Here is the AP storyfrom Saturday published at the Eagle Tribune.
The timing of the arrest is suspicious (is the FBI helping Hillary again, will she bring it up in the debate on Wednesday as an example of right wing extremism?), but otherwise we will wait and see what comes of this. Tyson Foods Garden City, KS: Wherever you have Tyson Foods you will find cheap refugee labor. I didn’t make it to Garden City this summer on my tour of mostly American meatpacking towns, but visited many others with large numbers of Somali and other immigrants fueling ethnic tensions as the US Dept. of State provides refugee labor for BIG MEAT.
For background, you might want to see our archive on Garden City, KS (click here) where Tyson Foods has long been a draw for cheap refugee laborers. For more information on refugee resettlement in Kansas generally, go here.
One of my all-time favorite posts on Garden City is one from 2010 where Somali Muslims wanted a taxpayer supported cemetery to set aside a section just for Muslims so they wouldn’t have to be with infidels even after death.
For serious students of the history of Somalis and Tyson Foods in Kansas see our entire category on Emporia, KS by clicking here. It is a classic case of how a flood of refugees pushed a town over the edge. (Tyson ultimately closed the plant and moved refugees elsewhere.)
This is a bit of the AP story from over the weekend.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Three members of a Kansas militia group were charged Friday with plotting to bomb an apartment complex that’s home to Somali immigrants in the western Kansas meatpacking town of Garden City, a thwarted attack prosecutors say was planned for the day after the November election.
The arrests were the culmination of an eight-month FBI investigation [suspicious timing?—ed] that took agents “deep into a hidden culture of hatred and violence,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tom Beall said.
A complaint unsealed Friday charges Curtis Wayne Allen, 49; Patrick Eugene Stein, 47; and Gavin Wayne Wright, 49, with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. Their first court appearance is Monday.
Prosecutors said the men don’t yet have attorneys. Publicly listed phone numbers for the men couldn’t immediately be found.
The men are members of a small militia group that calls itself “the Crusaders,” and whose members espouse sovereign citizen, anti-government, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs, according to the complaint.
Continue reading here.
It looks like it is Catholic Charities that is resettling refugees (including many Muslims) in to Garden City. See here.
To all of you who have attempted (unsuccessfully) to get a copy of the important planning document the federal government uses to justify the number and ethnicity of refugees to be seeded in your towns, this should vindicate your frustration and anger (even if it doesn’t help you acquire yours!) Here they come. Is there a mosque in Missoula? Just wondering. Editor:This is the third post this morning in my ‘secret Saturday’ series. See the previous posts here, and here.
So many of you have reported, for months, that you have called your state refugee coordinator or the local resettlement agency only to be stonewalled, denied the document and in some cases made to feel like an idiot when the contractor pretended that you didn’t know what you were talking about (what R & P Abstract?). Some of you ultimately obtained the document using your state freedom of information law.
Bait and switch!
Yes, the R & P Abstract (Reception and Placement Abstract) exists and now the Missoulianwrites about it here, like it was no big deal. How many of you in Montana knew until recently that they weren’t planning for 50 or 100 refugees but more than that, year after year? And, as they told you, with a straight face, that they would be benign Christians from the DR Congo you were expected to believe that too.
Now we learn you are getting Somalis, Afghanis and Syrians, three of the most difficult to security-screen groups of Muslim refugees. In addition to more than a dozen other ethnic groups (btw, this makes the resettlement extremely costly to your school system that must cope with children speaking many languages). Hereis the Missoulian (I don’t know if one of the concerned citizens out there obtained an R & P Abstractand gave it to the paper, or the contractor decided it was best to release it, so as to get their own spin on the story first):
Missoula could resettle up to 150 refugees of as many as 15 nationalities in the next 12 months, but the biggest numbers will reflect the world’s most troubled spots. (Troubled spots is code for Muslim countries!—ed)
A Reception and Placement Abstract filed in May with the U.S. State Department proposed up to 65 people from sub-Saharan Africa and 70 from the Middle Eastern countries of Syria, Iran and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, during fiscal year 2017.
The first group includes those who’ve fled war or persecution from Burundi, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan and South Sudan.
Five families from the Democratic Republic of Congo – 27 people in all – arrived in town in August and September, according to wrapsnet.org, an interactive website of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
They won’t count toward the 150 total for FY17, according to Molly Short Carr, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s Missoula office.
[….]
An abstract also was filed for the remainder of fiscal year 2016, which ended on Sept. 30. It proposed a capacity of 100 refugees, though Missoula was clearly not in a position to receive that many.
For all of you, think about this! Every week these tax-payer funded contractors sit down with the Department of State (in Washington) and divvy up the refugees to be seeded in to your town. Each contractor is ‘bidding for bodies’ as each refugee comes with a bucket of money attached per person.
The federal bureau uses information provided on R&P abstracts when it sits down each week with representatives of the IRC and the eight other resettlement agencies in the United States, a State Department spokeswoman told the Missoulian.
[….]
