Day: February 24, 2018

Investigative reporter and blogger, Leo Hohmann's first-hand account of trip to South Dakota

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It was an eye-opener on so many levels Hohmann recounted to me and here is the first of a couple of posts on what he saw and learned when he was invited to help educate a South Dakota legislative committee about refugee resettlement and the refugees being secretly placed in American towns in recent years.
Joining Hohmann on a witness panel were James Simpson and Phil Haney, both should be familiar to regular readers here at RRW.
Below is the title and a few snips of the must read post at LeoHohmann.com, but please read it all! (Emphasis below is mine):

GOP governor leads fight against ending refugee influx from Somalia and other jihadist strongholds

Many of you have noticed I’ve been quiet this week, posting only one article about the efforts of Kansas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins to win amnesty for an illegal-alien Muslim professor with ties to a terror-stained mosque.

Rest assured I haven’t been slacking. I was traveling on special assignment, so let me fill you in.

sen-neal-tapio
SD Senator Neal Tapio is running for Congress. Although Republicans soundly defeated his bill, the hearing served as an educational opportunity that should be replicated in other states.

Refugee resettlement has over the past couple of years become a controversial subject in many state capitals as more Americans educate themselves on the dark underbelly of a program that has been transforming U.S. cities and towns for 35 years.

South Dakota — like Idaho, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia and Minnesota — is a state where patriotic Americans have formed pockets of resistance to the resettlements. They’ve seen the fraud and greed upon which the program — run by the United Nations in cooperation with the U.S. State Department and its federal contractors affiliated with private agencies like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services — is based.

[….]

My task Wednesday was to testify before the South Dakota Senate’s Committee on State Affairs in support of a bill introduced by Sen. Neal Tapio that would place a moratorium on refugees entering that state from any country that has been placed on a federal travel ban.

Any time a state pushes back against refugee resettlement it is a big deal, so I dropped everything and flew to South Dakota. This federal program has evolved over the decades from a legitimate humanitarian effort into a fraudulent operation whereby agencies like Lutheran Social Services serve as headhunters for industries looking for cheap Third World labor. The cost for U.S. communities has been devastating in terms of crime, terrorism and welfare abuse but the establishment of both parties will tell any lie necessary to keep the cheap labor flowing.

I saw them in action in South Dakota Wednesday and it left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Continue here for the remainder of part one.
See the Argus Leader here for its sanitized story on the hearing. More later on that!
Go here for my South Dakota archive, a state I visited during my tour of meatpacking states in the summer of 2016.

Get those federal "monitoring reports" for your community (if you can!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m reminded by this report on the San Diego refugee housing scandal at Inewsource.org.
The US State Department on some sporadic basis sends monitors out to refugee resettlement offices around the country to see if your local resettlement agency is compliant with guidelines for the care of refugees they have placed.
Years ago I spoke with Chris Coen who had a blog called ‘Friends of Refugees’ and he regularly submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department for those monitoring reports, then patiently waited YEARS to get responses.  Lacking patience, I never sought them (little did I imagine that nearly 11 years later, I am still doing this!).

Mireille Cronin Mather
IRC’s representative in San Diego: Mireille Cronin Mather

Now that we know that the Tillerson State Department is trying to clear its FOIA backlog, maybe some of you should try again to get the reports for contractors operating in your towns.
Clearly the reporters at Inewsource.org were able to obtain one for the International Rescue Committee in San Diego.
Here is the title and first paragraph of their latest report.  The contractors are extremely vulnerable on the issue of how they care for refugees they are paid to care for (I’ve been hearing it for years), and it goes to the heart of the question about whether this is really a ‘humanitarian’ program or simply driven by money.

Federal monitors warned San Diego refugee nonprofit of problems with resettlement practices

Federal monitors raised concerns about a local refugee resettlement agency’s housing placement practices months before the organization’s employees committed additional violations, which KPBS uncovered and detailed in a series of reports last year.

Continue here.
Now see what a Monitoring report looks like.  2016 report for IRC in San Diego:
 
Screenshot (217)
 
Here is the State Department’s FOIA guideline site.
If you need to know which resettlement agencies are working near you, go here for a directory.  Pick offices that are within a hundred miles of your home.
This post is filed in my ‘What you can do’ category, see here.

Catholic Charities can't have cake and eat it too in Lesbian adoption case, or….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…to put it another way—Live by the government, die by the government!
I wasn’t planning to get into this story about how a Lesbian couple was denied the right to foster a refugee child by Catholic Charities because the couple is a same-sex couple, but couldn’t resist when I saw this Leftwing report on a “Rightwing” TV interview.

DONOHUE
Donohue wrote a book entitled: Twilight of Liberty! Unbelievable that he can’t see that being financially beholden to the federal government doesn’t exactly advance ‘religious’ liberty!

You may be surprised to hear that I am on the side of the Lesbians in this case.
Why?
Because Catholic Charities wouldn’t be in this pickle if they weren’t living off the federal dole with their millions of dollars in grants/contracts they receive from taxpayers.
You might be saying, well they probably would still go after Catholic Charities, yes, maybe, but would have a more difficult road if it weren’t for all the federal money that goes directly to CC and indirectly via the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of nine major federal refugee contractors.***
Catholic agencies can’t act like they are private RELIGIOUS organizations while living off you and me via the US Treasury.  
From The Advocate:

A Texas lesbian couple’s lawsuit over the denial of a foster care opportunity amounts to “gay bullying and harassment” in the mind of right-wing Catholic activist and noted homophobe Bill Donohue.

Fatma Marouf and Bryn Esplin filed suit in federal court Tuesday against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and several federal government agencies after the director of international foster care at the Catholic Charities of Fort Worth turned down their application to foster a refugee child because they don’t “mirror the Holy Family,” The Texas Tribune reports. The bishops’ conference receives federal funding that it funnels to the foster care program, so it is using taxpayer dollars to illegally discriminate based on Catholic beliefs, say the women, who are represented by Lambda Legal.

But Donohue contends the women are just trying to bully the Catholic church. “They’re gay activists,” he said Wednesday on The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham’s show on the Fox News Channel (watch below). “They are trying to shove their secular values down our throats. … Secular militants [are] trying to shove their way in and basically neuter Catholic institutions,” he continued.

He and Ingraham both said the couple could go to other religious groups or secular agencies in search of foster care opportunities, but they are targeting Catholic institutions to rob them of their religious identity. “The intent is to intimidate, to bully, to get them to capitulate,” Donohue said. In some states, Catholic groups have ceased providing adoption or foster care services rather than serve same-sex couples.

More here.
When Catholic Charities and the Bishops give up their federal boodle, then I’ll listen to their “religious identity” arguments.
Decide! Religious principles OR federal money!
If you missed it last month, go here, and see Capital Research Center‘s educational youtube on CC and its dependency on federal money.
*** These are the nine federally funded refugee agencies operating in the US.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!  From most recent accounting, here.