Refugee industry unhappy with new hire at State Department

03/09/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Unhappy is probably a mild description of the mood of refugee activists inside and outside the government with the posting of Andrew Veprek, described as an aide to the White House’s resident monster, Stephen Miller, to a post as Deputy Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM).

Politico says that inside the agency, other staff might resign in protest.

(They obviously are convinced Veprek is on the side of slowing the refugee flow to America. And, for the record, I don’t know him, so I couldn’t say.)
Here is Politico reporting the latest discouraging news for the once prosperous refugee industry:

Screenshot (260)_LI — Since I couldn’t find a pic of Stephen Miller’s right hand man Veprek, this is my image of how the refugee industry is viewing the appointment.

A White House aide close to senior policy adviser Stephen Miller who has advocated strict limits on immigration into the U.S. has been selected for a top State Department post overseeing refugee admissions, according to current and former officials.

Andrew Veprek’s appointment as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) is alarming pro-immigration activists who fear that President Donald Trump is trying to effectively end the U.S. refugee resettlement program.

Current and former officials also describe Veprek’s appointment as a blow to an already-embattled refugee bureau.

The Deep State blabs to Politico:

Veprek is a Foreign Service officer detailed to the White House, which listed him as an “immigration adviser” in a 2017 staff document. He has worked closely there with Miller and the Domestic Policy Council, according to a current State official and a former one in touch with people still serving in the department. A former U.S. official also confirmed the appointment.

In interagency debates, some administration officials have viewed Veprek as representing Miller’s hard-line views about limiting entry into the U.S. for refugees and other immigrants.

Veprek played an influential role in Trump administration’s December withdrawal from international talks on a nonbinding global pact on migration issues. He also argued in favor of dramatically lowering the nation’s annual cap on refugee admissions, the current and former officials said.

Resignations coming???

Politico continues….

“He was Stephen Miller’s vehicle,” the former State official said. The current official predicted that some PRM officials could resign in protest over Veprek’s appointment.

“My experience is that he strongly believes that fewer refugees should admitted into the United States and that international migration is something to be stopped, not managed,” the former U.S. official said, adding that Veprek’s views about refugees and migrants were impassioned to the point of seeming “vindictive.”

Veprek’s appointment as a deputy assistant secretary is unusual given his relatively low Foreign Service rank, the former and current State officials said, and raises questions about his qualifications. Such a position typically does not require Senate confirmation. [It is significant that Trump has still not chosen an Asst. Secretary for PRM because that job does require Senate confirmation—a hellstorm they are apparently avoiding.—ed]

tillerson foia — Politico tells us that Sec. of State Tillerson has given up on the idea of scrapping PRM. If I understand it, he was considering moving the refugee program to Homeland Security, a proposal that had some merit in my opinion.

[….]

The White House referred questions to the State Department. A State Department spokesperson confirmed Veprek’s new role and, while not describing his rank, stressed that Veprek comes to PRM “with more than 16 years in the Foreign Service and experience working on refugee and migration issues.”

[….]

The PRM bureau, like several other bureaus at the State Department, does not yet have an assistant secretary to lead it. People familiar with the bureau say the morale among its employees has sunk to unusually low levels as top officials have left or been reassigned and amid the anti-refugee messages emanating from the White House. But initial worries that Tillerson would scrap the bureau completely have faded, at least for now, as the secretary has scaled back plans to restructure the department.

More here.
In another report on the “refugee hard-liner”, The Hill says this of Trump’s reduction in the number of refugees to be admitted to the US:

The move signaled that there would no longer be a need for all of the 324 resettlement offices that were operating in 2017.

As we reported extensively in the waning years of the Obama Administration, the State Department was on a high identifying as many as 40 prospective NEW resettlement sites.
Elections have consequences after all.
But the consequences come with a time stamp and if there is no move to reform the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program by Congress, by changing the law, during the Trump Administration, the program will simply pick up where it left off when a new President (without Trump’s guts) comes in, bumps the numbers up, opens those offices and away they will go!
Where is Congress?

