Recently we reported that US security screening agents had been called home and took that as a sign that the US government was coming to its senses and that we were not going to honor Obama’s “dumb” deal with the Aussie government.
I guess my optimism was premature. Here, at the PostCourier, we learn that US agents have gone back to screen the MEN.
Staff from the United States Department of Homeland Security have returned to Manus Island to interview refugees about resettlement in the US.
Prime Minister Turnbull is between a rock and a hard place as his leftwing No borders activists want the mostly Muslim men settled on the mainland. If he gives in, he signals to thousands of aliens waiting in nearby locations to jump into boats and sail to Australia.
Refugees in Australia’s offshore detention centre on the island have been told that interviews will resume this week.
Immigration authorities at the centre provided a notice to the men telling them only some will be interviewed.
“Don’t worry if you do not receive an appointment slip,” the notice said.
“Further visits are anticipated in the coming months.
“All cases are different and will move through the resettlement process at different speeds.”
There are almost 700 refugees on the island who are eligible for resettlement in the US, but the US Government still has not said if any of them will eventually be taken there.
Refugees inside the centre said a total of 70 men have been interviewed by Department of Homeland Security staff in their previous visits.
All of this is happening because Obama was mucking around in Australia’s immigration policy!
Obama administration lobbied to change Australia’s asylum seeker policy
The Obama administration lobbied Australia to change its asylum seeker policy, actively disagreeing with the Australia’s off-shore detention and “Stop the Boats” mentality.
Former deputy secretary of state Heather Higginbottom has given an insight into how the secretive refugee-swap deal between the two allies came about, while revealing the United States, under former president Barack Obama, wanted to “bring relief” to asylum seekers held on Nauru and Manus Island. [Asylum seekers are NOT refugees!—-ed]
Heather goes to Washington! One of the great minds crafting a “dumb” deal! Obama didn’t like Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ deterrent to illegal aliens, so the deal was struck. But, Dear Donald, you don’t have to go through with it! Mostly Muslim men Australia doesn’t want shouldn’t be secretly placed in American towns! Here is Heather: https://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V71N3/feature2.html
The deal was the subject of a tense first phone call between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, with Mr Trump labelling it “stupid”, “rotten”, “horrible” and “disgusting”.
But Ms Higginbottom, writing for Time magazine, said it was struck with humanitarian solutions in mind, by an administration uncomfortable with Australia’s stance.
“While the last administration strongly pressed the Australian government to change its policy toward asylum seekers, we also sought to immediately relieve the suffering of these refugees and agreed to resettle up to 1200 after they went through the US government’s rigorous refugee screening processes,” Ms Higginbottom, who now serves as the chief operating officer of CARE, wrote.
[Most have not even been determined to be legitimate refugees yet—ed]
His first instincts were correct—-this is a “dumb” deal. And, whoever advised him to move forward with a completely ridiculous (unprecedented!) Obama Administration last minute ‘deal’ should be fired.
(See my extensive archive on the Australia deal by clicking here.)
Update: Iranian detainee kills himself. He had mental health issues now being blamed on Australian policy and by extension, Trump. See here at Australia News Corp (see video, are you ready for these men as neighbors?)
Turnbull definitely wants the deal to save his political neck! Leftwing Australians want these mostly men admitted to the mainland.
If the Trump State Department/Homeland Security ultimately admit hundreds of mostly Muslim men to American towns, voters will be truly ticked-off.
If he doesn’t go through with the ‘deal,’ get a taste of the treatment he is already getting from the likes of CNN.
CNN managed to find a family and a single woman to interview (to criticize the leaked phone conversation) while most of the detainees are young men.
All of this could have been avoided if he had killed the ‘deal’ in the first weeks of his Presidency.
(CNN)In the wake of a leaked phone call in which US President Donald Trump repeatedly called them “bad” and “prisoners,” refugees at the center of a controversial deal between the US and Australia say they have lost faith in ever making it to America. [Think about this, they tried to reach Australia illegally and somehow they have some expectation of getting to America!—ed]
“We are really hopeless,” said Shirdel Eskandari Khah, an Iranian refugee who lives with his wife and seven-year-old son on the Pacific island of Nauru.
“We believe that it is another game from the US and Australian governments.”
Under the terms of a deal settled by the Obama administration, the US agreed to vet and then resettle nearly 1,200 refugees like Eskandari Khah, who have been living for years in or around offshore detention camps [So, not all in camps!—ed] run by the Australian government. In return, Canberra would take a group of Central American refugees who had been attempting to make it to the US.
