Category: Taxpayer goodies

Tucson area resettlement agency may close; Memory lane! Iraqis unhappy there in 2007

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They say they may close if the number of refugees admitted to the US falls as a result of Trump’s 120-day pause on the program.
Somehow they seem to think that the flow will pick up because of the Hawaiian judge’s misguided restraining order.  As we have said repeatedly, Trump didn’t need the Executive Order to reduce numbers being admitted to the US. (We are monitoring the numbers coming in every few days, see refugee admissions in right hand side bar.)
After I give you the latest news, I want to tell you about Tucson, Arizona and unhappy Iraqis there ten years ago.
Here below are a few snips from a story yesterday at Arizona Public Media.
Notice that once again, they are admitting, and the media is publishing the fact, that these so-called non-profit agencies actually live off of contracts (based on per refugee head payments) with the US government.

Tucson-area nonprofits that resettle refugees are worried that they may have to cut services or close their doors under the refugee ban President Donald Trump is seeking.

Refugee Focus is one of three nonprofit agencies in Tucson that resettle refugees from around the world.

Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest runs Refugee Focus, and Connie Phillips oversees the nonprofit. [She participated in an ‘interfaith’ rally against Trump, here, last month.—ed]

Connie Phillips Lutheran Social Services Southwest. http://www.lss-sw.org/key-staff/

She said Refugee Focus may have to stop operating if the Trump Administration wins the court battle for the most recent executive order and there is a 90 to 120 day pause in settling refugees.

[….]

Money to run the program comes from federal contracts for resettlement services.

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty. It is just highly, highly stressful right now.”

The other two nonprofits that resettle refugees in Tucson are International Rescue Committee and Catholic Social Services.

I just checked Lutheran Social Services Southwest recent Form 990 here.
92% of their funding is from you, the taxpayer. Their gross revenue in that form (2014) was $14,238,656.  $9,210,621 is from government grants and $3,957,813 is listed as medicaid contracts (What the heck is that! Why is some Lutheran non-profit managing medicaid contracts?)

Iraqi refugees resettled in Tucson voice their unhappiness!

Back in the earliest days of RRW (2007), this news (below) from Tucson was an eye-opener for me.
Iraqis complained to the Washington Post that they were unhappy and neglected.

Like the Cuban, Vietnamese, Laotian and Sudanese refugees before them, some of the Iraqis are going through a difficult adjustment period, feeling disoriented, alone and even abandoned by the social service agency that is supposed to serve them.

[….]

When the Iraqi refugees arrive in the United States, they are sent to cities where there are other Arab or Muslim populations. Social service organizations are assigned to help them resettle.

“Refugees, in general, endure a tremendous cultural shock,” said Janell Mousseau, a program director at the Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, an Arizona nonprofit organization that helped to resettle the 34 Iraqis here. “They have a lot of adjusting to do in a short time.”

LOL! Read this next paragraph!  What a difference ten years makes. Back then the WaPo and most media never mentioned that the resettlement contractors were PAID for their charitable work by the US taxpayer!

The organization was asked [LOL! asked!—ed] by the State Department to find proper housing for the Iraq families, providing them basic supplies and helping them acquire Social Security numbers and food stamps. The group is paying [LOL! the group is paying!—ed] the refugees’ rent for three months. After that, the families will have to pick up the cost themselves.

Before they arrived here, the refugees said they were told by U.N. representatives that they could get jobs based on their professional qualifications. But they said they have now been told that they should work as hotel housekeepers, an occupation many of them have refused because they deem it degrading. [The hotel industry along with food processing companies have been major consumers of cheap refugee labor!—ed]

To add to their frustration, when the families arrived, they said they found their apartments missing beds, kitchen supplies, bedspreads and blankets. [Contracts with the govt. specifically list these items to be supplied as requirements of the contract—-ed]

This last line resonated with me because one of the first things that people were buzzing about in my Maryland county, when refugees were placed there beginning in 2006, was that some teachers at the local junior college were finding the refugees blankets and winter coats!
I have 727 posts in my Iraqi refugee category (see early posts where I joked about Matthew Lee a reporter carrying water for the contractors by helping to beat the drum for more Iraqi admissions).

Obama gone wild!

You need to know that George W. Bush was reluctant to admit the thousands of Iraqi refugees (paying clients!) that the contractors were demanding. But, in the last year he opened the flood gates and we have now, 11 years and 5 and 1/2 months later, admitted 141,433 Iraqis!
Here at Wrapsnet you can see what happened when the Obama team took over the US Department of State in 2009:

 

You can see how the number jumped when Obama took office. Of the 141,433 Iraqis we admitted in the last decade plus, 1,578 were placed in Tucson, AZ. Do you see that low year (2011)? That was the year two Iraqi refugee terrorists were arrested in Bowling Green, KY and all of the Iraqis had to be rescreened.

