Michigan: Pakistani Hotel Owner Alleges City Picked on Him for Housing Syrian Refugees

11/28/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The point you should take away from this story is that in addition to new refugees being illegally housed (newly arriving refugees are required to be placed in their own apartments or homes upon arrival, not placed in hotel rooms) is that the Michigan Lutheran refugee resettlement agency was working with the Muslim hotel owner who the city says was already in violation of fire and other safety codes.

Formerly Lutheran Social Services of Michigan

The Lutheran resettlement agency, Samaritas, is a subcontractor to Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service I wrote about yesterday. Check out that post and see the salaries you pay!

For newcomers to RRW, there are nine federal resettlement agencies largely funded by you, the taxpayers, who work for the US State Department.

Each of those has many subcontractors. Your money flows through the nine down to hundreds of smaller organizations (like this Michigan subcontractor) making it very confusing for concerned citizens to know who it is that is changing their communities and it makes it almost impossible to follow the money.

(See LIRS other subcontractors below.)

From Detroit Free Press:

(emphasis below is mine)

Sterling Heights hotel in dispute with city alleges anti-Muslim, anti-refugee bias

The owner of a Sterling Heights hotel who is Muslim and of Pakistani descent alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday that city officials targeted and drove him out of business because of his faith and ethnicity and because he had housed about 200 Syrian refugees.

But on the same day, a Macomb County judge ruled against the hotel in a separate lawsuit that had been filed by city against the hotel, agreeing with the city that the hotel had failed to meet safety regulations.

Asad Malik, the owner of Wyndham Garden on 15 Mile and Van Dyke and president of the Pakistani Association of America, says in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Detroit that after he started housing Syrian refugees in 2016, the city started to slap him with citations for violations of fire codes that he said other hotels with similar problems were not receiving. The hotel closed in September.

Malik purchased the hotel in 2014. He is an active member of the Muslim community in metro Detroit as a leader with the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in Rochester Hills and meets with elected officials who have visited the mosque over the years.

The hotel was “opening her arms to refugees escaping from their war torn country,” his attorney Shereef Akeel, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Sterling Hotels, told the Free Press. “The last thing you would think is then one of our own cites shutting the door on them. And now, my client has had to pay dearly for their act of generosity.”

The hotel started taking in Syrian refugees in November 2016 [during the big Obama flood of refugees—ed] working with Samaritas, formerly known as Lutheran Social Services of Michigan, which helps resettle refugees.

Malik said he then received an email from the Sterling Heights city manager asking him: “Are there any Syrian refugees being housed at the Wyndham? A resident is alleging such at our council meeting.”

The targeted harassment started after that….

Keep reading to learn more about the complaint. The fallback position for a certain group of people is to cry DISCRIMINATION!

So where else is LIRS working to change America by changing the people?

This is something I need to do every time I write about a resettlement agency funded by you, in this case Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (the mothership) that passes its case loads to subcontractors like Samaritis.

Here is where you can find out if a refugee agency in your city is affiliated with LIRS.

Below is a screenshot of the full list of subcontractors. Note how some have dropped the word “Lutheran” from their names.

Refugee Contractors Want to De-Politicize Resettlement, Tell Biden What He Must Do

11/27/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“Tragically, in the last four years, we have seen this program become politically divisive and a lightning rod for no good reason, except for scoring political points.”

(Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of LIRS)

And, one of their planned new (?) tactics is to tell more refugee stories for media consumption! Hire more communications personnel! Tell more stories!

When I began writing this blog in 2007, that was one of the things that fired me up!

Every time you turned around there were emotional tear-jerking stories in local and national media about how a struggling refugee came to be in America and how great life was now that he/she lived in some American multi-culti slum!

I called the stories, ‘refugees see first snow’ stories when what I wanted was real reporting on the pros and cons of placing refugees in unsuspecting communities.

My refugee alerts these days are filled with articles like this one from Sojourners (a ‘religious’ Left publication):

UNDER A NEW ADMINISTRATION, CAN REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT BE DE-POLITICIZED?

On Nov. 12, at a virtual event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Jesuit Refugee Service, President-elect Joe Biden doubled down on his promise to increase presidential determination for annual refugee admissions to 125,000. That pledge marks a big increase from the record low of 15,000 refugee admissions President Donald Trump had set for the 2021 fiscal year.

[….]

Forty years later [Refugee Act signed into law in 1980 by Jimmy Carter.—ed], the all-time low numbers of refugees resettled in the United States is concerning. But, according to refugee resettlement experts, that number is a symptom of a larger, more alarming problem: Refugee resettlement has become a partisan issue.

You know why it has only in recent years become a hot potato issue? For 30 of the last 40 years no one had any understanding of what the hell these contractors had been doing. I like to think I helped educate the public about the refugee industry!

“Tragically, in the last four years, we have seen this program become politically divisive and a lightning rod for no good reason, except for scoring political points,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). “… My hope is that we can have a serious discussion that could help insulate the program from the political whims of a future executive branch that would once again seek to use refugees as a political cudgel.”

Watch for it! This is what they want—a refugee floor—so that no future President could dramatically reduce the number of refugees because those refugees represent the contractors’ income. Fewer refugees means less money for their coffers.

“Part of the discussion we need to have in the coming months and years ahead is how do we create a more predictable and bipartisan system that potentially sets a refugee floor, in addition to allowing the president to establish a ceiling,” said Vignarajah, who came to the U.S. with her family as a refugee in the late ’70s.

[….]

LIRS CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah previously worked for Michelle Obama, so can we really expect “depolitizing” of the refugee issue?

Along with the eight other organizations that contract with the State Department to resettle refugees in communities across the country, LIRS is taking steps to make bipartisan support of refugee resettlement a reality, in part, by doubling its communications staff in an effort to dispel myths around resettlement.

Think about this! Your tax dollars pay for big salaries so they can tell their “stories” to the media!

“We’re in the business of storytelling so people understand who a refugee is, and why they pick up with the limited belongings they have and come halfway across the world,” Vignarajah said. “In this kind of environment, we need to do a better job of communicating who we are and what we do and who refugees are.”

According to Naomi Steinberg, vice president of policy and advocacy at Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the conversation around refugee resettlement has become “toxified” over the past four years.

[….]

Among their requests of the incoming Biden administration:

Inform Congress of their intent to welcome 125,000 refugees and deliver a report to Congress that makes a case for increased appropriations for refugee resettlement.

Set the presidential determination with slots allocated according to regional needs, which allows the resettlement effort greater flexibility in meeting refugees’ needs.

Invite experts at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security into the larger discussion on refugees.

Appoint a senior-level White House coordinator for refugee resettlement.

Immediately signal to the United Nations the intent to resume United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees referrals domestically and internationally so that they can devise a process quickly and efficiently.

More here.

It’s been awhile since I checked the income and salaries of the story tellers at LIRS.

Here is a page from the most recent Form 990 I could find (2018). Under Trump they are 87% federally funded (down about $10 million in federal grants since a top Obama year).

To listen to them whine you would think Trump made them find PRIVATE charitable money.

And here is the same page for 2015 (under Obama they were 95% federally funded):

Now have a look at the salaries.

But, first here is a headline of a post I wrote in February 2018. There has never been any adequate explanation for Hartke’s sudden departure.

Lutherans announce departure of CEO Hartke amid claims of financial irregularities, poor management

You will see here (below) when comparing the salaries reported to the IRS for 2015 and then 2018, that Hartke did exceptionally well in her last year at LIRS.

We do not yet have any record of the salary the new CEO—Krish O’Mara Vignarajah—is getting, but must assume it is in the same pay range as the salary of Ms. Hartke.

Here are the salaries for top execs at LIRS in 2015:

Here are the salaries for those who survived the inner turmoil that shook LIRS in 2017/2018. See that Hartke’s salary jumped about $100,000 in just three years as she walked out the door!

And, on your taxpayer dime!!!

Doing well by doing good! Tell your kids to grow up to be charitable execs at ‘religious’ non-profits funded by the US taxpayer!

Aljazeera: Refugee Promotors Tell Biden What He Must Do ASAP

11/23/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Becca Heller **https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becca_Heller**

The International Refugee Assistance Project (a relatively new organization run by Becca Heller which acts as a legal mouthpiece for the refugee resettlement industry) has released a ninety page document that outlines the steps any Biden/Harris administration must take to unravel President Trump’s efforts to slow the flow of poverty, disease, and potential terrorists to your towns and cities.

Indeed IRAP (also funded by you!) has been a leading legal group working to stop Trump at every turn for the last four years.

Here is what Aljazeera says about the release of their directive to Biden.

Refugee advocates urge Biden to ‘rebuild’ US asylum system

Refugee advocates in the United States are calling on President-elect Joe Biden to reverse some of Donald Trump’s most restrictive immigration policies, including historic-low admission quotas for asylum seekers, when he takes office in January.

https://refugeerights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Expanding-Complementary-Pathways-for-Refugees-and-Displaced-Persons-A-Blueprint-for-the-U.S.-Government.pdf

Rebuilding the US refugee programme may take time, said Becca Heller, executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) advocacy group, but it is critical for thousands of asylum seekers waiting for their claims to be heard.

[Note that they are already signaling that they can’t quickly unravel what Trump has accomplished—ed]

“The refugee program may take some time to rebuild, but the thousands of refugees who have already been waiting in limbo for years don’t have any more time,” Heller told Al Jazeera in an emailed statement.

