Refugee Program in Disarray, Resettlement Contractors Reportedly Furious with Biden

“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting.” [From the Biden Administration]

Angie Plummer, Ohio resettlement contractor

Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family.  No promises, but I will try to post from time to time so I won’t have too big a gap in my now nearly 15 year running catalog of ills surrounding the US Refugee Admissions Program.

Reminder: there are over 9,000 posts archived here at RRW and the search function works pretty well.  Choose a few key words and see what is here.

You surely know by now that the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are being treated like legitimate refugees and have swamped the refugee program causing complaints to surface from other ethnic groups and from contractors*** who do not want the Afghans to completely wipe out the chances of others, like the Somali starring in this Columbus Dispatch report, getting their extended family members into the US.

Biden’s pause on refugee resettlement worries agencies, advocates in Greater Columbus

Aden Hassan wants his mother here.  He blamed Trump for not moving faster and now he blames Biden.

Biden has paused the regular resettlement program in order to accommodate the Afghans, many of whom have not been vetted and likely will never be legal refugees.

Columbus is a top Somali resettlement target city

 

Angie Plummer, executive director of local refugee resettlement agency Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) [CRIS is a subcontractor of Church World Service—ed], which resettled Hassan, said there’s no reason why Afghans and refugees from other countries can’t be helped simultaneously.

“When we were asked do we want to pause (refugee) arrivals, I said no because it’s apples and oranges,” Plummer said. “We don’t think that it’s necessary. It’s not a competition for resources to have these folks come.”

[….]

“I fear there’s only so much bandwidth and that it’s shifted to focusing on Afghans, and we can’t take our eyes off these other crises that are happening,” Plummer said. “We want to serve the Afghans well, but we also feel committed to serving those people whose cases we started and who got the shaft under Trump.”

Angie Plummer https://www.osu.edu/alumni/news/ohio-state-alumni-magazine/issues/may-june-2017/open-arms-helping-hands.html

In light of the pause, refugee resettlement advocates are lamenting the fact that Biden did not prioritize rebuilding the refugee resettlement program as soon as he was inaugurated in January.

Plummer said she is concerned because the program’s capacity is still being rebuilt after Trump’s administration decimated its infrastructure.

“Any stopping and starting creates pains,” Plummer said. “I worry about that. Even if their intentions are to try to exempt out certain groups, we should be trying to ramp it back up and help this machinery work again.”

[….]

“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting,” Plummer said. “I really thought some wrongs would be righted and they haven’t been, and it feels like they’ve been shuffled down the road.”

Meredith Owen, Church World Service

The fact that the administration hasn’t prioritized restoring resettlement capacity sooner makes Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy at the national refugee resettlement agency Church World Service (CWS), furious.

“The problem is you never want to undermine or harm one refugee population in the name of another,” Owen said.

But, that is exactly what is happening.  Muslim Afghans are apparently Biden’s priority.  There is much more, visit the Columbus Dispatch for additional details.

*** For new readers, these are the nine major federal resettlement agencies which have contracts with the US State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement to place refugees (find housing!) and get them signed up for their welfare benefits, their medical care and get the refugee kids in school.

If you have an agency working near you and it doesn’t have the same name as one of the nine below, check its website carefully and you will most likely find it is a subcontractor of one of the nine (like CRIS is a CWS subcontractor).

Poor mouthing….

Know that when they “got the shaft” under the Trump Administration they were fundraising on their plight something they can’t do now that their guy is in charge of the taxpayer portion of their money stream.

Too Many Afghans and Not Enough Welfare For Them (and everyone else!)

Afghan evacuees arrive at Dulles near Washington, DC.

 

CBS posted a handy outline of the massive mess the Biden Administration has created by scooping up tens of thousands of Afghans who have really no legitimately determined immigration status in the US.

So, of course, Congress might have to change immigration law so that medical care, housing assistance, food stamps and cash assistance can be made available to them.

In the meantime, the Biden Administration will be going outside the law to find money (your money) to care for them.