Just think about that previous line. So these Central Americans were trying to illegally get to the US and somehow it is the American taxpayers’ responsibility to admit them to our towns and cities, or send them on to Australia. BTW, HIAS is involved, see here. (Never a good thing!)
USCIS spokesman Carter Langston—No worries! We are coming back to do more interviews (build up hope, so if the deal falls through, Trump can be blamed further).
Australia was on the right track in its attempt to deter illegal migrants, but WHY IS THIS NOW OUR PROBLEM?
The offshore camps — on Nauru and Papua New Guinea — are key to Australia’s immigration policy. Anyone who arrives by boat without a visa is told they will never be able to settle on Australian soil and sent to the island camps for processing.
[….]
Last week, refugees on Nauru began to hold regular demonstrations, with one of the demands being for an update on the status of the US program.
Carter Langston, a spokesman for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the resettlement deal was ongoing and the department was planning upcoming trips to the camps.
There is a lot more, especially whining questionable refugees, go here.
It is not too late, Trump can still get out of the ‘deal’—at least some American voters will be happy. If he goes forward with the swap, he just gets deeper and deeper in to the muck and shouldn’t expect any praise from the media.
And, whoever convinced him to move forward with the rotten deal in the early days of this Administration needs to be fired!
I’ve lost track of how many posts I’ve written on a refugee swap deal that Obama (and Anne Richard) engineered in the closing months of the Obama administration that would bring over 1,000 rejected ‘refugees’ to your towns in the coming months. (See archive here)
These are mostly men illegal aliens who, with the help of people smugglers, tried to reach Australia by boat, but were intercepted and taken to detention facilities where they have protested, rioted, and occasionally set fire to their living facilities.
Australian leftwing NO Borders activists want the mostly Muslim men admitted to Australia. So why should we take them to America? NOT OUR PROBLEM! http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/02/19/1900-manus-asylum-seekers-in-massive-class-action-against-the-go_a_21717262/
This week, as it looks like their admission to the US is stalled, efforts were being made to move some of them to another facility until violence and protests erupted.
The detainees say they won’t be safe if moved. It is unclear to me (and apparently the NYT too) who exactly would attempt to harm them as they wait to see if they hit the jackpot with a airplane ticket to America.
Hundreds of refugees and migrants living in limbo on a remote Pacific island refused Tuesday to vacate the detention facility where they have been held for years, the latest protest of their treatment under Australia’s offshore detention program.
The protest was a response to cuts to water and electricity to parts of the facility on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, where 800 men were still being held since attempting to reach Australia by boat.
The Australian authorities want the refugees to move to a new site; the protesters say they are being aggressively relocated and denied protection.
[….]
East Lorengau Refugee Transit Center, the new facility on Manus Island, is intended to temporarily house refugees awaiting resettlement. Those who are not considered refugees will be returned to their home countries.
These are men being considered by the Trump State Department to be your new neighbors!
The police commander on Manus, David Yapu, told the New Zealand news outlet Radio NZ that minor confrontations between the protesters and police officers had occurred in recent days.
“There was tension. We decided to withdraw,” Mr. Yapu said, saying his officers pulled back from the compound where the protest happened. “But our men are still there just to assist, to move the refugees from the Foxtrot compound.”
[….]
Most of the men on Manus Island have been formally recognized as refugees, but Australia refuses to allow them to be resettled.
The Obama administration had agreed to resettle hundreds of the refugees from Manus and Nauru, but this year President Trump questioned that decision.
He later confirmed he would follow through on the commitment for the one-time resettlement agreement after “extreme vetting” of the refugees, but it is unclear when this will take place.
Trump v. Turnbull phone call transcript leaked.
Trump ‘got it’ in January when he called it a “dumb deal.” It is about saving Turnbull from his radical Leftwing human rights agitators.
Remember, as I told you here, the reason these mostly men from Muslim countries are not being admitted to the mainland of Australia (when we are told repeatedly that they are legit refugees) is that Australia has a policy of never admitting anyone who tried to break into the country by boat.
We get that, and it is a good deterrent, but why is your US city or town to be punished with their US taxpayer-supported placement?
Does anyone really think these men, who have learned from the Leftwing how to protest, are going to quietly go to work for BIG MEAT OR BIG CHICKEN?
(BTW, did anyone tell those detainees that they would come to America and be expected to do this kind of manual labor?)
Now we have the snarkyWashington Post suggesting that Trump didn’t ‘get it’ (doesn’t understand the refugee program) when he discussed the swap in January with Prime Minister Turnbull. Trump got it and understood intuitively that it is a DUMB deal.
WaPo:
In November, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, responsible for the USRAP in the Senate, could not get the exact number out of the Obama bureacrats at the State Department.
We’ve known for a while that President Trump berated Australia’s prime minister on a Jan. 28 phone call; The Washington Post reported on it back then.
What we didn’t know then was how little Trump understood the policy that was discussed on the call.
According to a transcript of the call unearthed by The Post’s Greg Miller, the deal to resettle refugees was actually brought up first on the call by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who wanted assurance that the U.S. government would stand by its commitment in light of Trump’s stance on other refugees. After some discussion of the Islamic State and Christian refugees more generally, Turnbull says, “This is a very big issue for us, particularly domestically, and I do understand you are inclined to a different point of view than the vice president.”
[This is revealing, so Pence was already talking to Turnbull about the refugee swap deal, sooner than eight days after the inauguration?—ed]
Trump then starts the back-and-forth by noting that someone had just described the deal to him. But then he uses inaccurate numbers: “Somebody told me yesterday that close to 2,000 people are coming who are really probably troublesome.”
The reporter shows his ignorance (and bias!) because it wasn’t until recently that the target number discussed (to be admitted to your towns) is in the range of 1,250. Back when Trump talked to Turnbull we know that it was close to 2,000 as noted by Senator Grassley, here. Grassley reported in November that the number being considered is CLASSIFIED.
Continue reading the WaPo here as reporter (Aaron Blake) twists himself into a pretzel trying to make Trump look foolish. I think it is clear Trump understood exactly why Turnbull was so desperate for a deal!
For new readers, know this:
This sort of deal is outside of the ordinary resettlement process. It would set a horrible precedent!
So, if it goes through in October (the new fiscal year), as the Aussie government hopes it will, Trump will lose me for sure.
Australia welcomes large number of Syrian Christians while sending its mostly Muslim rejected asylum seekers to US. NUTS!
As we wait for news about who the terror plotters are in Australia—the ones arrested for planning to take down an Australian airliner—I thought this short news item was telling. How can the US be so stupid, so snookered by the Australian government!
While many countries have opened their doors to Muslim migrants from the Middle East, the journey has not been as easy for Christians in search of new homes after fleeing from intense persecution from their countries. However, an aid agency that extends help specifically to Christians is working to change the picture. The Barnabas Fund has set up a program that helps believers from the Middle East to resettle in Australia.
[….]
As of May 2016, Operation Safe Havens has rescued a total of 1,071 Christian refugees worldwide, and 823 of these are now living in Australia. However, these figures are small compared to the number of Muslims refugees that have been taken in.
In the UK, according to Barnabas Fund, from July to September 2016, only 13 of the 1,583 refugees from Syria were Christians. This means only 0.8 percent of Syrian refugees who entered the UK for that period were Christians, when the Christian population of Syria represents 10% of the total.
Malnourished Syrian Muslims arrive in KY in 2015. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/02/15/first-syrian-refugees-arriving-in-louisville-ky-helped-with-grant-from-islamic-charity/
How are we doing on the Syrian Muslim/Christian ratio?
I hadn’t checked the numbers recently, but see now at Wrapsnet that in FY17 the US admitted 6,461 Syrian refugees up to today. 96% of those we admitted (from October 1, 2016 to today) are Muslims.
Then I checked just those who were admitted since Trump’s inauguration day (January 20th to today), and yikes! the percentage of Syrian Muslims vs. Christians is even higher under Trump at 98%!
Since January 20th, we admitted 1,873 Syrians and 1,840 are Muslims.
***See my ‘Australia deal’ archive by clicking here.
…..and American towns will see as many as 1,250 mostly Muslim detainees secretly dispersed and set free in Anytown, USA.
(Your town will not be notified if you have been chosen by the US State Department and its contractors*** to be the lucky recipients).
Illegal alien swap!
This swap of what amounts to illegal aliens (Australia’s for Salvadorans in Costa Rica) is “insane” as I told reporter John Binder at Breitbart,here yesterday.
And for regular readers I apologize for posting on the ‘Australia deal’ again, but frankly it epitomizes the foolishness the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program has come to demonstrate.
First, just so you know, Australia (rightly) said to illegal alien wannabes—if you try to break in to Australia by boat, you will NEVER get to the mainland, and they are sticking with that as a major deterrent to future attempts. Fine and dandy!
Trump: Let’s see, do I save my political skin or Turnbull’s with “dumb deal” on illegal alien swap?
However, by the US now agreeing to take as many as 1,250 mostly male and Muslim illegal aliens, we save Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s political skin.
Also, this case is a prime example of using the supposed refugees for other purposes of US diplomacy, something I have been raging against for years.
We should only accept refugees in extreme need of humanitarian protection, not because it benefits some politician/government somewhere else in the world. These are Australia’s problem asylum seekers, they are not ours!
Here is the latest from Reuters. And, remember readers, September is it! We will see then, when President Trump submits his refugee plans for FY18 to Congress, whether he was serious when he campaigned on reining-in the monster the program has become.
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia will accept several dozen Central American refugees within the next few months, two sources familiar with the process told Reuters, the first transfers under a controversial refugee swap arrangement agreed with the United States. [Note the clever Aussies are going to bring in a few of their part of the “deal” as more pressure on Trump—ed]
Canberra pledged to take an unspecified number of Central American refugees under a deal struck with former U.S. President Barack Obama late last year.
Will Trump go through with the Obama deal?
In exchange, Washington said it would accept up to 1,250 asylum seekers held in Australian immigration centres in the Pacific Island nations of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru that Australia wants to close.
A group of approximately 30 refugees from El Salvador currently being held in Costa Rica will move to Australia in the next couple of months, the two sources said, with a second group of a similar size to follow shortly afterwards.
Read the discussion about those Salvadorans. Frankly, they are not refugees. Obama unilaterally wrote refugee law and created a new ‘refugee’ program for Central Americans who have no claim on asylum status in America. Our supposed ‘gain’ in the Australian deal is that they take these wandering Central Americans which are not legitimate refugees, nor are they our problem, off our hands!
The other day we reported that the processing had stopped,here. Now Reuterssays this:
A U.S. State Department spokeswoman said although the United States has reached a 50,000 cap on refugee admissions this fiscal year, the U.S. government continues to process refugee applications from Nauru and Manus.
“United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has not yet concluded its adjudications of any refugees being considered for resettlement out of Australian facilities in Nauru and Manus islands,” the spokeswoman said. “USCIS does not make public the exact schedules of their interview teams, but they are planning return trips to the islands.”
Australia turning up the heat on Trump!
The transfer of the Salvadoran refugees to Australia will focus attention on U.S. steps to uphold its end of the agreement, described by President Donald Trump as a “dumb deal” for America.
Turnbull’s open borders agitators (the girls) want the detainees (mostly young male Muslims) to be free in Australia!
None of the refugees on PNG’s Manus Island or Nauru – mostly men from the Middle East and South Asia – have been approved to move to the United States yet.Earlier this month, U.S. officials halted screening interviews after the United States reached its annual refugee intake cap.
[….]
Turnbull, under pressure in opinion polls and from within his own party, can ill afford for the United States to renege on the agreement, said Sean Kelly, an adviser to former Australian Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
“The deal has become yet another test of (Turnbull’s) leadership,” Kelly said. “If it fails, that will be a big black mark against him, and he knows that.”
In September, the President, by law, will submit his FY18 ‘determination’ to Congress for consultation. This whole 50,000 cap/ceiling will go away, as will the Supreme Court (families can get in above the cap) unconstitutional rewrite of refugee law. It will be a new refugee year. It will be Donald Trump’s first determination—his first ceiling.
The Aussie’s are fully expecting to move hundreds of these detained men (who have in the past burned down their detention facilities!) to America in the first month of the new fiscal year which begins October 1. We will be watching.
If Trump goes through with this “insanity,” this writer will know just who we elected President and whether any serious reform will ever happen.
Go here for our complete ‘Australia deal’ archive.
***Federal contractors/middlemen/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizerspaid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities. Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors. Every week representatives of the nine meet with DOS officials and literally divvy up the refugee dossiers deciding where in 49 states (WY takes zero!) they will be placed.
The contractors income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US. These Aussie rejects come with a dollar value to the contractor and they have no obligation to tell community leaders/police who they are placing in US towns and cities.
The only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the contractors/propagandists from the process.