The IRC’s abstract touched lightly [does the DOS in DC try to verify the information contractors submit in their bids?—ed] on housing and employment in Missoula. Basing its figures on the latest Missoula Housing Report, it said the average monthly rent for homes or apartments with one, two and three bedrooms is $750, $950 and $1,200, respectively. Availability was listed as “always” for the two smaller homes and “sometimes” for three bedrooms.
I visited Missoula on my RRW fact-finding trip this summer and learned that the contractor office was being kept secret. This is my photo of where I was told it was located.
Listed as available jobs for refugees in Missoula were construction, customer service, food service, health care, hospitality and retail. [Really! Customer service! Hospitality! they don’t speak ENGLISH!—ed] The average starting wage is $9.50 for full-time positions, while the starting wage of part-time positions and the percentage of positions offered benefits are “to be determined.”
On this issue of housing and jobs. It has been reported to me that the contractor may have lied in the R & P Abstractabout the availability of housing and jobs for very poor, non-English speaking refugees from places like the Congo. Also, it is pretty obvious that if (big if!) even one member of the family gets a job at $9.50 an hour they will need lots of welfare benefits just to survive.
As Isaid here, if you see any neglect of the refugees and/or abuse of contractual agreements with the DOS. Please report what you see. Come to think of it, maybe you could make a hotline phone number available in your community where citizens could anonymously report any refugee problems they see.
We have written a lot on Montana, click hereto learn more.
Why should citizens have to use freedom of information act requests to find out how the federal government and its refugee contractors are planning to change the demographics (and the culture!) of hundreds of American towns and cities? When Ms. Merdzanovic refers to her HQ she is referring to Lavinia Limon. This is Lavinia Limon, CEO of USCRI, sharing the stage with Mr. Chobani (Hamdi Ulukaya) at the same Clinton Global Initiative gathering where Bill Clinton and Ulukaya thought it was a great idea to repopulate Detroit with Syrian refugees. Chobani Yogurt actively seeks refugee employees for their yogurt plants in New York and Idaho. Ms. Limon supplies the town of Twin Falls (Idaho) with refugees. Cozy huh? The good citizens of Rutland should find out and expose what business entities are driving the resettlement in Rutland.
Here is more news on ‘secret Saturday’ (see Hillary secret speeches) about how the Open Borders Left (including refugee resettlement contractors!) is working in collusion with certain local elected officials to hide information from the public.
From Judicial Watch yesterday:
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 128 pages of documents it obtained from the mayor of Rutland, Vermont, showing a concerted effort by the mayor and a number of private organizations to conceal from the public their plans to resettle 100 Syrian refugees into the small southern Vermont town.
The documents include an April 14, 2016, email from Amila Merdzanovic, executive director of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, to Mayor Christopher Louras, in which she wrote:
I want to share with you the concern my HQ has about holding a public forum. If we open it up to anybody and everybody, all sorts of people will come out of woodwork. Anti-immigrant, anti-anything. They suggest that the forum be invite only but make it as wide as possible. Work with faith leaders, United Way, etc… Perhaps, we could go back to the Congregational Church and continue the conversation there.
[….]
On April 10, 2016, she wrote to the director of the State Refugee Office about her coordination with the mayor to keep the resettlement program secret:
He did share with me that the Governor’s office called him after getting a frantic call from DOL [Vermont Department of Labor] inquiring about the plan to resettle ‘100 Syrians in the next month’ in Rutland. Again, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of not sharing the information even if it is confidentially. Please respect our process, you will have plenty of opportunity to share and take action once we have met with the stakeholders. At that point we can and will share it widely. It will not serve any one of us well if the community in Rutland learned about it through the grapevine and not directly from us. The above example shows that what people hear and how they interpret it is two different things.
Visit Judicial Watchhere for more and especially if you want to follow links for the documents they received.
We reported here that the Department of State has given the green light for the first 100 Syrians to be placed in Rutland later this year. And, I am emphasizing the word ‘first’ because once your town gets a resettlement office there is no stopping the flow! (See ‘Ten things your town needs to know,’ by clicking here). USCRI is 97% fundedby you! Go here for our complete Rutland archive.
By the way, the DOS has, we are told, identified 47 new resettlement sites in America to accommodate Obama’s proposed 110,000 refugees for FY2017 which began last Saturday. These are the sites we know of so far. As we have said this is all planned in secrecy, but if you can help identify others, please let us know!
Asheville, NC
Rutland, VT
Reno, NV
Ithaca, NY
Missoula, MT
Aberdeen, SD
Charleston, WV
Fayetteville, AR
Blacksburg, VA
Pittsfield, MA
Northhampton, MA
Flint, Michigan
Bloomington, IN
Traverse City, MI
Update October 19th: More on this scheme. Remember the purpose is to get more refugees in to the country because this private scheme would be in ADDITION to the present system.
So, as it is described by one commenter: Instead of buying a $10,000 car in the coming year, what the heck adopt a Syrian refugee instead.
