Note:As I began writing this post, Firefox appears to be blocking access to RRW. I don’t know what is up with that, so I’ve switched to Chrome for now….let me know if you are having problems too!
I debated whether to post this photo—I’ll call it the photo of the week—but decided to do it because there is no sense sugar-coating where the western world is this Christmas. In the wake of the Berlin Islamic terror attack…..
Posted at Drudge a day ago….
Here are our Top Three Posts of the week (top daily most popular posts are in the right hand side bar):
For new readers, I have a good summary of how to use RRW and find information at the end of both the October roundup, here, and at the end of the November roundup, here.
And, many thanks to everyone who has suggested that I might be useful to the Trump team. I am flattered, but there are several good people I know who hope to be placed in agencies involving refugee resettlement in the Trump Administration, so let’s hope the Trump Transition Team has the good sense to hire them!
As for me, who would write RRW if I was busy in DC battling bureaucrats every day? And, besides, I need to be right here, not only informing you, but ready and willing to keep Donald Trump and his people honest if they stray from Trump’s campaign promises on immigration!
With Trump win, Santa Fe’s refugee program on hold
(Albuquerque Journal headline)
Hurrah! We found another*** of the supposedly 47 sites the Obama Administration has (secretly!) approved or was working on approving for the massive numbers of refugees they expected to resettle had Hillary won the election rather than Donald Trump. Here is the sad tale from Sante Fe (a city yearning for more diversity). After an initial heartwarming intro:
In less than a year – and largely through the efforts of Santa Fe’s faith communities – what snowballed into a group calling themselves Welcoming Santa Fe were able to get the city designated a refugee resettlement site by the U.S. State Department.
“We were elated,” Dickenson [Nancy a Sante Fe filmmaker who spear-headed the effort] said.
Sante Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales wanted more diversity for Sante Fe. He was one of 18 mayors who demanded Syrian refugees for their cities in 2015. See here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/10/14/act-for-america-launches-citizen-action-campaign-urging-18-mayors-to-re-think-their-demand-for-more-syrian-refugees/
But that was in October. Weeks later, on Nov. 8, Donald Trump won the presidential election. He campaigned on a strict immigration policy that included building a wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration. He also proposed a temporary ban on allowing Muslims into the country, a message he repeated Wednesday in response to this week’s terrorist attack in Berlin that was allegedly perpetrated by a Tunisian asylum-seeker.
No one knows what a Trump presidency will mean for immigration policy. And that’s what caused Lutheran Family Services, an affiliate of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service – one of nine national organizations that work on behalf of the U.S. government to resettle refugees in different parts of the country – to put on hold using Santa Fe as a refugee settlement site.
One hundred refugees, including up to 20 families and 30 children mainly from Central Africa but also from the Middle East and South America, were scheduled to make Santa Fe their new home next month. The startup of a refugee resettlement program was mentioned at a recent meeting of the city Immigration Committee and notice had been issued for a fundraising concert.
Money is the main reason it is on hold!
Burnett [Tarrie Burnett, program director for Lutheran Family Services in Albuquerque] said future funding is also a major concern. Trump has talked about scaling back the nation’s admissions program for refugees, defined by the State Department as people who face persecution in their native lands.
[….]
Burnett said her office operates on a budget of about $1 million, about 75 percent of it coming from the federal government.The rest comes from various grants, pass-through funding, donations and other sources.
Much more here at the Albuquerque Journal.
Bottomline! Resettlement subcontractors like Lutheran Family Services (LIRS is the major resettlement contractor) are not going out on a limb now to open offices, pay rent, and hire staff when Donald Trump could drastically cut the number of refugees arriving beginning on January 21st.
The contractor’s initial federal funding is paid out by the number of ‘clients’ they place. It is a per head payment!
*** We can now add Sante Fe to our list!
Below are new sites we have identified so far of the supposed 47 the Obama Administration is (or has been) trying to get established.
One of the first things the Trump Administration must do is to make all of this information public information. Here are some of the sites we have identified so far by just keeping an eye on local news reports:
Where were you WV Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Republican Rep. Alex Mooney? Only two choices!—either asleep-at-the-switch or in support of this move by a local ‘interfaith’ group to be named a federal subcontracting agency for the purpose of beginning a new refugee resettlement site in the state. (Charleston previously received a few refugees through Catholic Charities, but no where near this scale).
If Capito and Mooney had put up significant opposition, we would have heard about it and this decision might have turned out differently.
Does Obama think he can stick it to West Virginia (Trump territory) voters in his final weeks in office? And, where is Joe [Manchin]? He must be all for it too! Did Mooney tell this nice lady that he is supporting Syrian Muslim resettlement in the state capitol? Charleston is in Mooney’s district. Photo: https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/57741
Just this morning we reported that in Wisconsin, Republican Rep. Sean Duffysent a strongly worded letterabout plans to begin placing Syrians in his district and here a few days ago we learned that the plan for Bloomington, Indiana was shelved because opposition had grown there and because it is expected that Trump will make some move after January 20th to slow (or stop) the flow of refugees to America (money for resettlement is drying up as well).
So why go ahead with this new site at the West Virginia state capitol?
For new readers we have followed the growing controversy in Charleston extensively for months,see here.
From the West Virginia Gazette-Mail (emphasis is mine):
The U.S. Department of State has approved an application to establish a refugee resettlement program in Charleston, officials announced Wednesday. But that decision could be reversed by the incoming administration, according to an expert on refugee resettlement law.
The West Virginia Interfaith Refugee Ministry, which also is the name local organizers have been informally using to describe their humanitarian effort, will begin as a program of the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia.
In a statement issued Wednesday, the Rev. Canon E. Mark Stevenson, director at Episcopal Migration Ministries, announced that the West Virginia Interfaith Refugee Ministry had been approved to join its network of 30 refugee resettlement sites throughout the country.
[….]
In October, they submitted an application for a resettlement agency to place 100 refugees in Charleston in the first year.
David Ramkey, chief financial officer for the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia, said the refugees should be a “welcome addition” and “very productive part” of the community.
[….]
Neil Grungras, executive director of the nonprofit Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, said the Donald Trump administration could reverse the decision.
“The State Department is never obligated to allow even an approved refugee into the U.S.,” Grungras said. “The answer, with regard to the 100 approved, is that it probably depends where they are in their processing. [I will bet a buck that the Obama Administration is packing as many as they can into that pipeline right now!—ed]
[….]
Lynn Clarke, a local organizer, said the group had been told that, if they were approved, the refugees would likely begin arriving this summer. She said the group anticipates refugees fleeing from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, but she said they also could be from other countries. –
As I said in aprevious post, I don’t know why this ‘interfaith’ group was so hot for Syrian Muslims (apparently Iraqis and Afghans too), they usually don’t get to pick their favorite ethnic groups, but actually get a little bit of everything.
That is the key takeaway from Leo Hohmann’s (WND) report on the Berlin terror attack and his interview with Homeland Security whistleblower Phil Haney. See a previous post here at RRW about Obama’s misguided Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policy. Here is Hohmann overnight:
What appears from the outside to be a bungling of basic law-enforcement operations in Germany – allowing a known illegal alien with a criminal and terrorist past to move about freely in German society for more than a year – may not be a bungling at all.
Never again! The Obama/Merkel mindset on Islam and terror must go. Trump must erase all vestiges of the policy wherever it has been installed in the government.
Rather, it’s part of a coordinated strategy also being used by open-borders globalists in the Obama administration, says a retired Homeland Security officer.
Philip Haney, co-author of the whistleblower book “See Something Say Nothing,” explains how a Muslim migrant was able to stay in the country long enough to plan an attack that killed 12 and injured nearly 50 at a Berlin Christmas market Monday.
Anis Amri, a Tunisian national, was allowed to float about undetected by German authorities for more than a year, even though he was a known terror threat who had his asylum bid rejected and had spent four years in an Italian prison for burning down a school. [How many rejected asylum seekers, fake refugees, are floating around your towns and cities?—ed]
The policy that treats Islamic radicals with the soft touch of a preschool teacher, making sure not to violate their “civil rights and civil liberties,” is called “countering violent extremism,” or CVE.
It’s the same policy that governs the Obama administration’s actions in fighting terrorism in the homeland.
The CVE program is rooted in United Nations Agenda 2030 principles on migrant rights, which are adopted by sanctuary cities throughout the world. The principles of CVE are being implemented in city police departments worldwide through the U.N.’s Strong Cities Network, as well as through the U.N. New Urban Agenda.
As previously reported by WND, the Rockefeller Foundation is promoting the New Urban Agenda as the means to transform cities into multi-cultural havens for migrants.
[….]
Haney said President-elect Donald Trump must do away with the suicidal CVE policies installed by Obama, because these policies are more concerned with violating the civil rights and civil liberties of Islamic radicals than they are with protecting America.
Germany is reaping the bitter fruit of this same policy. Twelve Germans, including several women and children, are dead, and more than a dozen more are seriously wounded by a terrorist who should never have been let in the country. And even after he was allowed in, the government had multiple opportunities to arrest and deport him but failed to do so.
German political correctness is directly responsible for those deaths!
To follow links and continue reading, click here.
Before the Trump movement was born, I advocated that your grassroots efforts must focus on local initiatives to elect like-minded office holders (especially mayors seem to have been captured!) and defeat those working for Open Borders and increased refugee resettlement.
Now that the Trump movement is headed to the White House it is time for you to turn your efforts to getting mayors, like this one in Austin, TX, unelected. This is not to say you can rest and assume that the Trump Administration will do everything right, they won’t (Establishment influence is on the rise we hear) and you have to be ready to tell Trump when he gets wobbly! It is imperative that the Trump movement, the reason Trump was elected, must stay alive (no matter what Trump does!) in your towns, cities and states. Mayor Steve Adler: Whatever you say man! See Adler bio, born in DC educated at Princeton. Come on Texans you can do better! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Adler_(lawyer) Here is what the ever vigilant Judicial Watchis reporting about collusion between Austin’s Democrat mayor and the White House behind the back of Republican Governor Abbott. (JW obtained this information because the organization is the leading expert on the Freedom of Information Act.)
After the governor of Texas announced that the state would stop accepting Syrian refugees, the Obama administration went behind his back secretly conferencing with a mayor that offers illegal immigrants sanctuary and Syrians a welcome mat. The plan, evidently, was to continue sending Syrian refugees to the Lone Star State, even as the governor initiated litigation to halt the flow. This week Judicial Watch obtained records of the administration’s behind-the-scenes efforts to keep sending Syrians to Texasdespite fierce opposition from state officials over the security threats created by refugees from an Arab nation that’s a hotbed of terrorism.
The White House looked to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, going around the governor to confer with a city leader who espoused the controversial Syrian resettlements, the records show. Shortly after Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the state wouldn’t accept any more Syrian refugees, the administration responded by colluding with Adler, according to records of a conference call between the mayor’s office and the White House. The administration also furnished Adler with “talking points” involving the refugee resettlement and the parties discussed Abbott’s lawsuit. It seems bizarre that the feds would discuss legal action with a town mayor operating in the state suing them.
[….]
While the legal process was taking place, the Obama administration reached out to a friendly official to assure the Syrian refugees would have a place to land in Texas. Adler, Austin’s mayor since 2014, had publicly proclaimed that Syrian refugees would be received in his city of about 900,000 residents. He even wrote a piece in a local publication last year titled “Syrian Refugees are Welcome in Austin.” Adler assures his constituents in the state’s capital city that “any Syrian refugee coming to the United States faces the most stringent background checks of anyone entering the country.” He proceeds to write that the U.S. only considers refugees screened by the United Nations (the famously corrupt world body) who are then vigorously vetted by the FBI Terrorist Screening Center and other federal agencies. Last month Adler participated in an immigration rally outside City Hall to reiterate his commitment to protecting illegal aliens.
More here.
And, by the way, Austin is a sanctuary city. President Trump must cut off federal funding to cities breaking federal law. After all, weren’t we beaten over the head a few years ago with the idea that immigration is a federal issue! The Open Borders cabal can’t have it both ways!
How many refugees has Austin been getting?
At Wrapsnet.org, I went back to FY2007 and looked at the numbers up to December 15th (6 days ago). The whole state of Texas took in 69,413 refugees in that time frame (they are trying to turn Texas blue!).
I’m not including in this list the smaller numbers of about a dozen other ethnic groups that went to Austin, but here are the major groups (FY 2007 to FY2017, so far):
Afghanistan (95)
Bhutan (589)
Burma (1,677)
Burundi (94)
Cuba (294)
DR Congo (427)
Eritrea (90)
Iran (191)
Iraq (1,775)
Somalia (278)
And, here is how the Syrians break down so far:
FY2015 (21)
FY2016 (161)
and so far in FY2017 (18)
We have a huge archive on Texas, click here for more information about the number-one state in the nation for resettlement of third worlders! Update: Just looked at numbers again and TX has ‘welcomed’ a total of 2,217 refugees in the first 11 weeks of the fiscal year. That is a rate far and above anything they have ever seen, so clearly the feds are getting them seeded as fast as they can despite what the governor says!
