Category: Taxpayer goodies

Trump crosses 40,000 refugees mark! Over 900 in past week! Syrians lead the pack in last 4 weeks

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It has been 4 weeks since President Trump announced his 120-day “moratorium” on refugee resettlement as part of the court-halted Executive Order.  And, for the umpteenth time, I repeat that the President did not have to even announce any “moratorium” or put it in an Executive Order!  He has the power to simply stop the processing!

GW Bush loved refugees, yet at this rate Trump will bring in more refugees than Bush. Bush’s average is about 58,000. At the rate of admission for this past week, Trump will surpass that number. Trump has already passed Bush’s lowest year (2003) of 39,554. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/01/27/trump-watch-is-rumored-refugee-cap-reduction-to-50000-that-significant/

Then on March 30th we were stunned to learn that they were aiming to bring in 900 refugees a week through the remainder of the fiscal year that ends on September 30th.
If he and Tillerson keep that pace they will admit around 60,000 this year which is near the average number we have admitted since 9/11.
Do they think we are not watching?
George Bush loved refugees and he averaged under 60,000!

Sure enough, according to Wrapsnet in the last week, from April 6th to today (April 13th) they have admitted 977 refugees in ONE WEEK!

It was yesterday that I noticed Trump had passed the 40,000 mark (it was 40,180 this time yesterday morning).  Today it is 40,602 (you might get slightly different numbers depending on the time of day you check the data, I try to check around the same time every day.)
That is an increase just since this time yesterday of 402!  (See my right hand sidebar where I am tracking the numbers every few days).

Going back to the date that the “moratorium” was supposed to begin on March 16th the Trump State Department has admitted 2,496 refugees.

100 Burmese Muslims admitted to US in last 4 weeks.

Of the 2,496, topping the list are 335 Syrians! 327 of those are Muslims. Other countries, where Trump’s campaign promise of “extreme vetting” was supposed to be put in place (Somalia and Iraq), come in at 283 each, and we admitted 116 Iranians in the last 4 weeks.
Most interesting to me is that we admitted 333 Burmese (that part is no a surprise because we have been admitting Burmese minorities for years and years).
The big surprise is that in just the last 4 weeks we admitted 100 Burmese Rohingya Muslims.  When I first started writing RRW in 2007, we were steering clear of bringing the devout Rohingya to America.

VOLAGs not making so much noise now!

Have you noticed that there are fewer news stories about the Refugee contractors*** screaming bloody murder about Trump (and their loss of federal bucks) in the last week or so? I have.  Has the word gone out to shut up for awhile?
The ultimate test for me will come in September when the Trump Department of State will send its “determination” to the Hill with the proposed numbers for FY2018.  Will Trump simply cave and continue the trend he has begun to bring in the average number of refugees that we have seen in the last 15 years?

Endnote:

We will also be watching to see if the Tillerson Dept. of State will go back to holding public hearings on the size and scope of the US Refugee Admissions Program.  The Obama DOS abandoned the public hearing format in 2015 after several years of hearings that had gotten contentious. See my comments last year here.
The ‘hearing’ is usually in May or possibly early June. We will be watching!
If the Trump team were smart they would hold some field hearings so that citizens impacted by the program could voice their concerns to the Administration—but, don’t hold your breath!
*** For new readers, these are the nine major contractors (VOLAGs), paid by you, to resettle refugees in your towns and cities:

587 refugees admitted since 120-day moratorium should have started, Syrians top list

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It has been 13 days since the Trump Administration said it would begin a 120-day moratorium on admissions through an Executive Order blocked by two rogue judges.

Is it Tillerson or Trump leaving the door open a crack?

Instead of doing what the Trump Department of State is legally permitted to do, without an EO, and pause the program, we have admitted 587 additional refugees since I checked the data on the morning of March 16th (moratorium was to begin that day).

Topping the list are 116 Syrians and not far behind 107 Somalis.

Other countries sending us their supposed refugees in the last 13 days include Sudan (22), Iraq (50), Iran (36), Burma (44), DR Congo (23) and one of the most maddening is El Salvador (35).  There is no question that the El Salvadorans are NOT refugees.  Many other countries are represented by smaller numbers.
Each one of these ‘refugees’ will cost US taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars over the next 5 years.
Yesterday we learned that federal contractors are hopeful that Trump will actually aim for Obama’s dream number of 110,000 refugees for FY2017 (which ends on September 30th).
As of this morning, according to Wrapsnet, we are at 38,693!

Trump needs to get a pep talk from the Visegard 4!

By the way, as far as I know, the bureaucrats in the Dept. of State are still running the program. I haven’t seen any news about Trump and Tillerson picking an Asst. Sec. of State for Population, Refugees and Migration.  Have you?

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service "cautiously hopeful" refugee ceiling will return to 110,000

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m actually stunned that they think that the Trump Administration could be forced by a judge (or two judges) to shoot for a refugee “ceiling” number set by Obama for a year he would no longer be President.
For the zillionth time, even if Obama was  still in the White House there is no legal requirement that the President reach the CEILING he set for admissions the previous fall.
As we showed you here—they never reach the ceiling!
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and World Relief mentioned in this story are federal refugee resettlement contractors paid through your tax dollars to place refugees in your towns and are most assuredly part of the ‘Religious Left’ I told you about earlier this morning.
Calling all Lutherans! You need to know what is being done in your name!***
Here is the story from Religion News Service:

CHICAGO (RNS) It was her desire to hear the stories of real people — “not just faceless refugees or immigrants” — that brought the Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton to a refugee resettlement agency that provides a range of services to refugees in the Chicago area.

Presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

“Especially now, when there’s this fear that’s been stirred up and anti-refugee sentiment, it’s really critical to say, ‘No, these people are our grandparents, our aunts and uncles,” said the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination.

Her visit last week (March 21) to RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency supported by Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, comes at a time when the status of the U.S. refugee resettlement program is uncertain.

On March 15, a federal judge in Hawaii blocked an executive order by President Trump that would have more than halved the number of refugees accepted by the United States from the current ceiling of 110,000.

Now, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is “cautiously hopeful” resettlement will return to the numbers that had been planned for 2017, said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs.

***According to LIRS website these are the Lutheran groups affiliated and supportive of bringing refugees to the US:

Rooted in Lutherans’ faithful and caring response to the challenges facing uprooted peoples, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service celebrates strong collaborative relationships with three national Lutheran church bodies. They are the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod LC-MS, and the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (LELCA).

Go here for our extensive reporting on LIRS, a preeminent member of the refugee industry.
Don’t miss this post—Will Lutheran bigwigs see pay cuts?
I am forever confident that one day, mainstream media will report on how much of your money these groups are gobbling to promote their progressive world view!

'Religious Left' on the rise in response to President Trump's people and policies

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Are they organizing in your name?
This is a Reuters story highlighting the phrase ‘Religious Left’ something we have been talking about on these pages for years.  Entitled of course to their political views, what has grated on me for so long is the FACT that many of the organizations working on the ‘Religious Left’ receive large pots of federal grant money that is not sufficiently accounted for.
The ‘Religious Right’ has not tapped in to the US Treasury as the Left has done!
Also, I believe churchgoers (Catholics and Protestants) should know what is being done in their names.
Here are some snips from the story featured at Drudge yesterday:

(Reuters) – Since President Donald Trump’s election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York’s Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.

Rev. Serene Jones, a leader of the Religious Left

In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London’s Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.

“The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action,” she said.

Although not as powerful as the religious right, which has been credited with helping elect Republican presidents and boasts well-known leaders such as Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, the “religious left” is now slowly coming together as a force in U.S. politics.

This disparate group, traditionally seen as lacking clout, has been propelled into political activism by Trump’s policies on immigration, healthcare and social welfare, according to clergy members, activists and academics. A key test will be how well it will be able to translate its mobilization into votes in the 2018 midterm congressional elections. [They better darn well not use taxpayer dollars for their vote mobilization!—ed]

[….]