This article is a must read for all of you interested in the tangled mess and it serves as a harbinger of the troubles your community is going to have with large numbers of unhappy evacuees who are going to be wanting stuff—decent housing in crime-free communities and a social safety net for months or even years to come.

By the way, in my first year of writing this blog—2007—there was an Iraqi boy, in Arizona I think, who penned a letter to a local paper and asked why the US would admit so many Iraqis that were then having a miserable life in America because there were too many to be properly cared for.  He asked, why not admit fewer so they could be happy instead of too many who were all subsequently unhappy?

I predict we are rapidly headed to a crisis we have never seen before because don’t forget we are also admitting hundreds of thousands across our southern border who have no approved reason to be here and who are expecting Americans to feed and clothe them.

All of those aliens combined with the Afghans and Biden’s promise for October 1 to begin admitting up to 125,000 refugees from other areas of the world is going to create the greatest drain on the American taxpayers we have likely ever seen, and the greatest chaos and tension in ‘welcoming’ communities as all of the competing migrants want stuff.

Here is the CBS story.  If you are really interested in what is happening, you should read it yourself.  I’m pulling out only a few nuggets of information I found most informative.

Once again, they are not legitimate REFUGEES, so try hard to simply call them evacuees, even as the mainstream media will try to firmly cement in your minds that they are legal refugees.

U.S. effort to resettle Afghan refugees faces major hurdles

The Biden administration’s plan to resettle tens of thousands of Afghan refugees is facing formidable operational and legal challenges, with issues ranging from the uncertain immigration status of many evacuees, to limited social resources and permanent housing for the new arrivals.

Thousands of at-risk Afghans are arriving in the U.S. without approved visas, placing them in legal limbo and rendering them ineligible for some federal social programs available to those admitted as refugees, including cash assistance and Medicaid.

The sharp increase in admissions of Afghan evacuees over the past few days has also strained the resources of the nine national U.S. refugee resettlement agencies***, prompting them to house some refugees in hotels and Airbnb rentals while affordable apartments are found, three resettlement officials told CBS News.

Since mid-August, the U.S. has admitted approximately 24,000 of the Afghans it evacuated from Kabul this summer ahead of the U.S. withdrawal. As of Thursday morning, more than 20,000 of them were being housed at eight military sites that have been chosen to temporarily host them, according to internal federal data reviewed by CBS News.

Another roughly 39,000 evacuees remained at military bases in Europe and the Middle East, including Afghans undergoing U.S. immigration processing and security vetting, the federal data showed.

Biden’s team is going “ad hoc” (a nice way of saying that they are going outside of existing law) to get the non-refugees their bennies.  

To address these exclusions, the State Department is launching an “Afghan Parolee Support Program,” which will help Afghan parolees with housing, transportation, food, cash, clothing, legal counsel and other services, according to multiple resettlement officials involved in the effort.

And, those religious charities (six of nine are supposedly religious)*** that resettle refugees on a per head basis will be getting paid as usual even as the evacuees are NOT refugees! Sounds illegal to me!

Resettlement agencies are expected to receive $2,275 for each Afghan parolee that they serve. However, parolees will only have access to the makeshift program for up to 90 days, so refugee advocates are now urging lawmakers to enact a legislative fix.

Congressmen Seth Moulton and Don Bacon, a bipartisan pair of former military officers, are planning to introduce a bill known as the WELCOME Act on Friday that would make Afghan parolees eligible for the same government benefits that traditional refugees receive, two congressional officials told CBS News.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services is also considering creating an ad hoc program to temporarily cover medical services for parolees, two resettlement officials said.

There is so much information.  You should read it and book mark it for future reference.

Don’t miss the part about how they will not be sent back to Afghanistan even if they don’t get a favorable decision with their asylum claim or their security screening!

More than 23,000 are already on US soil!  See here.

*** These are the nine Leftwing federal resettlement contractors that are busy beavers right now as they juggle for position to be awarded their allotments of illegitimate ‘refugees’ (refugee industry watchers refer to the process as bidding for bodies).

 

 

 

 

In Order to Boost Refugee Numbers, Church World Service Wants New Way to Admit Them

Anyone can be a refugee!

Instead of student visas (that have an expiration date) for college age foreigners, they want refugee status for them. And, that means besides a free ride to college they would get “services” to support them (and of course would never be expected to leave!).

Services means social services like housing, medical care, and food all supplied by you, the US taxpayer.

If they got their way, students like Khaled Awad who stabbed a rabbi in Boston last week, would not have to leave the country when a student visa expired, as it did for this creep.

Egyptian man charged in Boston rabbi stabbing overstayed student visa, was in US illegally: ICE

Check it out at Fox News. 

Now, here is Crux (a Catholic publication) reporting on Church World Service’s plan.

They are busy, busy, busy finding new ways to get more refugees into the US!

Church group seeks ‘educational pathways’ for refugees to reach America

NEW YORK – A new report from a faith-based organization calls for the federal government to create educational pathways for refugees to resettle in the U.S., as the Biden administration looks to rebuild the nation’s refugee resettlement program.

The report, from international faith-based advocacy organization Church World Service, was published July 1. It focuses on four steps for the Biden Administration, the first of which would be granting refugees admitted into the U.S. to pursue higher education refugee status, which would provide them more robust and longer-term protections than temporary student visas.

[….]

In April, however, Biden received backlash after he announced he would not increase the refugee admissions cap from the 15,000. The president then backtracked on that decision a month later and raised the cap to 62,500, with a goal of resettling 125,000 refugees in Fiscal Year 2022.

The Church World Service report notes that rebuilding the refugee resettlement program to that capacity is not an easy task. Therefore, it argues, it will be important for the Biden administration to consider complementary pathways, which “places focus on exploring ways to open educational, employment, family reunification, and other humanitarian pathways to refugees.”

Under an education pathway, the report says that these students “would be selected on the basis of their educational qualifications, in addition to their need for protection and a durable solution.”

[….]

President Trump attempted to give some power to state and local governments to determine resettlement in their states. CWS, and here Erol Kekic, sued the Trump administration because they (partnering with the feds) want to continue to decide which cities and states will get which refugees. https://www.hias.org/blog/hias-refugee-agencies-argue-against-trump-executive-order

 

The United States has some of the best universities in the world, [and] they deserve students who can bring new, invigorating perspectives to their classrooms,” Erol Kekic, senior vice president of Church World Service’s Immigration and Refugee Program, said in a statement.

Now get this!  These new types of ‘refugee’ would not count in the annual cap—a cap expected to be set in September at 125,000!

That said, the report also argues that the Biden administration should count refugees admitted into the U.S. through an education, or other complementary pathway, separately than those admitted on humanitarian grounds. Instead, the report argues, it should increase admissions.

[….]

It suggests that the U.S. government establish a separate target number of refugees to admit in addition to the 125,000 person goal anticipated to be set for the upcoming fiscal year.

“Educational pathways must not compete with humanitarian-based resettlement, and any educational or other complementary pathway should be designed to ensure that this separation is maintained,” the report continues.

Other steps Church World Service suggests the Biden administration take to implement an educational pathway include working with resettlement agencies to make sure student-refugees have the core services in place to excel as new Americans and students.

That last bit means that the contractors (aka resettlement agencies) get paid by taxpayers to help the student refugees (clients!) get their services!

One of my favorite pics of all time. The ‘Christians’ of CWS.

If you are new to RRW, here (below) are the nine major refugee contractors licking their chops about the money that will flow to them as Biden opens the refugee spigot.

And, for ambitious readers I have a huuuge archive on Church World Service partly because it was that contractor that ‘inspired’ me to write this blog in the first place back in 2007!

It was CWS that wanted to change my county by changing the people.

 

Biden Expected to Tap Julieta Valls Noyes (Who?) to Head Refugee Program at State Department

Noyes, a career diplomat, seems a surprising pick.

