Leave it to the refugee industry’s public relations apparatus to get a story planted in the Kansas City Star just as Donald Trump arrived in the state next door for a rally for Kansas Republican candidates including gubernatorial candidate, a leading immigration control advocate, Kris Kobach. One story is here.
(This Somali family lives in Kansas City, Missouri)
Here is the headline with the usual story line (family happy to be in America, only wish Dad was with them).
As Trump cuts refugee numbers, outlook dim for father to join KC Muslim family of 9
But, why wasn’t Dad with them and caring for them in Kenya (a safe country btw)?
Somali refugee Sahra Hassan Absuge and her eight children today enjoy what they could only dream of two years ago.
A two-story house. A couple of jobs. Schools. Donated appliances. [Food stamps and Medicaid fills the gap says the story.—-ed]
“I am so lucky,” Absuge said. “It’s by the grace of God that we are here.”
All that’s missing is her husband.
Also a refugee from Somalia, he seeks to one day join his Kansas City family after four years of being separated, trapped in another war zone. But chances for a reunion anytime soon appear slim, given ever-deepening cuts in the number of refugees allowed into the U.S.
Absuge and her children barely got in themselves.
Twenty months ago, dozens of cheering supporters at Kansas City International Airport greeted the family after they had squeezed through a tightening slipknot on refugee travel.
Continue here for all the happy talk and mention of their resettlement agency—Della Lamb—a Methodist group, a subcontractor of the Ethiopian Community Development Council (one of nine federal resettlement contractors that work for the US State Department).
Then a lament about a slowdown in family reunification:
At Della Lamb, Hyde and director of refugee resettlement Abdul Bakar could think of resettling only one Muslim on the Missouri side in the past year.
Absuge’s husband, the father of all eight of the children, is Muslim.
“There used to a good pipeline for family reunification,” said Judy Akers, Della Lamb’s executive director. “But there hasn’t been much spoken of that recently.”
Family reunification suspended in 2008 for Somalia….
Longtime readers may remember that the US State Department had to suspend the whole family reunification program for Somalis beginning in 2008 due to massive fraud in the P-3 (family reunification) program, see here. The suspension lasted several years.
I sure hope Homeland Security is doing some robust vetting of Dad. He left their Nairobi village in 2014? (Someone check the age of the youngest child!). But other news reports say they were living in a UN camp.
He went to Sudan looking for work in the middle of civil unrest there? And, then instead of returning to his family in a safe Kenya he ‘flees’ to Uganda. WTH!
Dad then ‘finds his family’ on YouTube videos?
He could have found them if he had returned to safe Kenya from his sojourn in Sudan instead of hotfooting it to Uganda!
KC Star continues….
….father left their Nairobi refugee village in 2014 to seek work in Sudan. He instead encountered homelessness, civil war and hunger before fleeing to Uganda. When his family resettled in America, his wife didn’t know if Abdullahi was alive or dead. [Really! Or did this family have a better shot of getting in to the US as women and children only?—ed]
Wow! Dad found after the family got to KC!
The father, through friends in Nairobi, learned of the family’s whereabouts with the help of the internet and those YouTube videos. “Search ‘refugees’…and our family of nine pops up,” Absuge said through the interpreter.
For those who want to read the whole long (anti-Trump propaganda) story, click here.