The US Refugee Admissions Program was severely limited under the Trump administration, which has enacted increasingly restrictive refugee admission quotas and slashed refugee acceptance by more than 80 percent from the last year of former President Barack Obama’s administration.

IRAP released recommendations on Friday for the incoming Biden administration to address refugee and asylum seeker admissions into the country – and “rebuild” that federal admissions programme.

The recommendations, Expanding Complementary Pathways for Refugees and Displaced Persons: A Blueprint for the US Government (PDF), point to six main areas where action can be taken, including family reunification, private sponsorship and labour pathways for refugees.

Biden has signalled his openness to expanding refugee admissions.

Pay attention to this next bit! They want to set a MINIMUM number of refugees that MUST be admitted every year because they never want a repeat of President Trump’s lowering the ceiling upon attaining the presidency.

He promised to set a refugee admissions target of 125,000 a year and work with Congress to establish a minimum admissions number of at least 95,000 refugees annually in June, on World Refugee Day, in line with historical averages.

Biden must FREEZE deportations!

The incoming Biden administration is also expected to put in place a 100-day freeze on deportations until updated guidance is issued.

[….]

Addressing the issues in the US asylum and refugee systems facing “is a huge task”, he [JC Hendrickson, senior director of public policy at the International Rescue Committee (IRC)]said. “The world will be watching how we manage this.”

And, so will 70 plus million Americans who will resist a Biden regime!

More here. So far I only see Aljazeera writing about the IRAP directive for Biden.

Time Magazine: Open Borders Agitators Begin to Lower Expectations on What a Biden Administration Might Get Done on Immigration

11/21/202011/21/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“There’s going to be a lot of questions about how much they can accomplish in the first 100 days, and really how much they can accomplish in four years.”

(Sarah Pierce, MPI policy analyst)

From crooked Biden’s own mouth: **https://fraudscrookscriminals.com/2020/11/21/from-bidens-own-mouth/**

Well, well, what do you know! Apparently President Trump put some things in place to slow the flood of migrants into the US and the Open Borders agitators who worked hard to put good ol’ Joe in his present position are now hedging their bets on what he could get done to reverse Trump’s policies.

Time magazine published a lengthy report yesterday going through all of the policy changes Trump accomplished and what the open borders advocates are saying they (with Joe in the White House) can or cannot do.

The article restates Biden’s policy agenda that says he will ‘welcome’ 125,000 refugees to America in year one, but I won’t go over that again here.

The first hurdle Time reporters ran into is that the Biden team would not return their calls for comment. I can’t wait for the lapdog media to moan and groan about how they are kept in the dark after they worked so hard for him.

Biden Has Promised to Undo Trump’s Immigration Policies. How Much Is He Really Likely to Reform?

President Donald Trump ran his first presidential campaign on the promise to overhaul U.S. immigration, and for the most part, he kept that promise. Month after month, from the very start of Trump’s term, immigration policy changed rapidly, from the Zero Tolerance policy that separated children from their parents, to record low caps on the number of refugees accepted by the U.S. each year.

President-elect Joe Biden has promised to undo most — if not all — of President Trump’s immigration reforms. He’s pledged, for instance, to immediately end the ban restricting foreigners from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.and reinstate protections from deportation for the roughly 650,000 people who arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors, known as Dreamers.

[….]

But after four years of sweeping changes, making some changes could prove more complicated, and could come through executive orders, presidential proclamations or possibly get stuck in a divided Congress, experts say.

The Time reporter is a little worried about a “surge in migration” at the southern border. Why? Although she doesn’t say it, it would surely enrage 70 plus million Trump voters who make up the resistance to a possible Biden presidency.

For instance, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), otherwise known as “Remain in Mexico,” which has kept an estimated more than 67,000 asylum seekers in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated in the U.S., could prove difficult to reverse if the Biden Administration hopes to avoid a surge in migration to the southern border.

[….]

And while Biden’s campaign website promises to “modernize America’s immigration system,” immigration advocates and attorneys point out that the Obama-Biden Administration oversaw millions of deportations and an expansion of family detention, raising concerns about what the next four years will bring. [Gee, now they admit it was the Obama-Biden administration that built the cages!—ed]

Spokespeople from the Biden transition team and the Biden Campaign did not return TIME’s request for comment.

[….]

….the new Administration will likely be cautious about quickly ending the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, which stipulates asylum seekers who claim asylum in the U.S. after entering from Mexico must wait in Mexico while their cases are heard, without first developing a plan to prevent a surge in migration at the U.S./Mexico border.

[….]

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my Administration,” Biden told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro during an August roundtable with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Time continues…..

“If and when the future Biden Administration changes these restrictive [asylum] policies, it will have to do so with great care and planning and in a way that balances humanitarian concerns while avoiding a rush on the border that could overwhelm resources, and result in a renewed sense throughout the country that the border is out of control,”Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at MPI, said during a Nov. 9 webinar.

[….]

Yikes! Talk about ‘eating their own’ Here is Cecilia Munoz with Obama (the deporter in chief)! https://thehill.com/policy/515581-biden-pick-creates-furor-underscoring-bitterness-over-obama-immigration-policy

The Obama-Biden Administration oversaw a record-breaking number of deportations, something immigration advocates and attorneys have stated is a concern for them as Biden prepares to take office. Already, some immigrant advocates and lawyers have criticized the Biden Administration for selecting Cecilia Muñoz as a member of the transition team, and have expressed their hopes that she does not become selected as an overseer of immigration policy.

Muñoz, who was formally the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama years, has been criticized for enabling the thousands of deportations that took place during those eight years.

[I wrote about Munoz on these pages during the Obama Administration. She once bragged about putting their open borders policies into the DNA of government–-ed]

[….]

At the end of the day, Sarah Pierce, another policy analyst at MPI, says the next four years may bring a change of pace in changes to immigration policy, as Biden navigates the COVID-19 pandemic and other high-priority domestic issues.

“During the Trump Administration, immigration was the top policy priority. They poured everything they had into enacting their agenda,” Pierce said during the Nov. 9 webinar.

“I think under a Biden Administration we’re about to see the pace of immigration changes slow down significantly. There’s going to be a lot of questions about how much they can accomplish in the first 100 days, and really how much they can accomplish in four years.”

Did Trump put his immigration restriction policies into the DNA of government? Time will tell.

There is much, much more here on many areas of immigration policy.

Biden Reaffirms He Would Begin Admission of 125,000 Refugees in 2021

11/13/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“[We] are hearing the President-elect speak in the language of social justice!”

(Jesuit Refugee Service Director of Advocacy and Operations Giulia McPherson)

He did it yesterday in a recorded message to a leading group that advocates for more refugees for your towns and cities—Jesuit Refugee Service which by the way received $19,478,560 of US taxpayer dollars (grants and contracts) in the last 12 months according to USA Spending.

The Washington DC-based Jesuit Refugee Service USA is one more taxpayer funded ‘non-profit’ that can not survive financially on its own. The “social justice” group requires a massive infusion of your tax dollars every year in order to survive. In case you are wondering there is no separation of “church and state” when it comes to the US Treasury funding ‘religious’ social justice advocacy groups.

In fact, they are even more awash in your money in the last year than they were in 2019! See page from their 2019 annual report below***

From Religion News Service yesterday:

Biden pledges to raise refugee ceiling to 125,000 in address to Jesuit group

President-elect Joe Biden announced he will raise the number of refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000 in his first year in office, a major reversal from President Donald Trump’s steep cuts to the U.S. refugee program.

By way of comparison, President Trump set the ceiling for FY2021 at 15,000 and admitted 9,772 in FY20. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, that Biden helped create, the President is solely responsible for setting the admissions ceiling.

It’s not the first time Biden has made that pledge. He previously floated the number in a statement he made during the summer on World Refugee Day.

But it is the first time he has confirmed that number as president-elect.

And, notably, he made the announcement Thursday (Nov. 12) to a Catholic group that works with refugees.

“The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response,” Biden said in a prerecorded video set to air during the virtual event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Jesuit Refugee Service.

“I promise, as president, I will reclaim that proud legacy for our country. The Biden-Harris administration will restore America’s historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere and raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000.”

[….]

“That he chose to make this announcement with us tonight is an indication that President-elect Joe Biden is following his faith when it comes to American policy to protect and welcome refugees,” Jesuit Refugee Service Director of Advocacy and Operations Giulia McPherson said in a written statement.

“Not only is it exciting that the United States will once again welcome refugees at an historically high number, but it is also significant that we are hearing the President-elect speak in the language of social justice about the rights of refugees and our call as people of faith and as Americans to accompany them to safety.”

Faith-based organizations, like Jesuit Refugee Service, have long played an important role in refugee resettlement work in the U.S.

That is something they could not do without extracting your taxpayer dollars to do it because there isn’t enough support in the form of real private charity for what they do—help change America by changing the people.

***From JRS USA’s annual report for 2019. (BTW, they are exempt from reporting the details of their finances because as a “religious” group they are exempt from reporting to the IRS!)

Wow! I wasn’t expecting to see that high a percentage of federal funding—63% involuntarily from you!

As I said here last week, there are over 27,000 Muslim refugees in the pipeline waiting for Biden to say the word!