I would be a proponent of private sponsorship if it accompanied the complete abolition of the present system that involves middlemen federal contractors (the VOLAGs) being paid billions of tax dollars, and required the sponsor to pay for all costs associated with the refugees for a year or two. Congress would, of course, have the final say on numbers, security screening and nationalities permitted entry to the US in my hypothetical re-write of refugee law. Matthew LaCorte (one of the brains behind the plan) thinks $10,000 will get him a refugee—what for a month or two! Then what? The refugee he sponsored is on us! But, this plan, which they are apparently hatching within the State Department and in cooperation with the Refugee Council USA (the resettlement industry’s lobbying arm), is a plan to bring in additional refugees over and above what Congress is willing to pay for.
(For those of you who think we have no impact, this indicates to me that the industry knows there are limits to how much of your money the Congress is willing to shell out to bring hundreds of thousands of impoverished refugees to your towns.)
This really is a pretty audacious concept since they apparently think they can do this ‘in house’ and not involve rewriting refugee law. (Congress writes the laws, or have they forgotten?)
Here is the jaw-dropping (Bloomberg, of course!) story at the Chicago Tribune(hat tip: Julia):
Americans might be able to bring a refugee to the U.S. on their own dime if talks between the Obama administration and the nation’s leading refugee advocacy group come to fruition.
The State Department is considering a pilot program that would let citizens sponsor a refugee from their country of choice by paying for airfare, housing, clothing, food and other resettlement costs. Conversations began in July and are expected to continue in the coming year, said Naomi Steinberg, director of the Refugee Council USA.
The program, modeled after a similar one in Canada, is designed to crack open new sources of funding as growing anti-refugee sentiment in Congress threatens to cut resettlement programs.
“It puts Americans in the driver’s seat,” said Matthew La Corte, policy analyst at the Niskanen Center***, a Washington-based libertarian think tank that was an early supporter of the program.“It allows them to say ‘I have a spare bedroom. I was thinking of buying a new car but I’ll instead take that $10,000 and put it toward bringing a Syrian refugee over.”‘
[….]
Such a program would mark one of the biggest structural changes to U.S. refugee policy in three decades, and would allow Barack Obama or future presidents to skirt opposition by shifting financial responsibility to everyday Americans.
[I’m all for shifting all of the costs to those who are promoting refugee resettlement—ed]
[….]
For fiscal 2016, Congress appropriated $3.1 billion for refugee and migration assistance programs, the same level as two years earlier, according to figures from the agency.
Private sponsorship “is a good option in terms of increasing numbers without increasing budget outlays,” said Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies in New York. [Appleby was formerly the lobbyist in DC for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, we have a lot on him here at RRW—ed]
State Department’s Mark Storella: we will be working on it this coming year (when Hillary gets to the White House). Photo: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/259069.htm
Refugee Council USA and the state department began talks about private sponsorship this summer, said Steinberg, director at the Washington-based agency, which is an umbrella group for 22 organizations.
The State Department plans to work on the issue “in the year to come,” according to a statement from Mark Storella, a deputy assistant secretary. [Looks like they are pretty confident Hillary will be in the White House.—ed]
[….]
Before any program is launched, critical points must be addressed, said Steinberg. The group wants to ensure that sponsorship does not replace existing government programs.
“The only private resettlement program that we could support would be one that increases the number of refugees who arrive in the U.S., while at the same time maintaining and even strengthening the U.S. government commitments,” Steinberg said.
We have told you about the ‘Refugee Congress’ in past years (here the 2014 lobby campaign was run by the Lutherans). This is the time in September when the refugee contractors help to bring in refugees from all over the country to lobby Congress. It is always at this time of year because it is now, just before the new fiscal year begins that Congress (having not completed its budget work during the year) is in a crunch to get it done so they can go home. The lobbyists for the resettlement industry are not stupid (and they have a lot of money) and they know that bringing some very presentable refugees to DC now is a good move on their part. You know tug on the heartstrings, blah, blah, blah. Update: USCRI tweeted this photo of refugees on the Hill right now.
This year we see that the Refugee Congress is being funded largely by a new non-profit—USA for UNHCR—which is getting much of its funding from businesses who benefit from cheap migrant labor.
One of those (and proud of it) is Hamdi Ulukaya CEO of Chobani Yogurt. You know, that is the company that has caused social turmoil in Twin Falls, Idaho*** as it brings in, with the help of the US State Department and the refugee contractor USCRI, hundreds of refugee workers for its huge plant there (Chamber of Commerce loves this plant!).
I continue to wonder if any of the humanitarian do-gooders working with refugees ever think about how the refugees supply labor that keeps wages low for the benefit international corporate giants? Here is the Refugee Congress website (refugees were in DC for the last couple of days and are visiting their representatives today, looking for more money for the refugee contractors).
And, now go to the 2015 annual reportfor USA for UNHCR and see their corporate sponsors including their star of the year—Hamdi Ulukaya:
Some readers have asked recently what other companies are in on the refugee advocacy bandwagon, go here, to see a larger list (but certainly not a complete list).
***See our complete archive on Twin Falls, Idaho here.