 
Go here for more on Arizona.

Federal refugee grants to special ethnic groups "to promote community organizing"

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Community organizing for their group of people gratis the US taxpayer!

This morning, I was going to write about how elder refugees (yes, we admit many over 65 years old) are eligible for SSI, but I stumbled on the $millions in grants taxpayers give to ethnic groups across the country so they can help “their” special ethnic group of people integrate and become civically engaged.

Buffalo Imam Yahye Y Omar is listed as the agent for an ORR community organizing grant. Photo: https://www.hiiraan.com/news4/2017/Jan/140081/trump_crackdown_on_refugees_hits_home_for_somali_community.aspx

These grants previously were gifts to ECBOs (Ethnic Community Based Organizations) for which I had created a  whole category a few years back, see here.
I likened them to mini-ACORNS.
Do you remember ACORN which taught poor Americans how to get their stuff (welfare) and then organized them to vote, etc?  These groups are like that!
Now they are called Ethnic Community Self-Help groups (not really self-help are they if you are funding them?).
Because many are for specific ethnic groups, I believe they foster non-assimilation as they identify their people as somehow in need of special treatment by the government.
Here is what the Office of Refugee Resettlement says about these grants and groups.

Program Goal

The objective of this program is to support ethnic community based organizations in providing refugee populations with critical services to assist them in becoming integrated members of American society.

General Background

Throughout the history of the United States the involvement of refugees and refugee community based organizations in refugee resettlement has been critical to refugee integration. Today, these organizations continue to enhance the provision and effectiveness of services available to refugees. They allow the refugee experience to flow into refugee resettlement plans and decisions. For refugees, their active participation in resettlement is generally empowering and plays an important role in the integration of the entire refugee community.

Program Description

This program provides assistance to refugee community based organizations and other groups that address community building, facilitate cultural adjustment and integration of refugees, and deliver mutually supportive functions such as information exchange, civic participation, resource enhancement, orientation and support to newly arriving refugees (and other refugees that maybe in need of such assistance regardless of their resettlement date) and public education to the larger community on the background, needs and potential of refugees. In short, the purpose is to promote community organizing that builds bridges between newcomer refugee communities and community resources.

LOL! Building bridges to community resources=finding taxpayer-funded welfare goodies!
I thought the refugee contractors‘ job was to ‘orient’ new refugees and take care of their ‘needs,’ but nevermind, there is a whole cottage industry of non-profit groups sucking from the federal teat for their special ethnic ‘community.’
Here is a screenshot from the 2015 ORR Annual Report to Congress showing the $6,096,190 in grants sent out that year.

Sure hope the Trump team targets these for de-funding!



Homework assignment!
You should find out more about any of these special groups for special people (you fund them!) working near you.
The last one on the first page jumped out at me.  I wondered what is Helping Ensure Africa Looms International Inc. I didn’t even find a website or any description of what it does, just this NY state charity profile.  There I learned that the principle agent is one Yahye Y Omar of Buffalo.
We assume he is the same Yahye Y Omar who is the imam at the Buffalo Islamic Community Center who is quoted in this Buffalo News story entitled:

Refugees and immigrants reminded of legal rights at Buffalo event

Guess he is busy “community organizing!”
I didn’t have any intention of going farther with this, but be sure to see a recent Form 990 for ‘Helping Ensure Africa….’ Pretty much the only money they take in is from ORR and almost $70,000 went to salaries and $10,000 + went to rent.
But, I was still not ever able to find out what exactly the recipient of $170,103 in 2015 actually does!

Hawaii judge thumbs nose at AG Sessions: yes, my order applies to refugee ceiling/moratorium

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You probably heard on the news over the weekend that the Department of Justice sought clarification from Obama’s friend, Judge Derrick Watson, in Hawaii and asked if he really meant to include a stop order on the President’s 120-day moratorium on refugee admissions and the FY17 ceiling reduction when he was aiming at the travel freeze.
The travel issue and the refugee admissions issue are two separate things. For the time being, take the so-called ‘travel ban’ from six countries out of your mind. It is not the main subject of this blog or what I want to try to make clear to readers (and the lazy, ignorant press).

A co-plaintiff in the case is Imam Ismail Elshikh. Is he even a US citizen? Photo and story here at a very unusual blog that I had never heard of: http://hlaoo1980.blogspot.com/2017/03/egypt-muslim-imam-suing-trump-for.html

The confusion comes from the fact that the first judge on the original order left the refugee admissions pause and ceiling portion of the EO intact and so did the Maryland judge last week.

It appears that Judge Derrick Watson believes he has the authority to set the ceiling for refugee admissions each year.

He emphatically does not have that authority.  He can’t make the Dept. of State resume overseas processing of refugees. He can’t make the Administration and Congress spend money on refugees.
The President has the explicit power in the Refugee Act of 1980 to set the CEILING (as we said here). In most years the President (Bush and Obama) has been well under the CEILING!
As I have said recently, the big mistake the Trump team made was putting the refugee pause in to an Executive Order.
They have the power to slow the flow and stay under a proposed CEILING without an explicit order.  The only thing I can see that they should have done (maybe they did it) was to notify the House and Senate Judiciary Committees that they were lowering the ceiling.  However, the original act only gave Congress the power to ‘consult’ not stop the President. (In 1980, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter put a lot of power in the President’s hands when it comes to refugee admissions!)

If the controversy continues, more taxpaying Americans will be educated!

That said, there could be a silver lining.  The Trump State Department can keep the flow low (or at zero) for months to come, and because the refugee ceiling is in Watson’s case (a case that surely will now work its way through the courts), the subject of the US Refugee Admissions Program will continue to be in the national news.  Thus more and more Americans will be learning the facts about what they have been paying for since 1980!
(See my right hand sidebar where I will attempt to keep you updated every few days on refugee admission numbers for FY17.)

Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch: “…there is no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee….”

As for the contractors***, they would have been better off just shutting up and taking the 120-day (16 week) pause because 7 weeks have already passed since the original EO was announced on January 28th and they would be on their way through the slowdown.
Before you read the latest news about the Judge sticking by his original decision last week, see what refugee advocate and longtime expert Bill Frelick (Human Rights Watch) said in November after Trump was elected and the refugee industry went in to shell-shock:

“In the U.S., there’s not a quota that has to be filled. The U.S. has a budgeted amount of money to do refugee resettlement, but there’s no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee, and there’s no legal obligation to do it.”

Here is one of many stories (this one at Fox News) this morning about Judge Watson telling the DOJ—no way, not changing a thing!

The federal judge in Hawaii who halted President Trump’s new, revised travel ban denied the administration’s request for him to limit the scope of his ruling Sunday so that the United States can immediately stop taking in refugees worldwide.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order on Trump’s order that prevents travelers from six mostly-Muslim countries entering the U.S. and suspends the United States’ worldwide refugee program.

Justice Department attorneys argued in a motion Friday that Watson’s temporary restraining order was essentially based on the argument that the ban appears to unconstitutionally target Muslims.

They questioned whether his ruling was limited to the part of Trump’s March 6 executive order that temporarily bans visas to travel from the six countries into the U.S., and not to the temporary refugee ban.

Watson responded Sunday by saying there was nothing unclear about the scope of his order and that the ruling remains unchanged.

More here.

As I said above, keep it up! The more public controversy surrounding the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program the better because then more American taxpayers will be educated!

For a laugh, don’t miss the news that Hawaii has taken only a tiny number of refugees for the last 14 years!
*** Here (below) are the nine major federal refugee contractors who now will see their budgets slashed (because they are largely funded by you, the taxpayer).  They know this judge is on thin ice on the President’s power to determine the number of refugees being admitted to the US.
Are they hoping that Watson can bully his way through and singlehandedly re-write the Refugee Act of 1980 turning a ceiling in to a target/goal—something the refugee industry has wanted for a long time!
By the way, for new readers, you need to know that your local resettlement agency will be a subcontractor of one of the nine fake charities that monopolize the federal refugee contracting system listed here:

 

If SD governor willing to do this, why not take next step, join the Tennessee States' rights case?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

First, South Dakota is already a Wilson-Fish state which means a private non-profit group determines (along with the US State Department in Washington) how many refugees are placed in the state and where in the world they come from. Elected officials have little say over the process.
In SD they are trying to get some control.

Citizen activists should push the Governor to join the Tennessee lawsuit! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/03/14/tennessee-files-suit-against-federal-government-over-cost-to-state-of-refugee-program/

Here we learn that the state legislature passed, and the governor signed, a measure in to law that restricts South Dakota’s Department of Social Services (aka welfare agency) from entering agreements with feds and their agent in the state—Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota.
From the Tenth Amendment Center:

PIERRE, S.D. (March 17, 2017) – South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard has signed a bill into law repealing the authority of the state Department of Social Services to enter into agreements related to the Refugee Act of 1980.

A coalition of 12 Republican representatives and senators sponsored Senate Bill 124 (SB124). Originally, the bill would have required the state legislature to approve refugee resettlement in the state, effectively giving it a veto over future resettlement. An amendment in the State Affairs Committee stripped away the approval requirement. But the law did strip the authority of the state Department of Social Services to unilaterally enter into agreements with the federal government for refugee resettlement by repealing SD Codified L § 28-1-47 (2015). That provision allowed the department to “enter into agreements with agencies of the United States for the purpose of participating in the Refugee Act of 1980.”

Increasing reporting requirements is important….

The new law also increases reporting requirements for private agencies in the state assisting with refugee resettlement. Agencies must report information including services provided, demographics and the number of refugees assisted from each country.

But…..

From a practical standpoint, SB124 won’t change much, other than the reporting requirements. Currently, Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota runs the state’s resettlement program. That won’t change under the new law and it won’t limit resettlement.

But the law does increase transparency and gives the state more control over future resettlement. It will also prevent the state from directly running resettlement programs without legislative action.

Time for South Dakota to take the leap! Join Tennessee. State legislators who have led this fight should call the Thomas More Law Center to see how to join.
See our South Dakota archive here.  I traveled through the state last summer during my 6,000 mile trip to troubled refugee hotspots.  Grassroots activists there are increasingly organized.
BTW, the last I heard the Somali charged with attempted murder (who jumped bail) is still missing.

Refugee resettlement contractors "whipsawed" says New York Times

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Of course, the New York Times could be expected to help the US Refugee Resettlement contractors wail about their loss of paying ‘clients’ (aka refugees).
As I have said (more than seven times), the contractors*** have only themselves to blame if they can’t maintain staff and offices during a pause in refugees entering the US.  They have gotten fat (with big salaries!) on the US Treasury teat and long ago stopped doing any serious private charitable fundraising.
Here is the NYT:

Last month, in anticipation of the Trump administration shutting down the flow of refugees entering the United States, Church World Service, one of the groups that handles resettlement, took drastic measures. It laid off all but 40 of the 600 employees at its African center that prepared refugees for travel.

My first question is WTH! did CWS need 600 employees in Africa for? And, since many were probably low-paid jobs for Africans, did the Reverend McCullough take a pay cut to keep some of those poor people employed?

Doing well by doing good! The President and CEO of CWS pulls down a cool $316,714 in annual compensation. Will he and other top execs take a pay cut to maintain some of their staff? BTW, I wouldn’t care what they paid their CEOs if they weren’t largely funded by taxpayer dollars. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/03/04/church-world-service-announced-yesterday-that-it-is-launching-anti-trump-campaign-to-raise/

Then on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Hawaii temporarily stayed the executive order that would have, among other things, halted refugee resettlement for 120 days and cut the total number of refugees admitted in the 2017 fiscal year by more than half, to 50,000.

First, Church World Service and the other organizations that resettle refugees cheered the news. Then they wondered, what now?

“We just simply do not know,” said Erol Kekic, the executive director of the immigration and refugee program for the agency. “There’s no guarantee that this, well, hold, will hold between now and Sept. 30,” he added, referring to the end of the fiscal year. [See our previous post which indicates that they better get used to a lower paying client flow—ed]

But one thing was clear, he said: “You can’t just play games with people. You can’t just lay off 500 people and then hire them back and lay them off again. We’re going to need some answers from the federal government.”

The judge’s decision was just the latest dramatic twist in six weeks of whipsaw changes faced by refugees and the agencies that work with them.

[….]

More than 60,000 refugees were already in various stages of approval before Mr. Trump’s first order went into effect on Jan. 27. The State Department, realizing that the new cap meant that there was only room for about another 17,000 refugees, slowed down the machinery to space out arrivals to 400 per week.

But the slowdown meant the agencies faced budget cuts. The State Department pays each refugee agency $950 per person to cover administrative costs, with another $1,125 going directly to the refugee or to cover expenses like rent.  [But they are paid, much much more! See below—ed]

Readers who are researching the refugee program where you live might see slightly different numbers involving the split of the $2,075 per head payment. Some of the contractors keep a larger chunk of the State Department’s per head payment which represents a perverse incentive to never stop the flow no matter how over-loaded a community becomes.
Also, I repeat!  This is not the only funding the contractors get from you.
They get myriad grants totaling in the millions of dollars for such things as building community gardens for refugees, training refugees to do ‘culturally appropriate’ daycare, handing out micro-enterprise loans to refugees, and teaching them English (something I have maintained could be done at local community colleges). And, in the case of CWS, running programs in Africa.
Continue reading here for more of the wailing at the NYT!
Can’t these lazy biased reporters ever take a few minutes and get all the facts! 
Look at how much CWS is getting from you! This is one page at USA Spending.  In the last 8 years they are approaching a half a billion $$$ from the US Treasury!
 

 
If anyone sees a report about the top execs at the nine contractors taking a voluntary pay cut, let me know and we will give them credit!
*** The nine contractors that monopolize refugee resettlement in America: