Category: Immigration fraud

African “asylum shoppers” attempt to lie their way into Ireland

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I like that—instead of asylum seekers, let’s use the phrase asylum shoppers!

A new UK system to track rejected asylum seekers as they “shop” around with different names and even different nationalities attempting to get into Ireland  has revealed some surprising (to some!) statistics.   But, of course those Somalis coming across our US borders and asking for asylum are all legit, right?

From the Irish Independent (Oh, boy, watch for it! The Irish Immigrant Council will be on the paper’s case again! See what happened in 2008, here.):

TWO-THIRDS of failed asylum seekers investigated so far this year under a new agreement with the UK were found to be involved in identity swapping, the Irish Independent has learnt.

Cross-checks carried out by gardai using British fingerprint records revealed that about 1,300 out of 2,000 failed asylum seekers investigated were known to Britain’s Border Agency under a different name.

Of those looked at, about a third had given a different nationality to the UK authorities.

The scale of the identity swapping scam was uncovered under a data sharing plan, which is a key feature of a common travel area agreement signed by Ireland and Britain last Christmas.

The aim of the data sharing is to unearth previously undisclosed UK immigration histories that could help the Irish authorities in processing the cases of failed asylum seekers, a senior official told the Irish Independent last night.

He said this information was vital in helping to determine whether a deportation order should be issued against an applicant.

Of the 2,000 asylum seekers investigated, cross-checks found 600 had already been identified by UK agencies either as asylum shoppers with previous applications to the UK or as previous British visa seekers.

In the majority of fingerprint matches, those claiming asylum in Ireland had already been granted UK visas.

The official added that more than 80 people who had claimed asylum here as Somalis had previously been granted a UK visa using a Tanzanian identity.

Tip of the iceberg! 

“This is only the tip of the iceberg”, the official predicted last night….

Yup!

Update:  Identity problem keeps supposed Somali woman from marrying in Ireland, here.  LOL! Looks like some of these people need the services of the reality show along with Barack Obama—Who do you think you are?

Minnesota: Iraqi Muslim gets 3 years for ripping off food stamp program for $3 million

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Does that sound about right to you?  Three years in jail for $3 million worth of fraud!   And, then the OBAMA Justice Department has to throw in a lesson on the phony economics of the redistribution of wealth!

This is one of the largest food stamp rip-offs I’ve reported so far in my extra-curricular hobby of reporting on immigrant fraud schemes.   I wonder if maybe we could persuade that Minnesota Humphrey School that is so interested in how much immigrants benefit the economy of Minnesota to track the criminal fraud schemes too?

Note to readers:  I started writing this post last night and used this article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but this a.m. most of the text is gone (here is what I had last night from the story):

The former owner of a corner market in St. Paul argued before his sentencing on a massive food stamp fraud that his illegal behavior “was the product of stress and psychological instability” attributed to his ex-wife dying in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in 2007.

Khaffak S. Ansari, 46, of Arden Hills, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in St. Paul to three years and five months in prison for making illegal redemptions for cash and ineligible merchandise at the Stryker Avenue Market.

The government contended that Ansari trafficked more than $3 million in food stamp benefits from January 2006 — well before the bridge collapse — through October 2010.

Ansari argued that the figure was closer to $1.5 million. Sentencing calls for him to pay $2.4 million in restitution. [How much do you want to bet that money is already out of the country!—ed]

According to a law enforcement affidavit filed in the case, the average food stamp redemption for a similarly sized store in Minnesota between 2004 and 2009 was slightly more than $320,000. Over that same period, Stryker’s redemptions were nearly 10 times that.  [So, someone was ripping-off the taxpayer as early as 2004—ed]

In presentencing court filings, the government argued for a four-year prison term for Ansari. The defendant sought as little as three years, pointing out that his ex-wife, Julia Blackhawk, was killed in the bridge collapse three months after their divorce.

Stress made him do it!

“The nature and circumstance of the offense . . . was a product of stress and psychological instability after the death of Mr. Ansari’s [former wife] in the Highway 35W bridge collapse,” his attorney argued in a presentencing document.

This morning I see there is a much more interesting article on Ansari at the Chicago Tribune written by reporter David Hanners* of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  And, by the way, I am sure it didn’t escape your notice that Ansari had divorced his wife prior to her death on the bridge and that he had been trafficking and scamming the US taxpayer as early as 2006 (possibly earlier) and she died in 2007.

So Ansari is a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq!

His father, a doctor! made a plea to the judge to keep his sentence to as few years as possible with this sob story:

Ansari’s father, Dr. Tawfiq Ansari, a physician in North Carolina, wrote Magnuson, asking him to show “leniency and mercy to a man who was not himself for the past five years, and who loves his new adopted country so much.”  [Way to show your love of America by ripping us off! Is it justified because we are only infidels?—ed]

He said that his son, a Shi’a Muslim, had been tortured under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime in Iraq and that his son’s wounds “were not healed just hidden very deep inside.”