Some in the religious left are inspired by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic leader who has been an outspoken critic of anti-immigrant policies and a champion of helping the needy. [These reports NEVER mention that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities receive millions of tax payer dollars every year!—ed]

Although support for the religious left is difficult to measure, leaders point to several examples, such as a surge of congregations offering to provide sanctuary to immigrants seeking asylum…

[….]

The number of churches volunteering to offer sanctuary to asylum seekers doubled to 800 in 45 of the 50 U.S. states after the election, said the Elkhart, Indiana-based Church World Service, a coalition of Christian denominations which helps refugees settle in the United States – and the number of new churches offering help has grown so quickly that the group has lost count.

You need to know that “asylum seekers” are illegal aliens until their cases are settled by an immigration judge. The Left uses the phrase to put a veneer of respectability on illegal aliens who may or may not have a shot at being granted asylum and thus being deemed a legitimate refugee.

Church World Service!

As we said here earlier in the month, CWS, got nearly a HALF A BILLION tax dollars during the Obama years. Why doesn’t Reuters ever mention this!

There  should be a law! Any non-profit sucking this kind of money out of the US Treasury should be prohibited from running anti-Trump (or anti-any President) campaigns!

 

 

Donald Trump needs to nip this in the bud through the budget process. Will he?

Are you being used by the Religious Left?  Are they working in your name?
I recommend that you check with your ministers and pastors!
See the churches that are affiliated with Church World Service and its progressive policies:

Member Communions

    African Methodist Episcopal Church

 

No statutory authority underpinning refugee program in so-called Wilson-Fish states

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Refugee Act of 1980 does permit a state to withdraw from the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, but here is the catch: Back in 1984 Congress passed an amendment to the act that was then completely abused by the bureaucrats in the federal government who did not want to stop sending refugees to those states.  They came up with a program (created through regulations with no backing in the law) to pass the responsibility off to non-profit groups.
Here James Simpson writing at the Daily Caller tells us more about the illegal program.

The Thomas More Law Center has initiated a lawsuit on behalf of the Tennessee General Assembly. The suit charges that the government is violating both the U.S. Constitution’s Spending Clause and the 10th Amendment by forcing Tennessee to cover the costs of refugee resettlement in the state even though Tennessee dropped out of the program in 2008.

Under the 1980 Refugee Act, the federal government promised to provide 100 percent of the state share of refugee cash and medical welfare costs for the first 36 months of their resettlement. That constituted a significant savings for participating states, especially considering that refugees use welfare at very high rates. However, by 1991 the feds had stopped reimbursing states altogether. The refugee program has become an unfunded mandate.

Adding insult to injury, starting in 1995, the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), began assigning a private refugee resettlement contractor (called Voluntary Agency or VOLAG) to keep the resettlement program running in states that drop out. This would ensure a continual flow of refugees to the state.

In addition to welfare, refugees bring significant other costs, including interpreters, English classes for students, medical and other services. For example, in 2016, Amarillo, Texas Mayor Paul Harpole complained, “We have 660 (refugee) kids who don’t speak English and the U.S. Department of Education says they have to be at grade level within one year. It’s a ludicrous requirement — they don’t even know how to use the bathroom.”

Simpson then points out that states which withdrew, and which then were turned over to a non-profit group to run, received many more refugees after the non-profit (VOLAG) began calling the shots along with the feds. His table  at right shows the dramatic jump in numbers when unelected non-profit group leaders placed refugees in unwilling states and effectively began spending state tax dollars.
Continue reading to learn more about the illegal placement of refugees in states that have wished to not participate in the program.
BTW, Texas recently dropped out of the USRAP—will the governor join Tennessee lawsuit???  Will Maine’s governor join the suit? How about Christie in NJ or Brownback in Kansas? See here.
More on Simpson, here.