ cities and states, is that NO ONE ever says, maybe we should slow the flow into the US until such time that we can afford them!

Paw Moo Htoo (Mom in the photo) has been in America seven months….Htoo says her case worker only showed her how to turn on the lights and oven, but said nothing about enrolling her kids in school. So at first, they didn’t go.

 

There is so much in this report from the Des Moines Register by Rehka Basu (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) that I didn’t know where to begin snipping it.  So please be sure to read the whole article!  Emphasis below is mine:

On the Monday after standard time went into effect, Lee Mo’s children missed school. The Burmese refugee family knew the American ritual of moving clocks forward and back, but they didn’t know on which dates that happened, so the school bus left without them.

Even if she had known the date, Mo couldn’t read a calendar. For much of her five years here, she has had to estimate time based on the position of the sun. She doesn’t know her age. She can’t make a phone call. Like about half of the people in Iowa who speak her native Karenni, she can’t read in any language. Neither she nor her husband went to school.  [We have admitted tens of thousands of Burmese like this family!—ed]

An estimated 6,000 Burmese are in Iowa and some say life was easier in the camp!

Since 2006, refugees from Burma have been turning up in Iowa, becoming its largest incoming refugee group.

There are an estimated 6,000 refugees from Burma who are here, divided about evenly between three main language groups (though there are dozens of less-spoken languages), according to Henny Ohr, executive director of EMBARC, a new Des Moines nonprofit to help them. The Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services counts 1,667 refugees from Burma in Iowa, but that doesn’t include secondary migration from other cities. Yet Ohr says no Karenni speaker in Iowa is fluent in English.

For all of the deprivations in the refugee camps — houses of bamboo and leaves, lit only by candlelight; dug pits for toilets; no electricity or running water; no health care or police to fight crime — Mo says that life was easier. At least she knew how to navigate it.

In the “old days” resettlement contractors used private money and volunteer help to go beyond what their government dole paid for, today they don’t!

Refugee resettlement core services from the U.S. State Department were always limited to 90 days, and there is a one-time per capita grant of $1,800, of which $700 can go to agency staff for management, says John Wilken, chief of the Bureau of Refugee Services in the Iowa Department of Human Services. But in the past, income-eligible single people or couples without young children could also get cash assistance and medical care for five years. That was cut back to eight months.

“In the old days, agencies doing resettlement often went beyond 90 days, I presume because they had private dollars or volunteers,” said Wilken. “As the landscape has changed and resettlement has become more costly, resettlement agencies have had to limit their services to exactly what they’re getting paid for.”

Take note Wyoming, state taxpayers help foot the bill.

Low-income refugees with children get welfare benefits under Iowa’s Family Investment Program, with a lifetime cap of five years. The Bureau of Refugee Services uses federal funds for refugees here less than two years to pay for employment-related services primarily. The bulk of that $550,000 last year paid for bureau staff, job transportation and telephone interpretation services. Language instruction was limited to “self-learning” on computers using Rosetta Stone programs. The bureau has no Karenni-speaking employees.

There are other federal grants, including some to prepare elderly refugees for citizenship, or targeted to Des Moines Public School children, and partnerships with Lutheran Services of Iowa, Catholic Charities and the Des Moines chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But as Wilken says, “All of us would say there’s a pretty substantial gap in comprehensive case management.”

Secondary migrants arriving for meatpacking jobs!  (Immigrant cheap labor!)  Meatpackers make money, while taxpayers subsidize the lives of these legal laborers.

And when families are resettled in Iowa from other states — for meatpacking jobs or because relatives are here — the 90 days of assistance won’t follow them, and the Bureau of Refugee Services won’t help. Wilken said it didn’t compete for such funds; the Committee for Refugees and Immigrants administers them. Yet secondary migrants are the biggest group of refugees from Burma.

Just a reminder, Bill Clinton began the flow of refugees to Iowa for his meatpacking buddies, here.

Ohr calls it a crisis.

It is a crisis alright, but one not to be solved by throwing more taxpayer dollars to contractors!  Let’s bring fewer refugees!

 

Obama’s Aunt Zeituni dies; subject of infamous asylum case

Anyone who had read Obama’s and Bill Ayers’ book, ‘Dreams from my father,’ knew that Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, was in the US somewhere when he claimed not to know in 2008.

 

Obama’s Aunt Zeituni dead at 61.  Josh Reynolds/AP/2009

 

She had been ordered deported in 2004, but in a much publicized court case, she was granted asylum in 2010. 

Keep in mind that her home country of Kenya is not one of the top places in Africa people claim asylum from, it is a stable country (Well, except for the Somali agitators and terrorists. I doubt she told the court she was running from Somalis!).  All of our coverage on Aunt Zeituni is here.

Aunt Zeituni died on Monday in a rehab center in Boston.

I wonder if the Obama’s will attend her funeral.  Aunt Zeituni had complained in 2009 that her famous nephew didn’t invite her to family gatherings.  That snub and the apparent disregard for the “brother in a hut” in Kenya are strange actions indeed for our supposedly good-hearted young President.

From the Boston Globe (Hat tip:  Judy):

President Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who won asylum in 2010 after living illegally in Boston for several years, died on Monday night in a nursing home in the city, her legal team said.

The law office of Margaret W. Wong, one of Onyango’s immigration lawyers, confirmed on Tuesday that she died the night before in her sleep at the Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Harborlights facility in South Boston.

Onyango, 61, had taken ill in January and suffered from breast cancer and respiratory problems, Wong and a relative said.

[….]

The White House had no comment on Onyango’s passing. She was a native of Kenya and moved to South Boston in 2000, Wong’s office said. She was the half-sister of Obama’s late father.

[….]

Wong’s office said that Onyango was denied asylum in 2004 and nearly deported. Her case was leaked to the press during Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

[….]

Onyango, whom the president called Auntie Zeituni in one of his books, was ordered to leave the country in 2003, but she stayed. Later that year, she tried to stay again. But she lost the appeal, and an immigration judge ordered her deported in October 2004.

Instead, Onyango remained in Boston and lived in state and federal public housing. Critics have denounced her for defying deportation and for living in public housing while scores of families are on waiting lists.

Her lawyers successfully argued to reopen her case, and she was granted asylum in 2010.

In 2011, Zeituni’s brother Omar was discovered (drunk driving) living on the US taxpayers in Boston as well, and subsequently granted asylum.  Here is our archive on Uncle Omar.  See especially, Obama lies!

If you would like to learn more about the Obama ‘family’ tree—a fantastic book on the old man (Barack Sr.) is Globe reporter Sally Jacobs’ ‘The other Barack…..’   He was a creep, a cad, a liar and more.