Recently we reported on the news from Reutersthat a massive fraud investigation is underway involving the admission of Iraqi so-called ‘refugees’ to the US.
Now a former State Department officer comes forward with a first hand account of the Iraqi fraud and charges that the entire program involving refugees from many continents is riddled with fraud.
The Iraqi refugee fraud is just one of many scandals
The State Department’s recent admission that thousands of Iraqis likely filed fraudulent refugee applications for resettlement in the United States is not a surprise. Instead, the actual shock is that the State Department is finally admitting to what has long been known.
Disturbingly, in terms of the fraud-laden U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, history is simply repeating itself — as it appears that the massive deception inherent in the Iraqi resettlement program can no longer be willfully ignored. According to the Reuters report, U.S. authorities are pursuing what they termed a “sweeping fraud investigation” of potentially more than 100,000 Iraqis. At least 500 Iraqis have already entered the U.S. as “refugees,” while tens of thousands of others are pending resettlement.
The inquiry, although being called one of the “biggest fraud investigations in recent history,” is only one in a long line of resettlement scandals. As early as the 1990s, fraudulent refugee claims werecommonplace in the in-country refugee program in Cuba, which ultimately resettled more than 90,000 Cubans, and among the over 36,000 Somalis who entered the U.S. in the early 2000s under false identities. Similarly, as many as 1,700 individuals who posed as Burmese “refugees” gained fraudulent entry into our country a decade later by falsifying their own data or using the personal information of other persons. To date, at least for the Somalis, it appears that none of these fraudsters have been prosecuted or deported despite violating federal law and swindling the refugee program.
These are but a few of the scandals that have plagued the USRAP since its inception more than 40 years ago. Sadly, the refugee resettlement industry, which morphed into a numbers-driven, financially motivated business, grew blindly at the expense of the public and our national security.During my eight years as a State Department refugee admissions coordinator who served throughout the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and Cuba, I saw firsthand the flagrant abuses and scams that permeated the resettlement program. I witnessed widespread exploitation and misuse from identity fraud and marriage and family relation scams to private individuals profiting from their involvement in USRAP and the distortion of the actual refugee definition to ensure greater numbers of people who were simply migrants were admitted as refugees.
Is Hetfield saying that the ends justify the means?
Far too often, both the governmental and semiprivate power brokers within the industry consistently found ways to ignore, and at times cover up, the fraud and abuse.
Commenting on the Iraqi investigation, Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, one of the nine federally funded refugee contractors that implement refugee resettlement, called resettlement a scarce and valuable commodity.
“People … are going to do anything they can to access it,” he said to Reuters.
There is more, but please visit the Washington Examinerand help drive their numbers.
One of my astute readers pointed out the failure in logic of this line from the June Reuters story:
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the scope of the investigation and internal government deliberations, but said the fraud scheme did not affect security vetting of refugees.
If they are finding that the Iraqi refugee wannabes are liars, then how do they know if “security vetting” is not affected. Hmmmm!
See Doetsch’s earliest attempt (in a letter to the Chicago Tribune) to reveal the extent of the fraud she witnessed. And, as far as I know, no one in authority in Congress or even in the Trump White House in 2017 had asked to debrief her.
