01/08/2016 - Refugee Resettlement Watch

….some legal observers say that Alabama’s (and Texas before it) legal arguments are off track.
There are two excellent articles this morning that go into detail about what Alabama alleges in its lawsuit and what a better alternative legal attack might be.
First we have Michael Patrick Leahy writing at Breitbart (click here) and Leo Hohmann here at World Net Daily, both must have given Richard Thompson (at the Thomas More Law Center) a busy afternoon fielding questions!
Truth be told, my head hurts on these legal points and so I’m leaving it to you, my dear readers, to sort through these articles. I’m going to say a bit more at my other blog, American Resistance 2016!
Here are the opening paragraphs of Hohmann’s article at WND:

Richard-Thompson — Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel, Thomas More Law Center. https://www.thomasmore.org/about/president-chief-counsel-1/

Alabama has become the second state to sue the federal government alleging that it has failed to “consult” with state officials while secretly placing foreign refugees into communities.

The suit claims the Obama administration has violated the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980, which says the federal government “shall consult regularly” with states before placing refugees.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Robert Bentley told the Associated Press the lawsuit was filed Thursday, following a similar suit by Texas a month ago.

But an expert on the 1980 law governing refugee resettlement told WND that neither suit stands a chance of stopping the flow of refugees into Texas or Alabama.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, said his organization is not involved in either the Texas or the Alabama cases because he believes there is a stronger case to be made on the grounds of the 10th Amendment.

“They filed a suit on the grounds that the feds have failed to consult with the state on the location of refugees in the state, and failure to consult is a term that has no real definition to it. Texas has filed a similar suit that thus far has not gone anywhere,” Thompson said. “Thomas More Law Center’s position is that there is a constitutional claim and that claim is based on the 10th Amendment.”

Continue reading here.
Go here to our post a month ago about how the search is on for one brave governor!

Here is the hot news this morning. The LA Times has a more detailed account of the story that broke overnight, than some other news outlets (maybe CA is getting a little more sensitive to the terrorists living in their midst).
The two Iraqis are actually Palestinians who had been living in Iraq. By the way, we only bring a small number of Palestinians to the US as refugees. And, it is not clear to me if one or either of these actually became refugees by arriving here through some other means and then granted asylum. I guess only their federal resettlement contractor knows for sure!

Iraqi terrorist TX — Al Hardan was arrested in Houston, TX.

However, in all likelihood at least one of the two came from our special resettlement project for Palestinians when back in 2009 the US State Department agreed to bring in 1,350 Iraqi Palestinians to your neighborhoods.
It was quite big news at the time. And, the issue was that these were Palestinians Saddam Hussein had invited to live in Iraq and once the regime fell, no one wanted them.
Because of his arrival date, at least one of the two alleged Islamic terrorists could have been in that group. Here is what we said in 2009.
Now, the LA Times:

A man who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee was arrested in Sacramento on Thursday on suspicion of lying about fighting alongside terrorist organizations in Syria, federal authorities said.

On the same day, federal authorities in Houston announced that an Iraqi refugee in Texas, who had been communicating online with the man in California, was charged with attempting to provide support to the militant group Islamic State.

The allegations against two men residing in the U.S. with links to foreign terrorist groups comes as the nation reels from the Dec. 2 shooting in San Bernardino, which left 14 dead. That is considered the deadliest terrorist act on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

And the arrests of two refugees from Iraq, part of a wave of about 103,000*** Iraqi refugees admitted from 2006 to 2014, is likely to add fuel to the debate over whether the U.S. should welcome refugees from Syria, and if so, whether the screening process is adequate.

The man living in Sacramento, Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, had reported in private messages on social media that he fought alongside various groups in Syria, including Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni terrorist group and an affiliate of Al Qaeda, according to a federal complaint filed Wednesday and unsealed Thursday.

There is much more here…..
Because of the ages at which these two must have arrived in the US (as teenagers), it shows how ludicrous the discussion about vetting refugees can be when they are obviously becoming more devout after they get here (I refuse to use the word radicalized!).
And, these two are not the first, remember there is another pair of Iraqi refugee terrorists in federal prison. See our complete archive on the Kentucky terrorists by clicking here.

The only way to make sure we are completely safe is to stop the migration from terror-producing Islamic countries!

*** I’ve been meaning to check out the numbers for Iraq for some time.
Using the State Department’s data base I went back to 2007 and grabbed a map from then until December 31, 2015. The Bush Administration was slow to admit Iraqi refugees, but opened the door in its last year in office. The Obama Administration has made Iraqis the largest group of refugees we admit each year since then.
Here is where 127,906 Iraqis have been resettled since 2007 (remember though that this does not mean they stayed where the contractors originally seeded them).

Top five states: