If you missed the story yesterday, go here, to learn about how an arrest, an indictment and a guilty verdict all went missing from local news reports about a Somali refugee who had been in the country one week before his July encounter with a special-needs woman. Here is a recap and an update from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:
A South Dakota newspaper that failed to report on the case of a Somali man convicted of trying to molest a severely handicapped woman, changed gears Wednesday after being outed by WND and decided to publish a story about the crime.
Most SD refugees are placed in Sioux Falls. How Mohamed got to Aberdeen within a week of his arrival in the US and was left unsupervised is still unexplained.
The story ran on page three of the Aberdeen American News under the headline “Sentencing later this month for a man convicted of attempted sexual contact.”
But the newspaper left out an important detail.
The convicted sex criminal, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, was a recently arrived refugee brought to the state from Somalia at the invitation of the U.S. government. He had been in the country only about a week and in Aberdeen only one day when he wandered up to a group home and tried to molest a 31-year-old mentally handicapped woman who was sitting outside the facility.
Mohamed, freshly arrived in the U.S. just days prior, wandered more than a mile from his hotel on foot and preyed upon a mentally handicapped woman at the Aspire Inc. residential care facility, which houses about 150 handicapped people. His victim was left unattended for only minutes. When a caregiver returned, she caught him with his hand between the disabled woman’s legs, reaching toward her private parts.
AAN’s belated story also neglected to mention that Mohamed had been brought to Aberdeen to work in the local meatpacking plant, DemKota Ranch, which has become a magnet for cheap refugee labor.
I did some looking around last night and there is some very funny business that went on with this particular meat plant and its former owners that involved the state government and then-Governor Rounds (now US Senator for SD). It would be good if someone out there took time to investigate the broader story.
Near the end of his update, Hohmann, reports on a group of citizens who met with the South Dakota Attorney General in October (when surely this AG would have known about this case while the citizens did not!): What did AG Jackley know and when did he know it?
Meanwhile, a citizens group tells WND they met with South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley on Oct. 3 at the state Capitol in Pierre to discuss their concerns about refugee resettlement and its impact on safety.
The meeting was affable with the approximately 10 citizens sharing concerns about refugees who might put the safety of their communities at risk.
Then the atmosphere changed:
“If you guys know of anything, can cite anything [negative] that’s happening in your communities, then please tell me,” he reportedly said.
“He wouldn’t give the concerned people the answers they were looking for,” said one person present at the meeting. “I watched him and was thinking what are you doing? It was more like dodge ball and ‘what do you know?’”
He told the group refugee resettlement was a federal issue and “his hands were tied,” one participant of the meeting said. “What’s upsetting is, he already knew, he would have known that this crime had happened in Aberdeen.
So what are they hiding in South Dakota? The situation is shaping up there to look very similar to what happened in Twin Falls, Idaho where a sexual assault case blew things up—big company/big money wants foreign laborers, pols going along, newspaper covering for them all, citizens treated like troublemakers and labeled racists for wanting answers about why their community is being radically altered and wanting to know who is behind it?
Update January 5th: Be sure to see my next installment of this story, here.
A newly arrived Somali refugee*** who court records show had arrived in Aberdeen, SD to work for the controversial meat packing plant there was found guilty by a jury on December 20th of attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman.
Read the story! And, ask yourselves, why didn’t the local media report on the case?
Did it have something to do with the controversy roiling there among citizens who were vigorously opposing a plan to make Aberdeen a new resettlement site (only Sioux Falls and Huron were getting direct resettlements), a plan supported by the mayor, as we reported last April. Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen: ““We need workers, and we certainly would be glad to have more friends and neighbors and more children in our schools and more cultures that we can learn from.” [And you get to pay for it all while big business gets cheap labor!] https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/16/heads-up-aberdeen-south-dakota-new-resettlement-site-being-proposed/BTW, for new readers, my title refers to the sexual assault case that the media and elected officials downplayed in Twin Falls, Idaho earlier in 2016. Hereis what Leo Hohmann (WND) learned yesterday. After you read the whole incredible story, see what I have to say below about the timeline.
A refugee newly arrived from Somalia has been tried and convicted for attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman while she was sitting outside of a home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Liban Mohamed, 39, was in the United States for only about a week when he tried to force himself on a 31-year-old woman with severe disabilities.He is not a U.S. citizen, but whether he will be deported in the wake of his conviction remains unclear.
