….by funding citizenship and training services. You will recognize some of the usual suspects, not just getting grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement but also from Homeland Security which makes finding all of their federal bucks more complicated.
This is from reader ‘Julia’ who found this list of grantees for “Citizenship and Training”at USA Spending.gov. For a little summer Saturday fun, check out the over $30 million that has been expended so far through quasi-non-profit groups (I hope someone is monitoring how all this taxpayer money is being spent!).
Julia especially noted the DACA grants. By the way, just this week the HuffPoreported on how many Dreamers have signed up and how it’s going, here.
Signing up the kids!
Julia:
Below is a list of organizations that received funding for Citizenship and Training programs from the Department of Homeland Security. Funding for these programs began in FY 2010. Most of the organizations provide other services to the immigrant population. Note the organizations that provide assistance with DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Also, note the organizations that coordinate their efforts with other organizations. Website information for the organizations is still being completed and will be updated.
It seems that if DACA is expanded through executive order, there is already a network of organizations in place to facilitate the DACA application process. Please note that this list is not a compilation of all organizations that provide assistance with DACA.
One of the first on the list to sign up new citizens (and be sure to check out the $$$ going to the Colorado African Organization):
Reader ‘sodiumpen’ sent us this comment and I wanted to be sure you saw it (because I haven’t carefully followed the newest federal illegal alien contractor Southwest Key Programs as well as I should have!). Sodiumpen posted this as a comment to our post from yesterday about Pittsburgh, here. Those Lutherans we wrote about his morning look like a ‘penny ante’ outfit compared to this one!
sodiumpen (emphasis added is RRW’s):
I always laugh when people talk about “non-profit” companies as being altruistic, etc as if they are some charity.
Most NPs have fatter salaries and greater perks than you ever find in the comparable private sector companies. Looks like this NP was in on and profiting from Obama’s “transformation of America” since the get-go.
Dr. Juan (slick) Sanchez makes those Lutherans look like pikers! http://www.swkey.org/about/leadership/dr_juan_sanchez/
“Austin-based Southwest Key Programs has received more than $368 million in government grants over the last six years, $356 million of which went to provide food, shelter and other services for unaccompanied minors coming into the United States.The nonprofit, which employs 2,200 people in six states, has undergone explosive growth in its budget during President Obama’s time in office, according to tax filings and federal spending databases.
Southwest Key Programs went from receiving just $670,800 in federal grants in 2008 to $31 million in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s online database. So far this year, it has received $122.3 million from the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
. . .Critics say the nonprofit’s success at securing federal money shows that the Obama administration knew about the growing problem of unaccompanied minors for years and did not take appropriate action to address the issue.
. . .Southwest Key Programs also has close ties to a national immigration advocacy group which has a complicated relationship with the White House. The nonprofit shares two officers with the board of directors for the National Council of La Raza,*** the largest Latino advocacy group and the most aggressive in pushing Obama to curb deportations of illegal immigrants.
Dr. Juan Sanchez, who serves as president of Southwest Key Programs and made a salary of $338,000 in that role in 2012, is the uncompensated secretary of the board of La Raza, according to forms the organizations are required to file with the IRS. Anselmo Villereal, who serves on Southwest Key Programs’ board of directors, is the uncompensated treasurer for the Council.
Editors note: From time to time we post good comments from our readers. This is another excellent piece by reader ‘pungentpeppers’ with an entirely new and problematic angle on the ‘unaccompanied minors’ crisis that few are aware of! See our category “comments worth noting” for more reader commentary. Our extensive coverage of the ‘unaccompanied minors’ border surge is here.
Certain members of Congress want a law requiring taxpayer-funded legal representation for underage Central American migrants. I’ll ignore for now that there are not enough immigration attorneys, or room in our courts, to handle tens of thousands of long, drawn-out, and often dubious, cases. Instead, let’s focus on the big interpretation wall we’re going to hit because, as usual, nobody remembers the Mayans!
Attempting to learn English, 15-year-old Hugo speaks Q’anjob’al an indigenous Mayan language. http://wvpublic.org/post/language-barriers-pose-challenges-mayan-migrant-children
Not everybody in Central America speaks Spanish. This fact is slowly dawning on our politicians. San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee in an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian said: “I’m trying to wrap my arms around the fact that many of these kids don’t speak Spanish. They speak Mayan and different languages.”
Mayan is not one language but a native language family that includes many mutually unintelligible tongues. About 40 percent of Guatemalans are Mayan, and they speak around two dozen native languages, including M’am, Q’anjob’al, K’itche and Ixil.
Although young people who arrive here could learn basic English, if such a law were enacted, they would still need help to communicate with their lawyers and the courts. They would need legal interpreters. Here’s where it gets messy.For the Guatemalan Mayan language called “Ixil”, there is ONE legal interpreter in the whole country! Her name is Sheba Velasco and she’s been very busy of late. Hers is a mentally-stressful job. People expect her to help them stay in the U.S., but there’s nothing she can do legally for them except interpret the language. There’s so much work, she told NPR, “I can’t do all of it. It’s hard.”
Sheba Velasco has an important message about the unaccompanied minors currently flooding the country. She doesn’t agree with parents sending their children on the dangerous journeys, she told CBC Canada. For starters, their safety is at risk, but second, she’d prefer they stay in Guatemala where they can practice their cultural traditions and language. She knows many families are poor and struggle but Velasco said coming to America is not necessarily how to get a better life.
“What I would like to share with them is, you can make it where you are,” she said.
She feels badly that families fall for the lies they are told by smugglers. The coyotes, as they’re called, show photos of the U.S. around her village, and tell young people how easy it is to make money there. Parents essentially sign their houses over to the banks to get money to pay the smugglers. Their children get caught at the border, are sent home and everything is lost, Velasco explained. In the worst-case scenario, their children don’t even make it back.
“I would not send my children,” she said. “Their life is more important to me.”
The situation of these rural Mayan young people belies the current media gospel that everyone from Central America is fleeing from gangs. They don’t live in cities and they don’t speak Spanish – they can’t even communicate with gangs! As economic migrants, under our laws, there’s no chance they will obtain legal asylum in our country. We should not foolhardily rush into shackling ourselves into providing legal representation, when there are not enough interpreters and their chances of winning such cases are practically nil.
What about America’s needy, elderly, and disabled people?
Editors note: That is the question I hear all the time at the local level!
For some reason that I can’t explain, this post continues to be our top post—Tennesseans urging US Senators to block possible border surge to Tennessee—every day since it was published a week ago today. On July 16th we reported on an attackby Progressive Open Borders activists on the Tennessee citizens (and RRW) calling those who are concerned about Tennessee’s own needy people their favorite pejorative—“nativists.”
A Tennessee citizen responds (emphasis is mine):
Elder refugees on a Catholic Charities field trip to a tourist site, an historic farm. CC of TN is worried about losing government funding for such projects.
It’s exactly what you expect out of these groups. Just as soon as you try to have a rational dialogue about fiscal impact, funding priorities and program sustainability, they resort to name-calling.
Despite their caterwauling of anti-this and anti-that, the truth is that the conflict in Tennessee started with simple questions of “what is the state cost for the voluntary federal refugee resettlement program?” and “what if those state dollars were used to pay for services that Tennessee’s disabled citizens are still waiting for?”
The disabled are the more than 7,000 Tennesseans with intellectual disabilities (what used to be known as mental retardation) who are unable to care for themselves.
The federal government has said repeatedly that it has deliberately shifted the costs of the voluntary resettlement program to the states and a 2012 GAO report disclosed that the federal resettlement contractors get paid for each individual person they bring to a state, so they have a built-in incentive to increase those numbers.
Catholic Charities of TN said in their resettlement proposal that TN schools provide “free” English Language Learner services even though in 2012 TN’s state and local governments spent a combined $70 million for English Language Learner services in the public schools.
In 2008 Tennessee opted out of the voluntary federal program. Now the resettlement program is run by a federal contractor who in 2011 said they were going to expand the program in TN – without any input from the state of course. This has resulted in more people, more money for the contractors and higher enrollment in the state’s Medicaid program.
The state passed a bill that simply codified the federal code provisions which require the refugee contractors to coordinate with the state and give advance notice when refugees are due to arrive.
The idea for a local moratorium on resettlement when capacity becomes an issue, came from a federal hearing, and Tennessee’s State Refugee Coordinator (federal contractor) running the program agreed that was okay.
Federal contractor data showed that of the about 4,500 people they brought to Tennessee over a three year period, Medicaid (TennCare) enrollment in this group doubled during that time. During this same period at least one-third of their clients were considered “non-employable” because they were either children or 65 and older.
Contractors enroll eligible seniors into SSI which is also funded in part with state dollars.
Way back when the federal government reimbursed states for the state funded portion of SSI, Medicaid and cash welfare. That stopped in 1991.
This information raised more questions about how state dollars were being spent for a voluntary federal program. In the absence of any state law, the federal contractors believed themselves unaccountable to the state.
The bill to address this would have required the contractors to report for example, how many people they enrolled into TennCare and the cash welfare program. The State Refugee Coordinator initially said the contractors couldn’t provide that information. Then they “remembered” that the Cooperative Agreements signed with the federal government require tracking how many people and into which publicly financed programs they are being enrolled.
The State Refugee Coordinator was also asked to report how many of the students they help enroll into public school also receive ELL services. Again they said there was no way to get this information even though the contractors are receiving school impact grants that they use to hire staff that liaison between the schools and the families.
Isn’t it ironic that while complaining about the possibility of ORR diverting refugee resettlement money to help the illegal immigrants crossing the border, the State Refugee Coordinator was quoted saying that the loss of funds would effect the contractor’s “children in schools” program.
In a more recent article we are told that if the funds get cut because of illegal immigration, the elder refugees (who they define as 55 and older), will lose the “special help” they get that includes bingo games, bowling, and field trips to the art museum and pumpkin patch. These are services which the federal contractors say enhance the “quality of life” for their clients.
What about the “quality of life” issues for Tennesseans with intellectual disabilities?Federal refugee resettlement contractors like to claim that the refugee resettlement program is fully funded by the federal government. They really believe that if they say it enough it will be true. Well, it simply isn’t – even the federal government says this isn’t true.
About the photo: It was published at USA Today(from the Tennessean) in a story about how Catholic Charities, which as a ‘Wilson-Fish’ ***agency calls the shots (along with the federal government) for all refugees going to Tennessee, complains that they might lose funding for their elder refugees if too much money is diverted to care for the ‘unaccompanied minors’ —- all part of a public relations campaign to get Congress to shell out a few more billions for the migrant tide to America.
Most sensible Americans are asking—what about our own needy, elderly, and disabled people?
***Is yours a Wilson-Fish state where Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services or other entities run the program with no state government involvement?
Editor: This is a guest post from ‘pungentpeppers.’ I’m traveling today and will see how much I can still get posted. The mainstream media is doing a pretty good job of paying attention to the “refugee” issue these days—thanks to the unaccompanied alien minors surging at the border (LOL! less work for me!).
We don’t take very many Liberians through the regular resettlement program (one of the articles ‘pp’ linked says 3,300 went to Philadelphia), but large numbers who were here for other reasons, some illegally, were also granted ‘temporary protected status’ and never went home. TPS is another LEGAL immigration program for “refugees” that needs to be scrapped. Search RRW for ‘temporary protected status’ to read more.
Diversity is beautiful alert……see link to tax fraud by Philadelphia Liberians too (below)!
After a fire took four young lives, an angry, mostly Liberian mob stormed the streets of Southwest Philadelphia yesterday (Monday) taking over entire blocks. At times hurling water bottles at police, the outraged crowd were protesting what they perceived to be a too slow response to the fire that also destroyed a block of homes in their Liberian neighborhood.
Gathering on the heels of threats made against firefighters, the noisy protesters blocked a fire station, preventing crews from responding to emergency calls. Per NBC10’s George Spencer, at the scene, it was “one of the angriest mobs I have seen as a reporter”.
Saturday’s blaze started before 3:00 a.m., perhaps after fireworks set alight a sofa that was being used as porch furniture. The fire exploded and spread quickly to neighboring row homes. Dewen Bowah, 41, was in the home alone at the time taking care of seven children. She saved three daughters, but could not reach her 4-year-old twins, Maria and Marialla Bowah, or the children of another mother, 1-month-old Taj Jacque and 4-year-old Patrick Sanyeah who perished. Bowah, who saved her life by jumping out a second story window, was taken to a hospital in critical condition.
At the stormy protest, Patrick Sanyeah, whose son — also named Patrick — died in the fire, shouted “These people let our kids burn to ashes!” Other family members and neighbors accused police and firefighters, yelling “Murderers!” After nightfall, the crowd finally dispersed.
“Obviously the fire is the individual incident that set this off,” said Liberian community activist Christian Dunbar, “but I think this is frustration from a community that feels underrepresented.” Dahn Dennis, president of the Liberian Association of Pennsylvania, said, “The route being taken now is not the right way. This is not the representation of Liberians. We are decent people.” Many Liberians have been settled in Philadelphia by refugee resettlement contractors. Per a Philadelphia Weekly report, since the late 1990s, more refugees have arrived in Philadelphia from Liberia than from any other country—about 3,300 in total.
Fire investigators plan to return this morning to sift through the ashes. Last year, the Philadelphia Fire Department distributed free smoke detectors to the residents of the street, and it’s been reported that the detectors were installed in the home at that time.
Sorry, this is a major story, and I used many links:
