That is the question a young opinion writer asks and answers (in the affirmative of course!) in the wake of Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on the President’s travel ban.
The long opinion piece in Deseret News by writer Gillian Friedman evoked a largely negative response by readers. I especially got a chuckle out of this comment:
Continue reading “Does America have a moral obligation to resettle refugees?”
Month: April 2018
Ridiculous comments made on steps of Supreme Court yesterday
Ridiculous and ungrateful I should say….
(See my post yesterday about the Supreme Court hearing on the travel ban.)
Now, look at this headline from Talking Points Memo:
‘They Bomb Us, Then Ban Us:’ The Scene Outside SCOTUS Before The Travel Ban Case
And, then the reporter goes on to report from migrants to the US who would be better served putting their heads down and working hard to become good and grateful Americans.
Continue reading “Ridiculous comments made on steps of Supreme Court yesterday”
Refugee contractor: 100 refugee offices have closed
If this is true, then nearly 1/3 of all refugee resettlement offices have closed around the country. Really?
And, if this is true, why has the Refugee Processing Center (Wrapsnet) not deleted any of the contact information for those now supposedly non-existent agencies from its database, or updated their resettlement site map? What are we paying them for?
Continue reading “Refugee contractor: 100 refugee offices have closed”
Supremes to hear Trump travel ban case today, fears Trump will win
According the NPR people lined up as early as this past Sunday in order to get a coveted seat for the hearing on the President’s travel ban.
National Public Radio‘s Nina Totenberg has a lengthy, pretty straightforward, story. Here is a bit of it:
The Supreme Court’s Grand Finale: Trump’s Travel Ban
The Trump administration’s travel ban finally reaches the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, posing enormous questions involving the structure of the American government and the values of the country.
At issue is the third version of the ban — which the president has complained is a “watered down” version. The court allowed it to go into effect while the case was litigated, but the lower courts have ruled all three versions either violate federal law or are unconstitutional.
Like the earlier two bans, version 3.0 bars almost all travelers from six mainly Muslim countries, and it adds a ban on travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela.
The questions in the case are the stuff of history:
~Can the courts even review a presidential order on immigration that invokes national security?
~Did the president violate the immigration law’s command against discrimination based on nationality?
~And does the executive order violate the Constitution’s ban on religious discrimination?
The travel-ban argument will be the last of the term. And the importance of the argument is not lost on the court. For the first time since the same-sex-marriage arguments in 2015, the court is allowing same-day distribution of the session’s audio. Nonetheless, people started lining up at 7 a.m. Sunday in hopes of snagging a seat Wednesday.
The court itself will be under extreme pressure. There are only about two months left in the term and an unusually large number of cases yet to be decided.
One key question is this one:
Can the court consider Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric?
See more of the NPR story here. Legal beagles will find it interesting.
Then see that the Leftwing Slate predicts:
Trump’s Going to Win
Why the Supreme Court will probably uphold the president’s travel ban.
A decision isn’t expected until June.
For more background visit my ‘Supreme Court’ category by clicking here. Don’t miss my post of two days ago, here.
Best hope for reforming US Refugee Program is now, during the Presidency of Donald Trump, says expert
“I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams that permeate the refugee program.”
(Mary Doetsch, retired Foreign Service Officer)
Mary Doetsch is a retired US State Department Foreign Service officer who spent eight years (of a 25-year career) as a Refugee Coordinator serving on four continents.
As someone who has worked on the inside, her op-ed at the Washington Examiner today carries more weight than anything I could ever write as an outsider looking in!
Entitled:
US refugee program needs a complete overhaul
Ms. Doetsch opines (emphasis is mine):
During my career in the State Department, I became a refugee coordinator in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, because I wanted to help and support persecuted persons in legitimate need of international protection. But the pervasive fraud I saw during my eight years in the field was alarming.
It cries out for a fix, and President Trump might just be the person to do it.
Undoubtedly, many individuals who work within the refugee field have humanitarian aims. But refugee resettlement has morphed into a numbers-driven, financially motivated business, growing blindly at the expense of the American public and our national security.
There once was a time when private charities, civic groups and faith-based organizations provided the bulk of funds and volunteers to resettle and help assimilate refugees in the United States. Today’s deeply flawed system relies almost exclusively on nine federal contractors (paradoxically referred to as “Voluntary Agencies” or VOLAGS) to resettle refugees.
[….]
The contractors have a vested interest in processing ever-larger numbers of applicants, since they make money on every refugee settled. And as non-governmental organizations they can and do lobby for advantageous changes to law, something they could not do if they were government agencies. Their lobbying umbrella wields enormous influence over refugee admissions policy, pressuring Congress and the bureaucracy to increase admissions and provide ever greater funding. They stage political rallies, file lawsuits against unfavorable policies, and lobby for causes that coincidentally help their bottom lines, yet this linkage is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
This isn’t just important from the oft-discussed security perspective, but also because of the rampant fraud and abuse that has permeated this program for generations.
[….]
As a former Refugee Coordinator who served throughout the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Cuba, I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams that permeate the refugee program. I witnessed widespread exploitation and misuse, from identity fraud to marriage and family relation scams, and from private individuals profiting from their involvement in USRAP to distortion of the actual refugee definition to ensure greater numbers of people who should really just be migrants are admitted as refugees.
[….]
While refugee admissions have been declining under the Trump administration, without structural reform in the USRAP these numbers could again skyrocket under a new administration more favorable to the refugee industry.
Midway into fiscal year 2018, fewer than a quarter of the 45,000 individuals proposed in the FY18 refugee ceiling have entered the country. This slow-down in admissions may reduce the problem of fraud, but it cannot be eliminated without a complete overhaul of the program.
I’ve only snipped a portion of Doetsch’s op-ed, click here to read it all.
What you can do….
Contact the White House and tell the President it is now or never to overhaul the US Refugee Admissions Program, or once out of office the program will go back in to high gear. Reducing numbers for a few years is not enough!