The trial for Mohamed was held just a few days before Christmas and not a word of the conviction has made it into the local media, residents of Aberdeen told WND on Tuesday.
Mohamed speaks no English and required two interpreters at trial, according to the state’s attorney who prosecuted the case.
“I do know he lived in Aberdeen,” prosecutor Christopher White told WND. “The day that it happened, he was staying at the White House Inn hotel in Aberdeen. What came out at trial, in his defense attorney’s opening statement, was that he arrived in Aberdeen that day and had only been in the United States for approximately a week, and he had come to work at the beef plant in Aberdeen.But I don’t know if he had already started working or was about to start work there.”
Mohamed mentioned to law enforcement that he had been hired on at the Demkota Ranch beef plant, White said. [Someone needs to do some research on DemKota Ranch Beef and figure out how closely they are working with Lutheran Social Services of SD and the US State Dept.—ed]
Read the whole thing! Click here. Don’t miss the line where Mohamed told the arresting officers that what he did was o.k. in his country!
Hohmann wraps up with this:
According to court records obtained by WND, Mohamed was arrested July 30 and indicted by a grand jury on Aug. 15. The jury was seated on Monday, Dec. 19, and the trial was held Tuesday, Dec. 20.
What a coincidence!
I was in Aberdeen meeting with residents on July 25, just five days before the arrest. Citizens there were becoming troubled by the changes they were seeing in their community and expressed fear about just such a thing happening. They told me that the meat plant was luring labor like these newly arrived Somalis and they had already noticed an increase in crime. They said that they did not want a resettlement office in town.
As we reported in April, there was a big push going on to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen which would presumably supply labor for DemKota directly from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. A small refugee office existed in Huron, but most refugees placed in South Dakota still go to Sioux Falls which is 200 miles away from Aberdeen. Tim Jurgens, State Refugee Coordinator. SD is a Wilson-Fish state which means that state elected officials have virtually no say about the program that is run by Lutheran Social Services and the US Dept. of State in Washington, DC.
Because of the public outcry in late summer and early fall, Lutheran Social Services appeared to back off a plan to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen after some of the citizens I met on July 25 organized a resistance. (I’ll give you some numbers below for SD).
The first public meeting organized by residents occurred a little over two weeks later and the Aberdeen News didn’t miss that event reporting on it on August 12th. Go hereto see what happened at the heated meeting and read about the paper’s biased news coverage.
Look at the timeline. Mohamed was arrested on July 30th (no local media coverage). A grand jury indicted him three days after (on August 15th) the paper wrote in negative (biased!) tones about the citizens who dared question what was happening in their quiet town. Did the paper cover up the sexual assault story on purpose because it confirmed the things citizens said they were worried about (or was it just incompetence)?
Look at what was happening in Twin Falls, Idaho in the first week of August! Click here. All hell had broken loose about a sexual assault there!
And, then of course it is quite stunning that no court reporter was present at the trial on December 20th. But, also not present was the family of the victim, and there still remains a question about how the guardians of the mentally-impaired woman were not told to be in court.
Many more questions remain!
Have the wheels come off the US Refugee Admissions Program? Are they trying to shoe-horn so many refugees in to the country that there is flagrant violation of contracts going on?
Refugees are to be placed by the contractor (LSS SD) directly in to apartments or rental houses and their initial resettlement period is about 3 months during which the contractor introduces the new refugee to American culture, signs them up for their welfare services, gets kids in school, tries to find them jobs, and arranges their medical screening (for things like TB!).
I am simply blown away by the information given by the state’s attorney that Mohamed had only been in the US a week and was walking the streets of Aberdeen unsupervised.
What! Did LSS simply bring him in to Sioux Falls and put him on a bus to Aberdeen to work at the meat plant? And, then put him up in a hotel? (I’m getting more and more reports of refugees being housed in hotels when State Department policy has always been that the refugee is to be picked up at the airport and escorted to their furnished apartment with ‘culturally appropriate’ food in the refrig!). What is going on? Too many refugees for them to handle?
I know it is pretty easy to unload on Mohamed, but why was he literally walking the streets in Aberdeen? He didn’t even speak English. Was no one supervising him? Was no one giving him any instructions about American culture and laws especially as it relates to the treatment of women?
Does this guy have a family? Or are we admitting single men to work in meatpacking now? Didn’t Homeland Security find out during his vetting process that he might have a problem?
What did Aberdeen’s mayor Mike Levsen know (about the sexual assault case) and when did he know it?
What role did Aberdeen’s mayor play in bringing DemKota to Aberdeen, and did he encourage LSS to open a refugee office to supply the company with cheap labor? Is it even a US-owned company?
I think folks in Aberdeen need to start having a serious look at the man they elected mayor in 2004! What! 12 years! Isn’t it time for a new mayor? See one of many stories about him here.
South Dakota numbers
This is getting too long, so here (below) are some numbers from South Dakota (via Wrapsnet.org). I’m sure this story isn’t going away any time soon especially since sentencing is scheduled for January 30th! (After expensive-to-taxpayers incarceration, will he be sentenced to be deported?)
In the 8 fiscal years since Obama has been in office, South Dakota received a total of 4,319 refugees. The largest groups were Bhutanese and Burmese, but Somalis came in at #3 with 577 placed in the state. Almost all of them were resettled in Sioux Falls. 64 Somalis came in FY 2016 (Mohamed would have been one of them, but does he have a family that we are now completely supporting somewhere else in SD?).
***Almost all Somalis who get in to the US come as resettled refugees, however, if we learn that he came in with a work visa that is going to open up a whole new controversy for the incoming Trump administration. OMG! Work visas from terror-producing countries of the world! Jeff Sessions, as newly appointed Attorney General must look into this case.
Invasion of Europe News……
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a bad year ahead. On December 19th, a failed asylum seeker killed a dozen people celebrating a Christmas tradition in Berlin. Here we learn that a Syrian refugee (who had been granted permission to stay in dear old Deutschland) has been arrested on terror charges, and she is up for election later this year. To top it off Donald Trump, rather than her soulmate Barack Obama, will be in the White House.
From Reuters:
A Syrian migrant who arrived in Germany two years ago has been arrested on suspicion of seeking funds from Islamic State to drive truck bombs into a crowd, a German state prosecutor’s office said on Monday.
Obama to Frau Merkel: Ich liebe dich! You did good! Islam will ultimately rule Europa thanks to your kindness. (No, Obama did not say that as far as we know so don’t spread this as fake news!)
The arrest follows an attack two weeks ago when a Tunisian whose asylum request had been rejected rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people. The man, Anis Amri, 24, was later shot dead by Italian police.
In the latest case, the prosecutor in the western city of Saarbruecken said the 38-year-old Syrian was detained on Saturday and a formal arrest warrant was issued on Sunday on suspicion that he was trying to raise 180,000 euros ($189,000) to fund an attack.
[….]
The Syrian is from the city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s main stronghold in the country. The prosecutor’s office in Saarbruecken, near the French border, had been alerted to his activities by the BKA federal crime office.
The Syrian came to Germany on Dec. 5, 2014, just before a wave of more than 1.1 million asylum-seekers arrived from the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2015. He was given permission to stay in Germany on Jan. 12, 2015.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made the now-controversial decision to open the country’s borders to refugees in September, 2015, described Islamist terrorism on New Year’s Eve as the greatest test facing Germany.
She has also said she is sickened by the prospect that refugees Germany has tried to help could mount attacks.
Continue reading here.
For all of our ‘Invasion of Europe’ posts, click here. This archive extends back many years.
For fun, search photos of Angela Merkel and Barack Obama (steamy!).
Michael Patrick Leahyat Breitbartyesterday analyzed the education levels of refugees arriving at record numbers in the US right now as Obama gets ready to vacate the White House. Residents told me that Somalis working for Cargill have changed the town of Ft. Morgan, Colorado. Photo: http://madworldnews.com/colorado-biz-200-muslims-job/
Readers here know that I have been for years discussing the role that BIG MEAT plays in the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program and my 6,000 mile tour of America this past summer took me to several major meatpacking towns being changed by the influx of large numbers of Somalis to supply cheap labor to meat industry giants like JBS in Greeley, Colorado and Cargill in Ft. Morgan.
(I also visited meatpacking towns in Minnesota and North and South Dakota.) Here is Leahy reporting on the fact that Somalis enter the US with the least education of any refugee group thus making them desirable employees for the beef and poultry industry (LOL! Not pork!).
Somalis are the least educated group of refugees who have arrived in the United States during the first three months of FY 2017.
As Breitbart News reported previously, the Obama administration has resettled 25,671 refugees in the country during the three month period beginning October 1, 2016 and ending December 30, 2016. This is almost double the number of refugees resettled in the United States during the same period in the prior fiscal year, FY 2016.
More than 85 percent of these refugees arrived from just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Burma, Ukraine, Bhutan, and Iran.
[….]
The levels of education of arriving refugees from these eight countries vary widely. More than 71 percent of refugees arriving from the Ukraine have achieved high school level or higher training (secondary, university, professional, or technical degrees). At the other end of the spectrum, less than nine percent of refugees from Somalia arrived with high school level or higher training.
[….]
Somalis, in particular, are heavily employed in the meat packing industry.
The consequence of the availability of low skill, low wage refugees to fill jobs in the meat packing and related industries has been to keep wages down and limit employment opportunities in those industries for low skilled American citizens living near those meat packing plants. The plants also need a steady supply of new healthy workers to replace the workers whose hands are eventually damaged by the rapid repetitive motions required in the high-speed, low-tech slaughterhouse line.
It is an extensive report, continue reading here.
I have been told by readers over the years, and by some living in meatpacking towns, that meatpacking was a desirable job for Americans a couple of decades ago, but when these global corporations discovered immigrant (cheap!) labor all that changed. Refugees supplement their wages with your welfare subsidies!
Just now as I read through news on my various alerts I saw several year-end wrap-up local news stories including from Poughkeepsie, NY and Rutland, VT which ranked refugee resettlement controversies among their top stories of the year. The one from Idaho places refugee resettlement right up there with the 2016 Presidential election as a leading story for 2016!
MagicValley.com gleefully notes that a petition drive failed to put the issue before county voters, but this type of activity is not a wasted effort. It generated media, sneering media, but nevertheless the process created political controversy. This is an important stage in bringing about political change. As I say to everyone, stop looking for the silver bullet. There is no silver bullet, or no right thing to do, just keep up the political pressure in whatever way you can using whatever talents and time you have.
I’ve been writing RRW since 2007 and I must say, this has not happened in those nearly ten years—that the refugee issue would be a leading story of the year anywhere, so keep up the good work.
When you are feeling frustrated that your concerns about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program are not being addressed, know that getting those concerns reported in your local media (within an overarching theme of agitating your elected officials) is a first important step toward reaching a political tipping point.
Here is some of what MagicValley.comhad to say:
Refugee resettlement, which was a controversial issue in Twin Falls in 2015 and continued to be on in 2016, was also a major issue in the presidential race, and the debate over Medicaid expansion in Idaho will be shifted drastically because of the outcome. [By the way, the Office of Refugee Resettlement itself says that if your state has expanded Medicaid it makes it a more ‘welcoming’ target for the placement of refugees.—ed]
[….]
A movement to shut down the College of Southern Idaho Refugee Center started last year, after news came out that some Syrians could be among the refugees to be resettled in Twin Falls. (None have been to date.) As the Syrian civil war dragged on, displacing millions of people, refugee resettlement became a topic of worldwide debate and a major issue in the presidential race, with Trump’s hard-line views on refugee admissions and anti-Muslim rhetoric energizing some and horrifying others. As for Twin Falls, it started to attract national media attention as an example of a town divided over what was becoming a focus of national political arguments.
A drive for a countywide referendum on whether to shut down the refugee center fizzled this spring when organizers got about a quarter of the number of signatures they would need to get on the ballot. In June, however, the debate flared back up after news came out about a 5-year-old girl at the Fawnbrook Apartments being sexually assaulted by three boys from Middle Eastern refugee families.
Continue reading here.
LOL! That is all I am snipping. I am really careful about not taking too much of published news accounts, however, this publication is the only one in the nation to ever send me a legal letter telling me I have snipped too much of their report.
Does anyone know where the case is regarding the sexual assault from last June?
Our archive on Twin Falls may be found by clicking here.
