Later this month leading refugee advocates/Dems will attend a two-day confab in Boise, Idaho in hopes of generating support for illegal alien amnesty (the DACA kids) and to push for more refugees for Idaho and other states they are working to transform (turning red states blue!).
This time last year, Idaho citizens demonstrated (in Boise) against more refugees being placed in Idaho.
Here is the announcement published at Boise Weekly from the Frank Church Institute(emphasis is mine) Hat tip: Joanne:
The Trump administration recently unveiled yet another travel ban restricting certain individuals from mainly Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. In a time where the refugee migration worldwide has reached near World War II levels, these bans have proved to be highly controversial and have sparked much debate across the country. The Frank Church Institute plans to continue the debate at the 34th annual Frank Church Conference—Monday, Oct. 23 and Tuesday, Oct. 24—with a focus on current global concerns over refugee displacement and immigration.
Richard, as you must know, was Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for PRM. Learn more about her at our huge archive: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Anne+Richard
“[It’s a] timely issue with the new administration’s policies on immigration and DACA, and the public’s questions about the role of refugees both nationally and in the State of Idaho,” said Frank Church Institute Director Garry Wenske.
The theme of the conference at the Simplot Ballroom of the Student Union Building at Boise State University, is “America’s Future: Refugees, Migration and National Security.”Speakers will include former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Anne C. Richard, and International Rescue Committee Senior Vice President Jennifer Sime, as well as Jacob Sullivan, who served as national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and deputy chief of staff for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [You will recognize Sullivan as a bigwig from the Clinton campaign.—ed]
There will also be speakers from local organizations like the International Refugee [Rescue!–ed] Committee and ACLU-Idaho, as well as a panel of experts and refugees, including Refik Sadikovic, a Bosnian refugee who resettled in Boise and is now working toward his Ph. D. at Boise State University. [Token success story is part of their MO!—-ed]
For every refugee success story I can find you someone like this Idaho Uzbek refugee convicted terrorist. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/05/29/idaho-uzbek-convicted-terrorist-indicted-in-attempt-to-kill-prison-warden/
Idaho, especially the southern half of the state, has a long and significant history of accepting displaced people. According to a Pew study, Idaho accepts among the most refugees per capita of any state in the country. The Idaho role in resettlement, however, has been controversial. The College of Southern Idaho Refugee Center was criticized for its role in bringing refugees into Idaho amid fears of an influx of Syrians and fake news surrounding a crime connected with refugees in Twin Falls brought the issue to a boil.
Citizens wishing to get a “better understanding” of what is in the works for Idaho and the country should attend (and take notes)!
Wenske said he expects to fill the ballroom, and hopes the audience can walk away with a “better understanding of some of the issues that we’re facing as a country, as a state, and as a city.”
“Boise is a welcoming city for refugees,” he said. “These are important issues we need to discuss.”
The first story I read this morning has got my blood boiling! Not because it is one more blast at Trump, or at Stephen Miller (he can take care of himself).
And, although I have now learned more about the secretive process thanks to the leakers (the blabbermouths!), what has me steamed is that the Trump Administration clearly still has many people throughout government (the State Department!) and in the White House who are not loyal to him and are so willing to dish the dirt on his Presidency.
Whose fault is that?
It is Trump’s fault for not placing enough of his own people in leadership slots—people who would be loyal and keep the bureacrats in check.
Was he even paying attention?
Indeed the US Refugee Admissions Program in the State Department is still being run by career bureaucrats who saw Obama’s fantasy 110,000 refugee ceiling last year as the holy grail!
For new readers, know that I have maintained that there is nothing heroic about this 45,000 (split the baby) ceiling.
Trump had the perfect opportunity to suspend the program entirely, to put off setting the ceiling. He could have done it for 6 months and told Congress to investigate the entire program with an eye to reforming it or setting up an entirely new system to admit only the most desperate people. (There is likely zero chance any reform will be initiated in election year 2018!)
So, as you read through New Yorker reporter Jonathan Blitzer‘s story, meant to paint Stephen Miller as the boogeyman (written thanks to so many blabbermouths), know that I believe Trump flubbed this one and took an easy way out.
(You should read the whole thing. I couldn’t snip it all! So, I picked out what interested me most and the emphasis below is mine.)
Late last month, the White House announced that next year’s cap would be forty-five thousand, a record low. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Vice-President, and the Office of Management and Budget had wanted the number to be higher.
But they had all been forced to compete with one influential White House official: Stephen Miller, the thirty-two-year-old former aide to Jeff Sessions who has become Trump’s top immigration adviser.
I’m still laughing! They are all angry because Miller knows how the “sausage is made.”