The father told the judge that after his son settled in Minnesota and opened the market, he seemed to be doing better. He married Julia Anne Kreider in September 2005, and the couple had a son.

In June 2006, Ansari filed for divorce. [He filed for divorce!—ed] It was granted in May 2007, and the couple “maintained a civil relationship for the sake of their son,” the father wrote.

But on Aug. 1, 2007, Julia Blackhawk, as she was then known, was one of 13 people killed in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.

“That left Khaffak in extreme shock and confusion,” Tawfiq Ansari told the judge. “The death of Julia turned to be a turning point in Khaffak’s life, he drifted into depression and self guilt. He started to have mood swings and an uncaring attitude towards life and his business.”

He said his son told him several times “that Julia’s death was his fault and he had to be punished for it.”

O.K. so let’s punish the guy!

Obama’s Justice Department doesn’t miss an opportunity to promote their economic redistribution theories even in a press release about a fraud case!  

LOL!  Not a mention in the release about the Muslim refugee sob story though.

Justice Department: Food stamps fuel the economy through trickle-down welfare!  Huh?  Couldn’t you also say that if the dollars were left in the hands of those who earned them (rather than the government taking them through taxes) that would also fuel the economy and do it more fairly!

From those brilliant economists at the Justice Department:

According to a 2010 USDA report, when properly functioning, SNAP benefits move into
the local economies quickly. This is important for the families that receive the benefits and the communities where the benefits are spent because SNAP has an economic multiplier effect. When SNAP operates as designed, every $5 spent in benefits generates $9 in economic activity. This benefit is supposed to accrue not only to the eligible families but also to the grocery stores where the food was purchased, the distributors who delivered the food, and ultimately the farmers who produced it. According to recent estimates, every $1 of spending on SNAP increases GDP by as much as $1.79 — a significant multiplier effect, and an increase of $1 billion in SNAP spending generates as many as 17,900 total full-time jobs.  [1, 7 and 9 must be the favorite numbers of the ‘economists’—ed]

* Way to go Mr. Hanners!  Thanks for your more extensive reporting!  This is an example of the massive food stamp fraud going on in these ‘mom & pop’ stores across America—it is a huge story in need of some real investigative reporting!

Texas governor criticizes “unaccompanied minor” program of US government

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update May 9th:  More on unaccompanied illegal kids here at the Houston Chronicle.

Before you read this post, please go back to this post I wrote in March which gives one horror story of an unaccompanied minor in Galveston, TX  who had originally been ‘under the care’ of Catholic Charities (which receives payment from the feds for his and thousands of other illegal alien kids care) and has become an alleged “unaccompanied” adult sexual predator.

Here is Texas Governor Perry (via Fox News) on how this program is encouraging a boom in kids crossing the border without parents.   He also charges that Obama is actually pushing this.  Although I gotta say Perry himself allowed for another magnet for illegal kids—subsidized college education for illegal alien kids (but that is another story for another time).

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is accusing the Obama administration of “perpetuating” a recent “surge” in illegal immigrant children who are crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America without their parents and often falling straight into government care.

In a letter obtained by Fox News, Perry wrote to President Obama on Friday citing stats that show more than 5,200 “unaccompanied minors” were taken into U.S. custody in the first six months of the fiscal year — a more than 90 percent increase compared with the same period a year ago.

Perry, a former Republican presidential candidate, claimed that a failure to immediately send them back is “perpetuating the problem” by encouraging other children and teenagers to make the trek. He said the journey is dangerous for the children, and their flow into the United States is a burden on his state and others. The governor urged the administration to eliminate the “temptation” to make “this tragic and illegal migration.”

The Refugee program looking for expansion into new and lucrative territory?

A recent Associated Press article on the surge reported that 1,390 unaccompanied children crossed over the border and into U.S. custody in March alone. Some have even been housed at Lackland Air Force Base on a temporary basis while they are being processed.

The children, after being initially detained by the Department of Homeland Security, are typically handed over to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement — a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.   [where a couple of the federal “church” contractors get paid to take care of them until they “emancipate” them into the US population at age 18—ed]

I noticed the other day as I read through the testimony from the Refugee meeting in Arlington, VA last week, here, that there were many mentions of the “need” to boost this program.   Another chicken-or-egg question?   Are the kids coming anyway or are they being enticed into coming by this federal program (and the hope of amnesty through the Dream Act someday)?

Burmese refugee on trial for murder in Utah might be saved from death penalty, why?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

He may have lied on his documents to get into the US and may have been under 18 when he allegedly brutally raped and murdered a little Burmese Christian girl in 2008.   Gee, I wonder where his defense lawyers got this idea (4 years later!)?  Could they have been watching the Somali trial in Tennessee where the alleged sex traffickers are using the missing birth records defense too.

Here is one of several posts I wrote about the Utah case in 2008.  I wondered then, and still do, if the accused is a Muslim.  I had heard at the time that resettlement contractors were placing Burmese Muslims in buildings and neighborhoods with Christian Burmese refugees and that the Christians feared them (since they had been enemies in their home country!).   As a matter of fact, several of the federal refugee contractors and their lobbying arm–Refugee Council USA–were pushing for more Burmese Muslims to be allowed into the US in 2013 at the meeting I attended on Tuesday.

I have never heard which of the many Burmese ethnic groups the accused, Esar Met, came from.

I wondered what happened to the case, but it looks like it finally inches toward trial with a preliminary hearing in June (4 years after the murder!).  Can you imagine how much this refugee is costing the taxpayers of Utah.  You can bet he is not in the general jail population.  There have probably been many many psychiatrist visits and expensive translators visiting regularly.  As a matter of fact, it would help to know which ethnic dialect he speaks—we would know then if he is a Muslim.

Here is a reform idea!  The resettlement contractor which brought Met to Utah should pay his legal expenses!  Maybe they would then push the Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department to do a better job of screening “refugees!”

From AP in an Indiana newspaper:

SALT LAKE CITY — Attorneys for a Burmese refugee accused of a South Salt Lake killing say there’s no proof he was an adult when the crime happened, and the death penalty should be taken off the table.

Esar Met’s birthday is listed as January 1987, which means he would have been 21 when 7-year-old refugee girl Hser Ner Moo was found dead in his apartment in spring 2008.

But attorneys filed a motion in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court this week saying Met and his family aren’t sure of the man’s date or year of birth.

“There is no existing paperwork, and there likely never was any paperwork, documenting the date of Mr. Met’s birth in Burma,” the documents say.

It would be illegal to execute Met if he were younger than 18 at the time of the crime, according to the motion. Lawyers cite a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that banned capital punishment for minors.

Not knowing a birthday isn’t uncommon among refugees.

So he lied to those doing security clearances for the US?  Readers, we don’t really know who we are letting into the country.  And, we have heard that in some Burmese camps a criminal can get into camp and literally steal the identity of someone else.

Salt Lake County prosecutor Rob Parrish told the Associated Press on Friday that the lack of documents “creates complications, but it’s not insurmountable.”

His office is researching a response to the motion in advance of Met’s preliminary hearing, which is set for June.

Parrish said refugees sometimes encounter similar problems while trying to determine whether they’re old enough to get a driver’s license or to enroll in a specific program.

Just as I was about to post this, I came across this article I missed in 2010 in which we are told that authorities had trouble finding Met’s family members in Arizona, but the article wraps up with a report that Met’s mother says he was even older than 21 at the time of the alleged crime.   However, if as the defense argues Met was a teenager at the time of the murder, why wasn’t he still with his family?  Why was he resettled in another state?  Was he a perhaps a fraudulent family reunification case?  So many questions!

More single young men on the way to the US from Malta

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

These men are Africans who arrived illegally in Malta and were transformed into refugees so that they might be resettled in your town in America.   Legitimate refugees are expected to be granted or denied asylum in the first safe country in which they arrive—in this case Malta (a member of the European Union)—but as of 2007, the US (the Bush State Department!) changed the rules apparently under pressure from Jesuits in Malta  and began the unprecedented policy of just taking them off Malta’s and Europe’s hands.

LOL!  It would be like us asking Malta (Europe) to take some of our illegal aliens from Mexico because we have too many.

Here is the latest news from The Malta Independent:

31 persons from Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan including a family of three and 28 single adult men left today to start a new life in the United States, under the US Refugee Resettlement Program (USRRP).  On arrival, they will be assisted by NGOs in the US to proceed to their final destinations in various states.

This latest departure brings the total of beneficiaries of international protection who were resettled to the United States from Malta since 2007 to 958 migrants. Since the start of the USRRP in 2008, the number of beneficiaries of protection resettled to the United States amounts to 930.

To date, 147 migrants have been resettled from Malta to the United States of America during 2012. Such resettlements to the United States will continue in the coming weeks.

In all 1,592 refugees and beneficiaries of international protection have been relocated or resettled to various other developed countries since 2005.

Search RRW for “Malta” for more on this initiative that only encourages more illegal economic migrants to cross the Mediterranean in hopes of winning the “refugee” lottery and being airlifted to America at American taxpayer expense. How much do you want to bet the single men will be dropped off in a meat packing town?

And, I wonder when we will start helping other countries with their illegal immigrant populations of single adult men—will it be Greece next, or Italy?