More of Australia's rejected asylum seekers leave for US

03/05/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update on the movement of illegal aliens who tried to get in to Australia by boat, were placed in Australian detention centers, but thanks to former President Obama’s “dumb deal” they are coming to the US as refugees.

australian-detainees-on-the-way — Photo is of a bunch that was headed our way in January. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/01/23/australian-rejected-refugees-on-the-way-to-us-this-week/

(A refugee designation is the highest class of legal immigration one can hope to get because it comes with the works—a furnished apartment, job counseling, case workers to sign you up for your ‘services,’ etc.)
If you are a new reader, you need to know that Donald Trump agreed to honor the deal he once called “dumb,” but at least the administration seems to be slow-walking the process.
This time we learn that the latest batch includes a few families in addition to the larger number of single men, that Australia did not want on its mainland, being placed without your knowledge in Any Town, USA.
From the Australian AP via the Daily Mail:

Four more families of refugees and a cohort of single men have left immigration camps on Nauru to start new lives in the United States.

The group of 29, including eight children, who flew off the island nation on Sunday is the fifth cohort to depart Nauru under Australia’s refugee resettlement deal with the US.

They included two Sri Lankan, one Rohingyan and one Afghan family and single men from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, refugee advocates said.

Two hundred and twenty four of a projected 1,250 have been selected.

Since resettlements under the deal started in September, 139 refugees have left Nauru and 85 from Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

Ian Rintoul — Australian open borders activist Rintoul wonders why no more vetting interviews have been scheduled.

However, the Refugee Action Coalition said it was remarkable there were no Iranian, Somali or Sudanese refugees among those who have left this year, despite Australian Border Force officials denying any particular nationalities were banned from resettling in the US. [It makes no sense that the Trump Admin is blocking Iranians, Somalis and Sudanese, but allowing Afghans, Pakistanis and Rohingya!—ed]

Hmmmm……slow-walk?

RAC spokesman Ian Rintoul said US officials were expected to remain in Nauru for another couple of weeks but had not yet scheduled any new vetting interviews for another round of refugees.

Under the deal Australia reached with the previous Obama administration – derided as the worst ever by now-president Donald Trump – the US agreed to take up to 1250 refugees from the offshore detention centres.

Go here to learn more about the Australian “dumb” deal. We have been following it for months.

Politico says Trump refugee slowdown is the result of "engineered chaos"

02/27/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is an unnecessarily long article written by Politico reporter Meredith Hoffman. You can read the whole thing. But, I do want to make a point or two before I move on to other things (like Leo Hohmann’s latest on his trip to South Dakota).
The article begins as usual with a sympathetic case (star of the story) of an African woman who got in to the US and is now separated (because of Trump) from the children she left behind.
It goes in to the usual stuff we have been hearing about—the ban, Trump’s low refugee ceiling, the refugees trickling in, the ‘hardship’ the contractors are facing, but it mentions an issue I found most interesting.
The Trump Administration has shifted a focus away from sending USCIS officers abroad to interview prospective refugees and sent them instead to the border and elsewhere in the US to process the huge backlog in US asylum claims that piled up as Obama shifted these officers abroad.
Asylum a huge and growing problem!

migrants at US border — Other than Mexicans, extra-continentales, arranging their movement to the US border, getting travel advice and information about immigration lawyers! From: https://newrepublic.com/article/146919/this-route-doesnt-exist-map

Readers, the asylum issue is huge and will become an even greater challenge if this horrifying story at The New Republic (hat tip: Judy) is any indication…..

….many thousands of migrants who can’t get in to an increasingly unwelcome Europe are headed to South America with the goal of reaching our southern border.

These are all clever people who know that if they are caught at the border, they will ask for political asylum (there will be an immigration lawyer waiting for them) and will spend years here as that process slogs along.
Now to Politico and the usual whinefest. This is only a small bit of the story.
I see that Barbara Strack, after ‘retiring,’ has begun talking to the media. (Emphasis is mine, along with paragraph breaks for easier reading.)

….workers’ [the usual cabal] impression of engineered chaos comes as the State Department is already using low numbers of refugees to justify the closure of dozens of offices of resettlement agencies, which are private nonprofits that contract with the federal government***. The resettlement agencies and employees still standing are left with the question of how to do their jobs under an administration that at best is making resettlement a very low priority.

[….]

In a year in which the president simply banned whole groups of refugees from entering the United States, it’s far from unexpected that arrivals would be below those of previous administrations. But Trump’s high-profile executive orders halting refugee admissions last year are just part of the resettlement program’s disruptions.