I recently spoke to four Administration officials [come on chickens, who are you? put your names out there!—ed] involved in the refugee-cap process to try to understand how Miller was able to outmaneuver an array of powerful factions in the federal bureaucracy. Each official described Miller as a savvy operator who understands how to insert himself into the policy-creation process. They also described him as the beneficiary of a dysfunctional and understaffed Administration. Miller hadn’t completely gotten his way on the refugee cap, they told me; he wanted it to be lower. The forty-five-thousand figure—which past Administrations would have considered impractically low—amounted to a kind of compromise.
Miller, who has gone from the political fringe to the White House on the strength of his reputation as an anti-immigration ideas man, joined the Trump campaign early.
So the process begins in June. We will remember that for next year!
Blitzer continues…
The chain of events that led to the announcement of the new refugee cap began on June 5th, when Miller met with officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and a policy group called the Homeland Security Council. Every summer, the State Department and the N.S.C. lead a series of discussions to decide the next year’s cap. Officials weigh dozens of different considerations, solicit input from the various stakeholder agencies, and ultimately bring a number to the President for his approval. [Could the stakeholder agencies be the federal contractors?—ed]
[….]
Miller introduced the officials to Gene Hamilton, another former aide to Sessions, whom the Administration had installed at D.H.S. This year, Miller and Hamilton explained, D.H.S.—not the State Department—would present the refugee-cap number to the President.Hamilton would be Miller’s key ally in the process. “They were in direct and constant contact,” the second White House official told me. “If there was ever a question you had for Hamilton, he’d say, ‘Hold on,’ and call Miller.” According to the first White House official, “It was clear that there was some precooked plan here.”
On this issue of asylum (in the next snip)…
….know that there are an estimated 270,000 asylum seekers presently in the country waiting for their day before a judge to make a pitch for asylum. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, once granted asylum, they are REFUGEES in every sense of the word and are on track to citizenship. The only difference is that they were not screened abroad at all and did not have their airfare to the US paidby the US taxpayer. So, Miller is making a very important point on numbers.
Blitzer continues:
When officials pushed back against these kinds of changes, Miller would point to the backlog of asylum cases at D.H.S. and argue that the refugee program was unsustainable. All four officials believed this argument was disingenuous. “This was a manipulation to get the result he wanted,” one White House official told me. “He basically just had a political agenda: to limit the number of foreign nationals who come into our country.”
This next bit made me laugh!The bureaucrats who basically run the State Department were angry that Miller knows how the “sausage” is made in Washington!
Simon Henshaw is a career bureaucrat running the Refugee Program under Tillerson. https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/213334.htm
You can bet the biggest blabbermouths Blitzer talked to came from the branch of the State Department called ‘Population, Refugees and Migration.’
I asked the officials how Miller, with his limited experience in the executive branch, had become such a formidable bureaucrat so quickly. “Look at who the senior advisers to the President were and are—Bannon, Kushner—Miller’s the only one with prior government experience,”the State Department official told me. “He knows something about government, and it turns out to be useful. He saw how the sausage was made. And he’s smart enough to make his own sausage.”The chaos of the Trump Administration helped. “The White House remains in utter disarray,” the official said. “If you don’t have an established set of procedures in place, it’s very easy to create your own process.”
[….]
In early September, officials at the State Department and N.S.C. were told that the Department of Homeland Security was ready to propose to the President that next year’s refugee cap be between fifteen thousand and twenty-six thousand people.
OPTICS! OPTICS! WHAT THE HELL! TO SATISFY SOME FOREIGN POLICY OPTICS! WHAT ABOUT AMERICAN COMMUNITIES SADDLED WITH THE COSTS AND THE CULTURAL UPHEAVAL?
Duke: No number below 40,000 was permissible.
Officials at the other government agencies involved in the process balked. “If we go below fifty thousand, we won’t satisfy the optics that the program was designed to generate, and that functionally hurts national security,” one White House official told me. “We look scared.” Miller and Hamilton weren’t swayed by the arguments, but when Elaine Duke, the interim Secretary of Homeland Security and Hamilton’s boss, insisted that the number couldn’t be lower than forty thousand, they were forced to retreat. (The White House disputed this account.)
Putting up a modest resistance, the State Department proposed a cap of fifty thousand. “People felt beleaguered and betrayed,” the official there told me.
[….]
“By the time we talked about splitting the difference, we were already two-thirds lower than where we were previously,” the State Department official told me. “We’d gone from a hundred and ten thousand”—which President Obama had set for the current year—“to around forty thousand, with no evidence to support the decision. It was purely political. The process has never been this corrupt.”
In mid-September, Tillerson lowered the State Department’s desired number from fifty thousand to forty-five thousand. The State Department official said the Secretary’s staff was surprised. “He undercut his deputy,” the official said. “He undercut the recommendation of the staff. He broke with every other federal agency except D.H.S.” The other agencies had all previously said they would back the State Department, so forty-five thousand was the only number that went to the President.
