Federal Agents Expelling Children/Infants Due to Covid-19 Concerns

That is the type of headline I’ve seen often in recent days as the Trump Administration works to protect Americans from further spread of the Chinese virus by blocking and immediately returning illegal border crossers.

Editor:  By the way, don’t miss my post on Friday at ‘Frauds and Crooks’ about former refugee Rep. Ilhan Omar’s fraudulent marriage and the decision by the feds not to pursue a case against her.

What these stories, about so-called “unaccompanied children,” won’t tell you is that the vast majority—72% (FY19 numbers)—are “children” ages 15-17 years old.  66% of the those little darlings are teenage males, according to data at the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

In FY19 (there isn’t any FY20 data available) we admitted 69,488 “children.”

Therefore over 50,000 were over the age of 15!  At age 18 they are free to go!

So don’t get ideas that little frightened five-year-olds are held alone in hotel rooms waiting for big bad Don to send them packing as the legacy media wants you to believe.

Here is a story at CBS News that caught my eye:

Migrant kids to be expelled under virus order not entitled to attorneys and other safeguards, DOJ lawyers say

The Trump administration is arguing that migrant children set to be expelled from the country under an emergency coronavirus order are not entitled to legal safeguards guaranteed to all minors in U.S. immigration custody.

In a court filing on Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers argued that migrant minors processed under a public health order meant to curb the coronavirus’ spread are not in the “legal custody” of the U.S. immigration officials who physically detain them. Instead, the government lawyers said, the children are in the “legal custody” of public health officials they never interact with while on U.S. soil.

Citing that distinction, the Trump administration says these children are not covered under the landmark Flores Settlement Agreement, which guarantees minors access to lawyers, safe and sanitary housing facilities and prompt release from U.S. government detention.

During the pandemic, Department of Homeland Security officials have been relying on a directive issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to bounce most border-crossers off U.S. soil. More than 109,000 of these expulsions were carried out in July, June, May, April and the last 11 days of March.

Like adults, most migrant children who arrive at the border unaccompanied or with their families have been processed and expelled under the CDC order. Despite a federal law generally requiring their transfer to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, only 162 migrant children were transferred to the agency’s state-licensed shelters in April, May and June — a time period in which more than 3,300 apprehensions of unaccompanied minors were made by officials at the southern border.

The exact number of children who have been expelled under the CDC order is unknown, as the Trump administration has declined to disclose figures. There are fewer than 800 unaccompanied minors in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has the capacity to care for more than 13,000 children at a time.

There is more here.  And, another story at ABC blasting the Trump administration too.

I was most interested in the fact that so few were placed with contractors.  We know that Catholic Charities and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) have lucrative contracts to not only resettle refugees, but also to ‘care’ for the kids.

So, of course, I figured those contractors were hurting for payola as the numbers of refugees and unaccompanied alien children were both way down.

Lutherans rolling in bucks!

I checked USA Spending to see how LIRS is doing under the Trump Administration because four years ago contractors like LIRS were crying the blues about how their mostly federal funding would dry up.

Well, it hasn’t!  LIRS was granted by you, the taxpayer, $71 million in the last twelve months to take care of the children.  72% of that money went to take care of the mostly teenage boys, and for several months there were very few of those allowed to even stay in the country.

They are getting as much or more in funding from the Trump Administration as they got under Obama!  They will be able to get right back to full steam ahead if Biden wins in November!

 

Note these bars represent fiscal years that run from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30th.

 

Houston: Poor Refugees/Immigrants Get Chinese Virus While Rich Whites Don’t

Well, that is what the New York Times wants you to believe.

I’m not interested enough to search the data, but this story from Houston is a familiar one as the legacy media wants you to believe that the Chinese virus can find the poor and downtrodden while the rich are spared.

You know it isn’t true and as a matter of fact, as my continuous reporting on refugee camps worldwide has demonstrated, packing hundreds of thousands of unwashed people into squalid living conditions hasn’t hastened the spread of the virus.

You can read the story yourself, but I was interested in a bit at the end about an unhappy Burundian refugee and wondered how Burundians are now flowing to America.  And, why on earth we are still bringing them!

https://www.americansecurityproject.org/why-burundis-election-crisis-matters-to-the-united-states-and-the-world/

 

Remember it was only ten days ago that I reported that a Burundian refugee in Washington State was supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

NYT story posted at the Baltimore Sun:

The virus found a crowded Houston neighborhood, sparing one nearby

At an African market in another part of the neighborhood, Anaclet Rukata said that he had friends who had become ill but that he worried less about the virus than about his uncertain future.

A 39-year-old refugee from Burundi, he lost his job with a catering company in the Chevron headquarters when the pandemic caused the first wave of closures. His 55-year-old mother, also a refugee, lost her job too, he said.

That day, he was working behind the counter as a favor to a friend who owns the market. “He doesn’t make enough money to pay me,” Rukata said.

And he had just received word by email that his unemployment benefits would be cut off at the end of the month.

Can’t Mr. Rukata’s resettlement agency pony-up some funds to help him survive?

Does it make any sense to bring one more impoverished, low skilled refugee to live in America when so many Americans are unemployed and suffering? NO!

So, in summary, we are mucking around in Africa, in tiny Burundi, which has a corrupt leader and the consequent unrest which since 2015 has caused hundreds of thousands to flee the country to neighboring countries.

Those countries don’t want them and somehow it becomes our responsibility to deposit them in poor neighborhoods in America where they catch the COVID, complain, and jump on the BLM bandwagon. Does any of that make sense?

I just checked the data and we admitted 2,591 Burundians to the US since FY2015 (through today).  2,591 most likely unemployed and BLM agitators in the making!

 

Who is Going to Pay the Rent for Hundreds of Thousands of Refugee Tenants?

Who do you think?

As the Chinese virus tanks our economy, it will be those of you still able to pay taxes!  Either local tax dollars will go directly to the refugees, or local landlords will get bailouts (your tax dollars too).

Over the years I’ve watched landlord sharks seek out refugee tenants often working closely with federal refugee contractors and subcontractors in Democrat-run cities, but that whole system of cronyism could be crashing as we speak thanks to the Trump administration turning off the refugee spigot and the Chinese virus creating mass unemployment for the mostly low-skilled workers that have poured into the US as cheap refugee labor in the last few decades.

Will we soon see large numbers of refugees among the homeless, maybe.

This story in the Wall Street Journal today brought all of this to mind because I have been seeing stories here and there about how refugees are getting local financial assistance (with your money through local government agencies) when we have been promised for decades that the federal government bears the entire financial burden of refugee resettlement (NOT!).

I don’t have a subscription to the WSJ, but how great is this, the WSJ has a video with their story headlined:

Eviction Looms for Millions of Americans Who Can’t Afford Rent

This is Fadhila Hussein. She is a landlord in Schenectady, NY and owns over a dozen rental properties. She is now losing big bucks. I suspect her tenants are refugees and other immigrants. Watch the video at the WSJ link.

 

WASHINGTON—Millions of Americans who have missed rent payments due to the coronavirus pandemic could be at risk of being evicted in the coming months unless government measures to protect them are extended, economists and housing experts say.

Nearly 12 million adults live in households that missed their last rent payment, and 23 million have little or no confidence in their ability to make the next one, according to weekly Census Bureau data.

Who are the people who mostly can’t pay rent, I bet a large percentage are immigrants of all stripes who are losing work in the service industry and in food processing.  Can you say meatpackers!

Look around where you live and I will bet you find bailouts for immigrants coming from local tax dollars.  In just a couple minutes of searching I found this one for Illinois.

IDHS COVID-19 Resources for Immigrants and Refugees

See who gets to distribute the money in Illinois—radical Leftist groups like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR)—so that the needy immigrants then see who they are beholden to! And, it is not you, the taxpayer!

Just a reminder that back in the heyday of the Obama administration Democrat mayors were squawking to Obama and telling him they wanted MORE refugees (100,000 at least) especially the Syrians saying their cities needed many more poor, uneducated citizens who would eventually vote for more Dems.

NO, they weren’t that truthful, they said they needed more refugees to help their cities grow into economic boom towns (to benefit landlords and the Chamber of Commerce). Well, no they didn’t say that exactly either, they just tried to make it look like they are humanitarians seeking to help the world’s less fortunate.

So let’s take a trip down memory lane and see which mayors were begging for more refugees—refugees who are now down and out.

Story from 2015:

18 US Mayors tell Obama: We want MORE Syrian (Muslim) refugees!

Here are the mayors (some may still be in office), but even if they aren’t whoever took over the mayoral job since 2015 is, you can be sure, of the same ilk…

We want over 100,000 refugees a year!

Ed Pawlowski, Mayor of Allentown, PA
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor of Baltimore, MD
Martin J. Walsh, Mayor of Boston, MA
James Diossa, Mayor of Central Falls, RI
Mark Kleinschmidt, Mayor of Chapel Hill, NC
Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, IL
Edward Terry, Mayor of Clarkston, GA
Nan Whaley, Mayor of Dayton, OH
Domenick Stampone, Mayor of Haledon, NJ
Pedro E. Segarra, Mayor of Hartford, CT
Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles, CA
Betsy Hodges, Mayor of Minneapolis, MN
Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City, NY
Jose Torres, Mayor of Paterson, NJ
William Peduto, Mayor of Pittsburgh, PA
Javier Gonzales, Mayor of Santa Fe, NM
Francis G. Slay, Mayor of St. Louis, MO
Stephanie A. Miner, Mayor of Syracuse, NY

Obama gave them almost as many as they wanted in fiscal year 2016 as he was walking out the door—almost 85,000 from 79 countries.

If you live in a Democrat-run city, you need to think about the possibility that your city could see more homelessness, strife and crime in the coming months, so please take time now and prepare for your family’s safety and well-being.  Consider moving!

See here and here.

African Refugee Sides with Black Lives Matters, Badmouths Trump, and Lectures Us

So, let me ask, why should we admit any more Africans to America if they are going to lecture us about our racism?

How would Come Nzibarega and others of his ilk—like Rep. Ilhan Omar—react if we said okay there need to be more white people in Africa and we made a joint effort with European countries to colonize Africa (again! now!).

Can you imagine the uproar!

And, do you think for a minute there wouldn’t be racism against the white immigrants by the black native population, heck, there wouldn’t just be some hurtful words directed at the newcomers.  The migrating whites would be killed.

But, when its black Africans colonizing the US we are supposed to keep our mouths shut.

Come Nzibarega works for World Relief, one of the nine federal refugee contractors working to change America by changing the people and being paid by US taxpayers to do it! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2020/05/07/taxpayer-funded-refugee-resettlement-contractors-doing-well-even-with-trump-in-the-white-house/

 

Well, yes, that is exactly what Burundi refugee Nzibarega is saying.

He is also saying we haven’t welcomed enough and that means Trump is racist and you are too!

See my post last month about how insane it is to invite more potential Black Lives Matter activists to America, and pay for their upkeep on top of it!

By the way, the early US Refugee Admissions Program mostly admitted refugees escaping Communism in the old USSR and in Southeast Asia (Vietnam etc), it wasn’t until much later that the refugee program began admitting large numbers of Africans (bringing their socialist/communist desires with them?).

According to Heidi Boas in her lengthy 2007 paper entitled, “The New Face of America’s Refugees: African Refugee Resettlement to the United States:”

….several of the individuals interviewed for this paper identified the Congressional Black Caucus as one of the most influential groups advocating over the past decade for increased African refugee resettlement to the United States.

Now why would the Congressional Black Caucus want the number of angry Africans increased?

Come Nzibarega at USA Today:

Does Black Lives Matter apply to immigrants as well?

The declaration that “Black Lives Matter” has been written on countless protest signs, hashtagged across social media and even painted on a street, with the words now visible from space.

As a Black man in America, I’m encouraged that more Americans seem eager to affirm my dignity. But a series of recent immigration policy changes belie the statement that Black Lives Matter, as African individuals have been systematically excluded from entry to the U.S.

I’m one of more than 150,000 Africans in the past decade to have come lawfully to the U.S. through the refugee resettlement program. [Maybe 150,000 is enough!—ed]

In my home country of Burundi, my work as a translator for UN peacekeepers made me a target for rebels. One night, as I returned from a run, they kidnapped me at gunpoint, tortured me and held me for two weeks before United Nations peacemakers rescued me.

But I was still not safe, and my presence put my family at risk, so I made the difficult decision to flee my homeland. I made it to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where I spent six wasted years before the U.S. refugee resettlement program gave me a new lease on life. I arrived in Spokane, Washington in 2012.

As recently as fiscal year 2016, more than 31,000 African refugees were resettled. But the refugee resettlement program has been decimated in recent years. Halfway through fiscal year 2020, only about 3,000 African refugees have been resettled. If resettlement continues at that pace, 90% fewer African refugees will find safety and freedom in the U.S. this year than in 2016.

Now get this, he is complaining that in comparison there are too many white people being admitted from Europe (Ukrainians mostly).

Meanwhile, the share of resettled refugees who come from Europe has risen from about 5% in fiscal year 2016 to about 25% this fiscal year.

Nzibarega (well, not him really, his handlers at World Relief) go through a litany of changes that have reduced the migrant flow from Africa since Trump was elected. You can read those yourself. Then this…

These and other policy changes have already resulted in a sharp reduction to the number of Black people allowed to immigrate to the U.S. It’s hard not to wonder if the disparate racial impact is intentional. The president himself has reportedly referred to African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries,” expressed his preference for Norwegian immigrants, and imagines that Nigerians live in “huts.” It’s implausible that these views don’t have an impact on how he crafts our nation’s exclusionary immigration policies.

Like most Black Americans, I have experienced racism in the United States.

That is enough….

More here.

We have absolutely no obligation to admit one more African to the US through the US Refugee Admissions Program, so don’t let these guilt-tripping political agitators get to you!

And Trump is right—they are “shithole countries” or they wouldn’t be exporting millions of refugees looking for a better life.  I say, let them fix their own countries before they try to ‘fix’ America.

Virginia: Ethiopian Community Development Council Prez Speaks Out Against Trump Admin

“We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”

(Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the Ethiopian Community Development Council)

The legacy media is filled these days with stories about how refugees are having a tough time in America coping with the Chinese Virus—so commonsense would dictate that we don’t bring anymore until Americans are back on their feet. Right!

What interested me in this news from Arlington, VA isn’t so much about how refugees are coping, but that it features the Ethiopian Community Development Council one of the nine major refugee contractors operating in America.

I’ve been writing this blog for 13 years, and they have hardly made a blip on my radar screen because they seem to have chosen to keep a low profile.  I haven’t seen them out protesting Donald Trump, filing lawsuits against him or otherwise whining to the media about how they have to fire staff and close offices until now.

The ‘Our man in Arlington’ column by Charlie Clark (whoever he is) at the Falls Church News Press featured ECDC yesterday in a column about how (you guessed it) refugees are coping with the COVID lockdown.

The Supreme Court on June 25 okayed the Trump administration’s policy of limiting the number of asylum seekers in the country by denying them court appeal rights.

That decision came just days after the worldwide marking of the United Nations-sponsored World Refugee Day, June 20. And it comes after President Trump spent the past three years aiming to reduce total refugee levels to zero.

Most likely to feel the impact locally is the Arlington-based Ethiopian Community Development Council Inc., the refugee-support and State Department-authorized transition agency with offices just off Columbia Pike.

I was alerted that this sub-sector of Arlington’s diverse population is among those hit hardest by the coronavirus lockdown. So I logged on last week to several Zoom conversations with the nonprofit’s far-flung constituents.

Today’s immigration landscape is a far cry from the 1970s when Arlingtonians (mostly) opened our doors to refugees from the Vietnam War. And the current push to restrict America’s benefits to those born here distances us from our classic international role as a beacon for victims legitimately escaping violence and tyranny.

A rare public comment about our President by Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the “donation-supported council”:

In 2012 Obama named Teferra a CHAMPION OF CHANGE! https://theethiopiantimes.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/white-house-highlights-dr-tsehaye-teferra-as-a-champion-of-change-and-trailblazer-in-american-diaspora-communities/

“The current policy of the Trump administration with regard to refugees represents a departure from the foundational ideals that established this country as a place of refuge for those that are in need of protection and safety,” said the statement from Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the donation-supported council. “We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”

Teferra founded the counsel in 1983, focusing at first on Ethiopians in the Washington area, but eventually expanding to all refugee groups for help in resettlement, languages, employment and education.

I take issue with the columnist’s characterization of ECDC  being a donation-supported council unless you consider tax payer funding as a ‘donation.’

So, I did what I normally do under these circumstances and headed to Guidestar  to have a look at their most recent Form 990.  Gee, what a surprise! ECDC  is almost completely federally funded and Dr. Teferra pulls down a comfy salary thanks to US taxpayers and Donald Trump.

$12 Million in Government Grants! Total income $13 Million!

 

Nice work if you can get it!