I was fully expecting a hardened Leftwing ideologue like Obama’s former Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), Anne Richard, or possibly the insider Lawrence Bartlett, a bureaucrat, who wouldn’t have a long learning curve.

And, then another likely choice could have been Mark Hetfield of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), but he would have to take a hefty pay cut if selected and confirmed.

I expected Anne Richard to be back joining the others of Obama’s orbit populating the O-man’s third term.

Indeed the lobbying arm of the refugee industry was pushing hard for someone with “robust experience” in the complex workings of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) so they can immediately get to work to bring in as many refugees as possible before Trump, or someone with Trump’s concerns about mass immigration, returns to the White House.

Know that President Trump never filled this position and he likely would have not been able to get someone (who might do any good for us) confirmed.

Julieta Valls Noyes

Of course, it is possible that Ambassador Noyes is experienced with the USRAP, but I’ve never heard of her.  And, maybe that is the point—Biden wants to get someone past the Senate confirmation that looks and sounds reasonable.

LOL! But that can’t make the refugee pushers happy unless they plan to manipulate her as they did George Bush’s recess appointment Ellen Sauerbrey who they came to love.

Here is Foreign Policy on Biden’s expected choice to head PRM:

Biden to Tap Career Diplomat as Top Official on Refugee Policy

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to name three new nominees to senior diplomatic and foreign aid positions, including the top State Department official on refugee issues, a White House official told Foreign Policy.

Julieta Valls Noyes, a veteran career diplomat, is expected to be nominated as the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration—a senior post that could play a key role in the Biden administration’s efforts to reverse Trump-era sharp restrictions on the number of refugees entering the United States. Noyes, the acting director of the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and former ambassador to Croatia, is a first-generation American whose parents entered the United States as refugees from Cuba.

[….]

If confirmed by the Senate, all three nominees would join agencies widely perceived as hollowed out and damaged by politicization and mismanagement under former President Donald Trump.

The State Department’s top post overseeing refugee issues was left unfilled during the Trump administration’s four years in power, though lower-level officials assumed the job in an acting capacity.

Several senior career diplomats in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration who defended refugees were reassigned or temporarily sidelined during a shake-up in 2018 as the Trump administration worked to slash refugee admissions to record lows.

Refugee lobbyists at the Refugee Council USA wanted someone with “deep understanding” of “complex issues.”  See their letter to Biden here.

Nothing less than “robust experience” is acceptable.  (I want to barf every time they use the word “robust!”)

Refugee advocates had been urging Biden for several weeks to swiftly nominate someone to the population, refugees, and migration assistant secretary role. In April, John Slocum, interim executive director of Refugee Council USA, a nonprofit advocacy organization, sent Biden a letter obtained by Politico urging him to pick an assistant secretary “who has a deep understanding of the complex issues surrounding forced displacement, refugee resettlement, and other forms of humanitarian protection.”

More here.

Checking out Noyes’ wikipedia page we learn this interesting nugget.

She is the daughter of Cuban refugees and we know most Cubans sensibly loathe communism and loved Donald Trump in 2020.

She also has strong (we might say robust!) feelings about the Islamic State as well. Here in 2014:

“The financing of this barbaric organisation allows it to continue its operations. What we have to do is degrade its abilities and ultimately to destroy it.”[7]

Hmmmm!  Sounds like something Donald Trump would say.

If confirmed, the biggest problem she could have is to avoid being rolled by the career bureaucrats and their contractor pals***.

As soon as the contractors begin to weigh-in, we will have a better idea of who this woman is and how she might run the program as Biden promises it will soon be on steroids to admit 125,000 refugees beginning on October first.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!

Advocates Admit Trump Refugee Level Likely for Remainder of FY2021, but…..

…..they expect Biden to be ready to roll with 125,000 impoverished third worlders moving to America permanently beginning on October first.

 

“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew.”

(Having figured out their messaging on the mess they have made angering their friends, Sec. of State Blinken blames it on President Trump)

 

The Associated Press makes every effort to gloss over the recent controversy about the refugee ceiling that put Biden and his administration in the dog house with refugee resettlement industry “advocates.”

Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken were at odds according to White House leakers. Blinken wanted to bring ’em in faster than Biden did.

They complain that the mean orange guy really screwed up the refugee program with demands for more robust vetting of refugees to weed out those with terror connections, or those lying about family members—a rampant form of fraud in refugee resettlement.  How dare he!

And, adding insult to injury, the nine contractors*** had to shrink their staffs during the Trump years because your tax dollars flowing into their coffers were cut by a few million bucks.

But all of that is going away thanks to Biden who recently dropped Trump’s plan for additional information to be required of ‘new Americans’ arriving as refugees and is going full-bore open borders—125,000 beginning October first.

From AP:

Refugees arriving in US unlikely to exceed cap set by Trump

SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Joe Biden, under political pressure, agreed to admit four times as many refugees this budget year as his predecessor did, but resettlement agencies concede the number actually allowed into the U.S. will be closer to the record-low cap of 15,000 set by former President Donald Trump.

Refugee advocates say they are grateful for the increase because it’s symbolically important to show the world the United States is back as a humanitarian leader at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is the highest since World War II. But they’re frustrated, too, because more refugees could have been admitted if Biden hadn’t dragged his feet.

Evangelicals led by Jenny Yang lobbying against Trump in 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/20/14580938/evangelicals-jenny-yang-refugees-gop-republican-immigrants

“About 10,000 to 15,000 is what we’re expecting,” said Jenny Yang of World Relief, adding that Biden’s inaction for months after taking office in January was “definitely problematic.”

“That delay meant not being able to process refugee applications for four months. We weren’t able to rebuild for four months, so it really was unfortunate,” Yang said.

As he looked to the midterm elections, supposedly Biden (rightly) feared that the public wouldn’t tolerate a huge refugee flow while the border was in crisis.

“To be clear: The asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This is important, Blumenthal is right, do not conflate the US Refugee Admissions Program with the illegal aliens invading the southern border.

The 125,000 refugees proposed for FY2022 are in addition to the hundreds of thousands of supposed asylum seekers flooding into the country. 

The AP continues…..

Weeks later, on May 3, Biden raised the cap.

So far this year only about 2,500 refugees have arrived, with less than five months left before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

More than 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved to come to the United States, but thousands were disqualified under the narrow eligibility criteria Trump established in October when he set the low cap.

Blumenthal wants more refugees for Connecticut.  Here he is in 2015 with the Director of CAIR CT arguing for LESS security screening for Syrian refugees. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/10/07/update-who-was-that-man-over-senator-blumenthals-left-shoulder/

[….]

Before the Trump administration’s drastic cuts, the United States had admitted more refugees each year than all other countries combined under a program now 41 years old. 

It is Trump’s fault!

But a senior official familiar with Blinken’s thinking said it quickly became clear that the State Department offices responsible for refugee resettlement had been so gutted that they wouldn’t be able to process and absorb that number of refugees.

Biden’s got leakers….

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, described the situation as “aspiration meeting reality” and said Blinken reluctantly concluded that 62,500 wouldn’t be possible in the short term.

“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew,” Blinken told reporters this month.

The Trump bashers give short shrift to the China Virus as one explanation for the slowdown in their goals to change America as refugee travel was slowed worldwide.

Due to travel restrictions in and out of refugee processing sites worldwide, the U.S. suspended refugee arrivals from March 19 to July 29 of last year except for emergency cases. Only 11,800 refugees were admitted in the 2020 fiscal year, the lowest number in the history of the program.

[….]

The “sad truth” Biden warned when he finally set the target at 62,500 is that goal won’t be achieved.

Instead, the administration and advocates are working to fix the program by 2022 when Biden has promised to raise the ceiling to 125,000.

LOL! He dares not do otherwise now that he has experienced the wrath of the “advocates”—refugee placement contractors.

More here.

If Chairman Joe does admit 125,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year, it would be the highest admission number in the last 30 years.

Joe Biden Plans to Admit the Most Refugees in any One Year Since 1992

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!