Category: Africa

“Lutheran Church” taking the rap for bringing Somalis to Minneapolis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This NPR story is just mostly a rehash of a couple of on-going stories involving Somali refugees  numbering surely over 200,000* in the US by now.    It tells us once again that Muslim money transfer businesses have been raided by the FBI and that is linked to the missing Somali youths stories we have followed since November.    However, one line in this report demonstrates the woefully inadequate information the public has about refugee resettlement.

Federal agents served warrants on a handful of money transfer businesses around Minneapolis and eastern Missouri last week. People close to the investigation said the searches were related to the disappearance of about two dozen young Somali-American men and teenagers from the Twin Cities in the past two years.

The Somali community in Minneapolis is the largest in America. Some 70,000 Somalis have settled in Minnesota after they were sponsored by the Lutheran Church in the 1990s. To send cash to their impoverished relatives back home, Somalis typically use money transfer businesses. The FBI fanned out last week to a number of those operations, trying to follow a money trail that might give them an idea of who is behind the disappearance of the young men.

The implication here is that the Lutheran Church is entirely responsible for sponsoring Somali refugees and resettling them in Minneapolis.  In fact the United Nations and the US State Department (and now Homeland Security plays a role)  make the decisions about which refugees come to the US.   Then ten FEDERAL CONTRACTORS  (volags in refugee lingo) including Lutheran Immigration and Social Services divvy up the refugees and spread them out in the US—to your towns and cities.

These ten CONTRACTORS (funded by the State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of  Health and Human Services) compete for refugees by the head and seem to only have any accountablility to the US State Department  if they screw up in some way.  If one should screw up, another competing agency is ready to step in and take over the territory.

It has been our view all along that each refugee family should be sponsored by a church or civic group, for example, which is what this article implies, but it is not done that way.

* No one seems to know exactly how many Somalis live in the US now, but it has to be over 200,000 because the US State Department admitted 80,000 that we know of, others have come illegally and of course they have families with 5-6 kids or more.

US State Department wants to reinstate family reunification program by year’s end

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I wondered what ever happened to this issue, it seemed to have dropped into a black hole.  However, now comes news via another sad refugee puff-piece  story in the Houston Chronicle that the State Department hopes to get the family reunification portion of refugee resettlement up and running by year’s end.  Readers may recall that the program was suspended when widespread fraud was uncovered last year.   See those reports here.

From the Houston Chronicle, yesterday:

The program has been dogged by allegations of abuse for years, and it was suspended in October after a pilot program involving DNA testing found evidence of widespread fraud by people falsely claiming to be related to each other.

Refugee resettlement workers now say the program’s suspension and prolonged processing delays have created a hardship for refugees in the U.S. who are eager for the safety of relatives left behind in Africa, where hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded in war-torn regions.

The Chronicle reporter builds her story, designed to get the reader’s sympathy, around Houston African refugee 24-year-old Mayam Kromah who has discovered her long lost Daddy whom she hasn’t seen since she was 3 or 4 years old.  He is in Guinea, not a hotbed of civil unrest. As a matter of fact, we only admitted 3 refugees from Guinea in the last year.

Houston is home to loads of refugees.

Dario Lipovac, the resettlement services director for YMCA International Services in Houston, said he has a filing cabinet full of paperwork from applicants for the P-3 program, many of whom are still waiting to hear from immigration officials.

Houston has one of largest refugee populations in the U.S. In 2007, Texas resettled 4,440 refugees — many from Africa — ranking second to California.

87% of applicants had lied or disappeared before they could be tested!

The P-3 program aims to reunify families separated after resettlement, which has been considered a long-standing priority in U.S. refugee admission. Since 2003, the program has admitted roughly 36,000 relatives of African refugees, plus about 400 people from other countries, according to the State Department. The majority were from Somalia, Ethiopia and Liberia.

Admissions through the program were suspended last spring for applicants from a handful of East African countries after a pilot DNA testing program in Kenya found high rates of fraud.

A joint investigation by Homeland Security Department and State Department officials involving 500 P-3 cases found that 87 percent of applicants had either lied about a biological relative or failed to show up for an interview as word of DNA testing spread.

Family reunification suspended worldwide.

After the initial findings in Kenya, the DNA testing was expanded to other African countries that participated in the program and found varying rates of fraud, said Fred Lash, a State Department spokesman.

He said final results of the testing are not yet available, but the results were troubling enough that U.S. officials suspended the program throughout the world.

Admissions have dropped dramatically since the start of the fraud investigation — from 5,090 in 2007 to 1,540 in 2008. Since October, only 139 family members of refugees have arrived through the program.

DNA testing should be done on everyone—so-called “anchors” here and the applicants abroad!

Lash said the U.S. government plans to reinstate the program by the end of this year. He said it will require more stringent biometric checks in the future, most likely through DNA testing. The State Department and DHS have not said whether that testing would include “anchor” relatives in the U.S.

“…one man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the concluding line of an essay by Canadian Somali, K’naan, published at the Huffington Post this morning.   I had no intention of even mentioning the military strike on Somali pirates yesterday that resulted in the freedom of their American hostage Capt. Richard Phillips.  Afterall, the mainstream media is all over the story and what more could I say;  and other than the fact that we follow Somali refugee issues closely, it has nothing to do with what we write about.   Or maybe it does?

After my initial jubilation about the Captain’s release and our stunning display of military might, approved by President Obama no less, I started wondering how the average Somali living in huge numbers* in some American cities was going to feel about teenagers blown away while they were being towed by the American Navy ship and in the midst of negotiations. 

If you are now thinking that I’m getting soft by even giving any consideration to the “other side,”  consider that we also know that al-Shabaab, an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization that wishes to “throw the west into hell”  and bring about a worldwide caliphate does have operatives in the US.    So, I am wondering if we are stepping up security wherever Americans interface with Somalis.

K’naan, a successful and westernized Somali immigrant, says that although he is critical of piracy, his viewpoint and presumably the average Somali immigrants viewpoint, is to blame the origin of the piracy on the West—on environmental degradation perpetrated by European countries on Somalia.   Read the whole essay, but here is just a bit to see where he and many (how many?) other Somalis living in the west are likely coming from.

The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.

It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice.

In addition to al-Shabaab operatives in the US, we also have some common Somali criminals like those arrested in Minneapolis for shooting up a party a couple of weeks ago.  Will that type of hoodlum see a moral justification and feel emboldened to take out his fury on the infidels?  I hope Homeland Security is now gearing up for that possibility.

* For new readers, the US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

CAIR wants legal protection for students questioned by FBI

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Minnesota is demanding protection for students being questioned in the Somali missing youth (former refugees) investigation on-going in Minneapolis and other US cities, here.

An Islamic-relations group says high schools, colleges and universities need to do more to protect the rights of Somali students.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-MN, says it’s received an increasing number of reports from students who say they have been interrogated by the FBI on Minnesota campuses.

The group says the interviews focus on allegations that Somali men have left Minnesota to go to Somalia and fight in that nation’s civil war.

Although CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land terrorist funding case, it continues to flex its muscle and scare law enforcement, and additionally in this case schools, into doing its bidding.

CAIR-MN Civil Rights Director Taneeza Islam said, “Students’ legal rights need to be upheld and they aren’t currently being afforded the only true legal protection they have when talking to the law enforcement-an attorney.”

In a letter sent to area high schools, colleges and universities, CAIR-MN called on administrators to “develop initiatives that protect students’ rights and provide them with a safe environment.”

Here is the irony, back in February CAIR attended a press conference on the missing youths and chastised law enforcement for not doing more to solve the case.   You can’t win for losing!     Don’t investigate and you are criticized, do investigate and they try to tie your hands!

Unfortunately the link for the press conference is not available, but this is what I excerpted at the time:

Kashif Saroya, outreach director for the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate and resolve the appearances (disappearances) as soon as possible.

For new readers, the US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

Update April 11th:   Ms. Islam had more to say to the Voice of America, here.

But as the FBI continues to search for answers, Taneeza Islam says it needs to change its methods.

“The challenge is how do you build a relationship with a community when you’ve already started interrogating in ways the community is already fearful of,” she added.

Here is my question for Ms. Islam, what is the proper method for interrogation?   As I said above, you can’t win with these people.  This is all a big PR strategy on their part to undermine law enforcement.

FBI raided money transfer businesses in Minneapolis* today

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yes, yes, it involves Somalia again.   So what else is new.  On a day when Somali pirates are making the news by taking an American freighter, the FBI is raiding another source of funds for the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.  From an AP story in the Star Tribune:

Federal agents searched three money-transfer businesses in Minneapolis on Wednesday, carrying away boxes of documents and copying computer hard drives in a quest for details of financial transactions between the U.S. and several African nations.

Agents searched Mustaqbal Express, also known as North American Money Transfer Inc.; Quran Express; and Aaran Financial.

[….]

A copy of a search warrant executed at Mustaqbal Express and obtained by The Associated Press said authorities were looking for documents, books, records, ledgers and other materials “relating to the transfer of money, currency or funds” to Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates from January 2007 to the present. It also sought documents on ownership and management of the business and lists of clients, calendars, bank checks, safe deposit box keys, and other materials.

I wonder if any of the food stamp fraud money we have written about so frequently is making it to Somalia (or other Muslim countries) in this way.

Omar said the office handles about $1 million to $1.5 million per month, and ships the money overseas — mostly to Somalia. Local immigrants also use the Minneapolis office to send money back home.

For new readers, the US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

* Minneapolis has been such a welcoming city for Somalis, just think about all the excitement you less-than-welcoming cities are missing.