“The President would never know that almost all of his Cabinet wanted a higher number,” one of the White House officials told me.
If you are looking for something to do, contact the White House and tell the President to put his LOYAL supporters in key positions in order to begin reining-in the blabbermouths!
That is a rally partially sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to be held in Washington, DC this coming week. (As of this writing they have 847 confirmed planning to attend, here.)
I told you about it here when the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was pushing its groupies to attend.
Curious about whether the other eight federal refugee contractors (some receiving nearly all of their funding from the US Treasury)*** were involved, I asked in that post if anyone knew.
I got my answer just now at twitter when the lobbying arm of the refugee industry (Refugee Council USA) put out this message:
So who are the membersof the refugee lobbying consortium. Here they are:
***Check out those logos, below are the nine contractors. Where is Congress? Shouldn’t there be a law that if you take most of your funding from taxpayers, you shouldn’t be marching in the streets against the President and us!
Think about it! All nine contractors (the Catholic church included!) are telling their people to march against the President and for CAIR!
Why don’t they just take good care of the refugees they are being paid to care for!
Yesterday it was St. Cloud, MN and today it is Rutland, VT!
Getting the monkey off their backs!
Mayors and Councils across America, when confronted by citizens with questions and concerns about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, brush off citizens with the usual garbage line—it is a federal program and they have no role in it.
Mayor attempting to get the citizen ‘monkey’ off his back by saying he has no power. This is a federal program!
Yes, they do! The Refugee Act of 1980 did give local governments a role.
And, repeatedly the State Department has said they don’t send refugees to places where they are not wanted. Mayors and councils could go on record with their opinions, but at minimum they should be attending QUARTERLY STAKEHOLDER MEETINGS. And, they should be involved in preparing the annual R & P ABSTRACT (see post yesterday).
Here we have news from Rutland, VT where the previous mayor was ousted by voters for working secretly with a refugee contractor and the new mayor depends on getting his news from a state bureaucrat. Does he attend their meetings? I bet he is not even aware of the plan the contractor in Vermont sent to the US State Department not too long ago, let alone have seen it.
Shame on any mayors who are not intimately involved in preparing the plans submitted to the State Department each year for the city or town he/she is responsible for!
RUTLAND – Rutland has recently received word that the number of refugees an agency plans to resettle in the city in this fiscal year has been reduced from 100 to 75.
[….]
Rutland Mayor David Allaire said Thursday that litigation and court action nationally associated with the president’s immigration orders raises uncertainty over just how many refugees will actually be resettled in the city this year.
In the prior fiscal year, three families, totaling 14 refugees, resettled in Rutland. The plan had called for up to 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to resettle in the city by Sept. 30, about a year after the city had been designated a resettlement site by the U.S. Department of State.
Why weren’t the mayor and aldermen in on the planning process?Do they even have a copy of the final R & P Abstract? Denise should give it to them! Or, do they have it and aren’t sharing it with the public. Either way it is not good!
Signs like this helped defeat previous mayor!
Denise Lamoureux, state refugee coordinator, recently sent an email Monday to leaders of community organizations in Rutland discussing the change.
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration “has approved a preliminary revised plan with an objective of 75 rather than 100 refugees for Rutland for federal fiscal year 2018 (10/1/17 to 9/30/18),” the email stated.
[….]
The issue of refugee resettlement had been a hot-button topic in Rutland during the mayoral election in March that saw Allaire win the job over longtime incumbent Christopher Louras.
The former mayor had been a strong supporter of the refugee resettlement program, while Allaire, then a veteran member of the city’s Board of Aldermen, had opposed it, citing a lack of transparency in theprocess. [Where is the transparency now?—ed]
For the past several months there has been little, if any, debate or discussion about refugee resettlement at city meetings.
“My feeling about this right along has been if indeed there are more families that are coming into Rutland, refugee resettlement families, I would welcome them as I would anyone else,” Allaire said Thursday. “This is a federal program, the Rutland government has no control over the numbers or anything else.”
See my Rutland archive, here. The major federal contractor operating in Vermont is USCRI. You will see a lot about them when you visit previous Rutland posts. Of all the arrogant contractors, they are near the top of my list!
From time to time over the years we have mentioned that refugees are required to repay their airfare loans they receive from you, the US taxpayer.
Citizen watchdog, Judicial Watch, reported yesterday that they asked, through the Freedom of Information Act, for records on those loans. No information was received and JW sued. Now in response to legal filings, the DOS (Trump’s State Department!) says they have no records!
How could that be! We know that the resettlement contractors are tasked with sending the dunning notices to impoverished refugees and that the contractors—including those kind souls at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops—keep 25% of what they collect for themselves. So someone must be keeping records!
I’m guessing the mystery relates to the fact that the public (if fully informed) would react negatively to finding that the repayment rate is pretty low and that the contractors*** put a quarter of anything repaid in their pockets (so they can teach ‘new Americans’ all about debt!).
(First Judicial Watch, then see below, what a coincidence to see a sob story on airfare loans at NorthJersey.com just yesterday as well.)
In response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, the State Department claims in a legal document that it has no records involving refugee travel loans that the agency gives foreigners overseas to buy plane tickets to fly to the United States. The program is operated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental group that assists refugees worldwide with hundreds of millions of dollars from Uncle Sam. The money is channeled through the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM). In fiscal year 2016 the State Department gave IOM $477,257,564, according to the agency’s report on contributions to international organizations. That doesn’t even include millions more that the State Department gives the IOM for special refugee resettlement “platforms” that pop up throughout the year. [IOM is now part of the United Nations—ed]
[….]
In a federal court document responding to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the State Department writes that its “search did not retrieve any records reflecting the number of refugee travel loans furnished per year using U.S. Government funds, the number of such travel loans defaulted on annually, nor the amount of money written off per defaulted loan.”In a footnote the agency writes that it did retrieve some records reflecting IOM’s “general reporting” on refugee travel loans, but none of it contained the “specific information sought” by Judicial Watch. This is outrageous because it suggests that the State Department can’t account for money American taxpayers are lending to foreigners to fly here to declare themselves refugees. A source with inside knowledge of the matter confirmed to Judicial Watch that the records exist and years ago a State Department insider provided figures that show only about half of the travel loans have been repaid since the program was launched in the 1950s, representing a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to American taxpayers. Judicial Watch viewed the records, which span from 1952 to 2002 and reveal that the IOM issued $1,020,803,910 in “transportation” loans and recovered only $584, 219,453.
Continue reading here at JW’s “Corruption Chronicles.”
Now check this out! Coincidence? Just yesterday (JW’s news was yesterday) NorthJersey.comreports on poor Syrian refugees who can’t repay those loans!
Clearly this is a State Department program, so how can they possibly say they don’t keep records. In fact, how do the contractors get their 25% cut if no one is keeping records?
WE have to teach these refugees about borrowing money so that will help them be better Americans say contractors!
The travel loan program is supposed to help families build a positive credit history in the United States, advocates say. But families like the Al Samakehs worry that the reverse will be true and that they’ll be saddled with debt and a bad credit rating.
The State Department established the travel loan program after the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, setting up a revolving fund for the continued support of refugees. Before they travel, refugees agree to repay the interest-free loans for travel costs within four years, including a six-month grace period.
The agencies that resettle and help refugees in their new lives also oversee repayment, collecting a 25 percent commission.
It helps refugees build good credit. Most pay the loan back. How do we know, if there are no records?
Sean Piazza, a spokesman for U.S. Programs at International Rescue Committee, one of the resettlement agencies, said the arrangement teaches refugee families financial literacy and helps them build a credit history. That, he said, “can later help realize huge steps in a family or individual’s self-sufficiency, including automobile or home ownership.”
Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program of Church World Service, said the travel loan program is controversial, but that building good credit could help refugees. He also said that clients get financial counseling and that most pay back loans on time.
“They go into it knowingly and they try to honor their responsibility,” he said.
So, the State Department had records in 2015!
Nationally, around 70 percent of loan balances are repaid within five years and 78 percent are repaid within 10 years, the State Department reported in 2015. The average loan amount is $1,200 per person.
This is from the annual report of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration Fund in 2014 showing clearly the travel loan collection fee of over $3 million. More recent financial docs show a similar pot of money. So, if the DOS has no records on travel loans, how do the Bishops determine their income from collecting loans (from getting the money out of the impoverished refugees they “serve.”)
Still, some critics say the agencies’ [the volags, the contractors—ed] role poses a conflict of interest. Steven Sacco, an immigration attorney at a New York City nonprofit legal organization, said a debate about the loan program had been stifled because the agencies that are primary advocates for refugees also make money from the program.
“They’re trying to support themselves and their mission, but because they are short on cash they guard their income sources,” Sacco said. “It’s a conflict of interest because it’s a burden on the people they serve.”
Sacco argued that the loan program should be illegal because it amounts to a tax on refugees.
This is one more reason that Congress should be investigating the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.
*** Here are the contractors who monopolize all refugee resettlement in America. Six consider themselves ‘religious charities.’
By the way, back in 2007 when resettlement contractor Church World Service came to the county where I live, one of the first revelations to me came when an English language instructor told me about some poor refugee who didn’t speak English coming to her to ask about a letter he didn’t understand—it was his letter from the contractor to begin repaying his airfare loan through them. It came as an unhappy surprise to him.