Barbara Strack

More than a year after the original ban, resettlement workers paint a picture of chaos and confusion, and a field that has been upended by dramatic, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, changes. “If the refugee resettlement program were an assembly line in a factory, it works efficiently because every station knows what to do and how to do the handoff,” said Barbara Strack, who was chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the Department of Homeland Security until retiring three weeks ago. “What the administration has done this year is break that assembly line in multiple places at the same time.”

Trump is prioritizing asylum processing and that makes them all pretty angry, but should please those (like you and me!) who don’t want to see asylum seekers allowed to roam free until their cases are heard.

It’s not just the bureaucratic re-routing that is holding up the process. Another dramatic impetus for the drop in refugee arrivals is that USCIS is assigning about half of its Refugee Affairs Division officers to the border and to asylum offices in the U.S. interior instead of abroad, Strack said, which has a dramatic effect on USCIS’ capacity to do refugee interviews.

Under past administrations the reverse has been true: Asylum officers were occasionally sent abroad to help screen refugees, especially under the Obama administration, which ordered as many asylum officers as necessary to help screen enough refugees to reach the ceiling, she said. (The Obama administration came just shy of its 85,000 ceiling in fiscal year 2016, with 84,994 refugees.)

Readers might remember that Obama was hellbent to get as many Syrians in to the US as possible during his last year in office and hired many more officers to get them processed.
Politico continues….

With only half the resettlement officers working abroad as usual, the Department of Homeland Security has had to cut back drastically on trips for employees to screen refugees in those countries, known as circuit rides.

DHS cut its circuit rides to fewer than five locations abroad in the first quarter of this fiscal year, which began in October, resettlement sources said. That’s less than one-third the usual amount in that same time period in previous administration.

The rides were also shorter, staffed with fewer officers and included none to the Middle East, multiple resettlement sources confirmed. And while DHS has added more locations to its second quarter, the rides will remain much shorter than their usual six-to-eight-week duration, and still include no Middle East locations.

Then this! Trump: A ceiling is a ceiling, it is not a goal!

As we have said ad nausea, the Refugee Act of 1980 describes a ceiling chosen by the President in advance of the fiscal year. A ceiling is a cap, not a goal to be achieved. The refugee industry has for decades attempted to make it a goal to be reached!

…..the people I spoke to in the resettlement world all agreed on one thing: The Trump administration is more than happy to stay far below that 45,000-refugee ceiling. “Past administrations have looked at the ceiling [wrongly—ed] as a goal,” said Strack, who served in the federal government 26 years and in refugee resettlement the past 12. “That’s not the case for this administration.”

So to conclude… They can call it “engineered chaos”, but I see what the Trump Administration is doing is pretty clear.
Why process more people abroad when wannabe ‘refugees’ are piling up at the US border, or are already here and have never been screened?

Sounds like there is a clear goal here to keep us safe and create order out of the chaos Obama left us with!

***These are the private contractors that are paid by the head to place refugees in your towns and cities. Come on Politico why can’t you tell your readers how many millions they are paid annually to do their ‘charitable good works!’
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! From most recent accounting, here.

Bipartisan efforts underway to support Samaritan's Purse exec for top UN refugee job

02/20/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you here earlier this month about the long knives being out to destroy the nomination of Ken Isaacs a Veep at Samaritan’s Purse to head the IOM.
President Trump has nominated Isaacs to head the International Organization for Migration which not very long ago was another NGO receiving millions of US taxpayer dollars to do the foreign end of refugee processing in to the US (among other things). Now they have been officially folded in to the UN.
Of course, I would like to see the IOM squeezed financially, but at minimum the President should not be bullied by this pair (with the Washington Post!).

In my earlier post I said the President should not back down to the long knives lead by Eric Schwartz and CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper.
Here is news with the latest on the controversy, hat tip: Richard at Blue Ridge Forum.

A bipartisan group of leading human-rights activists, including a Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnist, has jumped to the defense of President Trump’s choice to lead the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), which uses its $1 billion annual budget to promote worldwide cooperation on refugee and trafficking issues.

Trump nominated Ken Isaacs, vice president of the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, in January to head the 169-member organization, which holds elections to name a leader but typically defers to United States’ choice to run the organization.

eric-schwartz-2 — Knife number two: Eric Schwartz, a hard Left one-worlder who ran the refugee program in the early years of the Obama Admin, and is a George SOROS protege.

Isaacs, who served in the Bush administration as the director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, has spent 30 years organizing large-scale emergency relief programs in some of the most dangerous and desperate places in the world, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Darfur, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Rwanda.

The day the White House announced his nomination, Isaacs was in Bangladesh administering diphtheria treatment to Muslim-majority Rohingya refugees.

Now, two weeks later, lifetime colleagues and allies in the humanitarian community are furiously trying to save his nomination after an Obama State Department official and a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations accused Isaacs of tweeting anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant statements.

In a Washington Post article, the pair of critics took issue with a number of Isaacs’ views, including the belief that the Koran instructs its followers to engage in violent jihad, that Middle East Christians should be given first priority when applying to the U.S. government for refugee status, and that President Obama’s policy of accepting large numbers of Syrian refugees was “foolish and delusional” because some of them could become “security risks” if allowed in the United States.

After the article, Isaacs apologized for his “careless” social media posts and vowed to lead the IOM with “the highest standards of humanity, human dignity, and equality,” if chosen.

The paper later editorialized against the nomination, arguing Isaacs’s views were “venomous,” demonstrated “bigotry,” and that his leadership in the post would be “an embarrassment to the United States.”

Continue reading here.
Dear Donald, don’t let the Washington Post (Bezos), CAIR and Schwartz win this one!

Obama's 'Final Year'—finally gone!

02/18/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Subtitle: Why Donald Trump is in the White House!

Obama's men and Power — Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power, John Kerry, and of course Obama. Four reasons (five if you throw in Susan Rice) why Trump won!

There is a new documentary film being released (in a few theaters near you) about the final year of the Obama Administration and how their foreign policy decisions (blunders!) helped put Trump in the White House.
But, the film idea didn’t start out that way. When filming began, Trump wasn’t supposed to win!
Be prepared for a sympathetic look, dripping with nostalgia, for the good ol’ days.
My special interest in viewing the film is to see what more the ever-cocky Samantha Power has to say. You will find her discussed many times over the years here at RRW from her earliest mention in 2008 as Obama’s ‘Iraqi refugee czar’ to her rise to her UN catbird seat.
See the trailer (here if it doesn’t play below): Pay special attention to the 1:25 minute mark (5 months left which means it would have been early September 2016) where Samantha Power says this:

“We have to be sure to make it harder to dismantle if we take a different turn.”

Does she mean make it harder to dismantle Obama’s foreign policy legacy (which was pretty lousy anyway) in case Trump wins? Did she suspect then that Trump might very well succeed?
The dossier and the FISA applications???? Wasn’t she fingered as a chief ‘unmasker?’ Hmmm!

(By the way, the 1:38 minute mark is pretty good too—Ben Rhodes realizes that they have lost!)
Now here is a bit of the text from the Times of Israel where the reporter seems to be wishing the Obama gang was back.

‘The Final Year’ follows the Obama administration’s last attempt to shape world affairs. (Magnolia Pictures)

For those tired of watching reruns of “The West Wing,” there’s a new political thriller out — and it just so happens to be real.

The recently released documentary “The Final Year” is the story of the Obama administration’s final 12 months in office as told by former president Barack Obama’s foreign policy team.

Leading roles are played by Obama administration stars. US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, along with Secretary of State John Kerry — and the president himself — all race against the clock to broker a deal with Iran, negotiate a climate accord in Paris and find a solution to the Syrian crisis, among the other issues on their diplomatic agenda.

For the individuals portrayed in the documentary, “The Final Year” was intended to solidify Obama’s foreign policy legacy, but President Donald Trump’s ultimate victory leaves the Obama team more stunned than assured.

“We tried to change the ending but we couldn’t do it,” joked director Greg Barker in an interview with The Times of Israel …..

[….]

“Samantha [Power] gets very excited and we’re talking about these ideas, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this is great. We’re going to change the world.’”

But by the fourth quarter of Obama’s final term, the glamour of their vision had succumbed to the political reality of the office.

The role refugees played in Trump’s victory….

Barker said that Power now believes that the Obama administration’s failure to take definitive action in Syria prompted a domino-effect of world events.

“[Power] will say that you can make the case that without the Syria tragedy and the outflow of refugees, you may well not have had Brexit in the UK, you may well not have had Trump without this fear of ‘The Other’ which was perpetrated by a million refugees flowing into Europe,” Barker said.

“She’ll make the case that the world could be a very different place [if not for the Syria crisis],” he added.

More here.
Note that comments to the Times of Israel are not flattering to the team.
Heck, it would be fun to watch this in a theater wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat!