Just now I wrote about what happened in Rutland, VT this week where the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) lost their chief advocate for Syrian refugees, Mayor Christopher Louras, in a stunning mayoral election upset.
And, I have been meaning to update readers on USCRI’s financials for some time, so this gives me an excuse.
Also, earlier this week when the Trump Administration announced its upcoming 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement, USCRI immediately tweeted this plea for funding:
When I opened the link here, I was expecting to see a pitch for how to tell the Prez he is wrong, instead it opened directly to a donation form.
My first thought was, why didn’t they long ago try to raise more PRIVATE funds rather than become completely addicted to the easy flow of federal dollars to their bank account?
USCRI CEO Lavinia Limon with Chobani Yogurt CEO at Clinton Global Initiative. Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Go here for our Limon archive: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon
(See recent posts on four other of the nine major resettlement contractors: HIAS, LIRS, Church World Service and the USCCBfinancials.)
Because this is a rotten system that pays contractors by the head to resettle refugee ‘clients’ in to your towns, now that the federal spigot is closing (at least temporarily) the budgets of these quasi-government agencies will shrink commensurately. And, they are running multi-million dollar agencies paying out BIG salaries.
Before I give you the most recent information available from USCRI’s Form 990, check out this post I wrote in 2008 where we reported that in 2006 USCRI was operating on a budget ofjust over $18 million!
USCRI’s gross income was $18,352,000. $16,905,312 was from government grants (that’s you the taxpayer) while another $675,868 included government contracts.
Total compensation of officers was $358,587 and other salaries were $2,966,521.
By 2014 their budget had grown to $51,524,570, government grants were a whopping $46,560452. Total compensation to officers was $820,147 and other salaries were $7,293,845. That would be a very respectable growth for a small non-profit except that virtually all of its growth depends on more refugees admitted to the US with a very handsome increase in the per refugee resettlement payment. We calculate that USCRI is 94% funded by taxpayer dollars. It could be higher, but we don’t know about some of their income categories.
Here are a couple of pages from the most recently available Form 990.
Page 9 is where you usually see how much in government grants they receive.
At the bottom of the total revenue column is where you will find the number $51,524,570. The IOM collection fee is your money too. We did our calculation of 94% funded by you (taxpayers) on just the federal grants and the IOM collection fee. Some of those other items may be taxpayer money too, but we aren’t sure.
Here is the salaries page: Revolving door! Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of ORR, then Eskinder Negash, who had earlier been a Veep at USCRI, took a swing at the government job, but has now revolved back to USCRI. If Hillary had won, would Limon revolve back to a government job? I’m guessing not because that would involve a big pay cut.
Go hereto see if USCRI has a sub-office in your town! USCRI does list a Rutland office, so while it lasts, those 2 Syrian families should get a lot of help and attention!
“[W]hat happened here in Rutland….should be used as a template for the rest of country!”
Don Cioffi (Rutland First!)
It wasn’t only the plan—there are lots of mayors pushing for refugees to be placed in their towns—but it was the way he went about it that riled citizens there in VERMONT, of all places!
Thanks to all who sent me one of the many many stories written in the last 24 hours about his defeat at the ballot box. We mentioned the upcoming election on Sunday, here. Leo Hohmann writing at World Net Dailyquoted that post. Representatives of the federal resettlement contractor, USCRI, field questions from standing room only crowd in Rutland last year. Photo: http://news4security.com/posts/2016/09/rutland-first-vermonts-homegrown-opposition-to-syrian-resettlement/
(Just as I am writing this post this morning, Fox & Friends is reporting on the mayor’s election loss due to his support of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.) Update: Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart weighs in here.
Mayor Christopher Louras’ defeat should be a wake-up call to mayors around the country that pushing the refugee program in collusion with a paid refugee contractor and the US State Department, while trying to keep the plan secret from the public, is not a good model for success.
Not only did Mayor Louras lose his reelection bid, but the federal resettlement contractor, USCRI in this case opened an office there for 2 families that they will now surely have to close, and their friends in the liberal media—see the New York Timeshyping the Rutland resettlement—who were working to make Donald Trump look bad in advance of his inauguration, show how weak they have become.
For our many posts on Rutland going back to (I think) last May,click here. The Rutland, Vermont model for all of you!
From Leo Hohmann at WND:
The people of Rutland, Vermont, have gained a measure of revenge against former President Obama’s forced influx of Syrian refugees, voting out the five-term mayor who helped negotiate the controversial resettlements with a federal contractor.
Rutland is Vermont’s third-largest city but still very small, with a population of 16,500.
The candidacy of Mayor Christopher Louras went down in flames in Tuesday’s election as he was defeated by the refugee program’s most ardent opponent on the board of aldermen. David Allaire won with 52 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Louras.
“That’s not just a win, that’s a drubbing,” said Don Chioffi, an activist who supported the upstart candidate Allaire.
Louras came out last April and “announced,” much to the surprise of his residents, that the city would be taking in up to 100 Syrian refugees [98.5% of the Syrians entering the US are Muslims—ed] in fiscal 2017 along with others from Iraq.
The announcement divided the city among those who wanted to welcome the refugees – no questions asked – and those who thought the refugee program was being dictated without any local input and with very little information. Protests and counter-protests were organized, attracting national media attention.
Unfazed by the division it caused in Rutland, a State Department contractor opened an office and started placing Syrians into the community.
The Leftist media doesn’t give you a fair shake, so go around them!
Hohmann continued:
Local activist Don Chioffi, an ACT for America chapter leader in Rutland, said Allaire got no help from the local media. But supporters bypassed the newspapers and TV stations by using social media, meetings and a conservative radio host to get their message out.
“The people we talk to always react positively, but you would never know that from the media coverage we get,” Chioffi told WND.
“In their sacrilegious and diabolical effort to squelch the truth, they won’t put it out there, so it’s hard to emphasize how important this victory is because the leftist media just doesn’t give you a fair shake, and we went into it expecting that. We knew we wouldn’t get a fair shake.”
[….]
“What won this race in Rutland is we concentrated on principles of democracies and how far we’ve strayed from those principles when a private, nonprofit agency is taking people’s rights away from them, using secrecy, getting government funding, all of the things about this refugee program that have been taken away from the people.”
Chioffi said his group’s requests for public-record documents were rejected by USCRI, which claimed the information was proprietary, even though it was doing the government’s work as a contractor.
Amila Merdzanovic, Director for USCRI of the Vermont Refugee Program: If we go public too soon “…all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork.”
“We said we have questions and we want answers,” he said.
The group’s big break came when the USCRI director of the state resettlement program stumbled in trying to answer a question about why the refugee plan for Rutland was so secretive.
In an April 14 email to Mayor Louras, USCRI Director Amila Merdzanovic wrote in an email “if we open it up to anybody and everybody, all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork, anti-immigrant … anti-anything.”
“When they came out and said they don’t’ think this should be made public because ‘too many people would come out of the woodwork,’ we just pummeled her and branded her,” Chioffi said.
Chioffi said Rutland is a microcosm for what happened nationally on Nov. 8 with the election of Donald Trump.
“We the people spoke, and we were sick and tired of being dictated to and people making decisions on our behalf. And we’re certainly sick of being dictated to by a private, nonprofit agency,” he said. “Since when do you turn over your local government to a 501c3 private contractor, which then denies you public information? So the lack of transparency was the focus of our campaign against this mayor.”
There is much, much more including quotes from our friend James Simpson, continue reading here. ***Update 2*** See my latest on USCRI here.
Actually it is over a half billion the US Conference of Catholic Bishops received from US taxpayers since 2008!
(By the way, I just heard Raymond Arroyoon Fox and Friends say that the USCCB gets millions of tax dollars annually from the federal treasury, but I couldn’t find the clip. Yeh! Finally that information is getting in to the mainstream media!) ***Update***Reader Robin has found the clip. Be sure to watch (click here) at about 50 seconds in when Brian Kilmeade asks why Lutherans and Catholics oppose the Trump refugee slowdown. Clearly Arroyo has done some homework!
Here is the latest from Catholic News Agency (CNA):
Washington D.C., Mar 6, 2017 / 03:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With people fleeing humanitarian crises around the world, President Donald Trump’s new executive order halting refugee admissions is wrong, Catholic bishop and aid groups maintain.
Bishop Vasquez chairs the U.S. bishops’ committee on migration. Last time we looked we reported that 97% of the Bishop’s Migration funds money comes from you—the taxpayers! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/01/11/and-we-almost-missed-it-us-conference-of-catholic-bishops-celebrates-its-national-migration-week/
“We remain deeply troubled by the human consequences of the revised executive order on refugee admissions and the travel ban. While we note the Administration’s efforts to modify the Executive Order in light of various legal concerns, the revised Order still leaves many innocent lives at risk,” Bishop Joe Vasquez of Austin stated March 6. Bishop Vasquez chairs the U.S. bishops’ committee on migration.
“The U.S. Catholic Bishops have long recognized the importance of ensuring public safety and would welcome reasonable and necessary steps to accomplish that goal,” he said.
“However, based on the knowledge that refugees are already subjected to the most vigorous vetting process of anyone who enters the United States, there is no merit to pausing the refugee resettlement program while considering further improvement to that vetting process.”
Here comes the big lie that Trump is reducing the number of refugees dramatically! Contractors, like the US Bishops, did just fine on less than 50,000 refugees during 4 of Bush’s years.
But, for only one year did Obama propose the astronomical number of 110,000 (for most of the year he would not be in office!) and that becomes the standard that the ignorant, gullible media goes with! For the many new readers we get every day, the resettlement contractors, including the USCCB, gets paid by the head to place refugees in your towns. More refugees=more money!
“Resettling only 50,000 refugees a year, down from 110,000, does not reflect the need, our compassion, and our capacity as a nation,” Bishop Vasquez stated.“We have the ability to continue to assist the most vulnerable among us without sacrificing our values as Americans or the safety and security of our nation.”
He goes on to oppose any religious test (like the prioritization of Christians in the first EO) for admission to the US. Now, here comes a major truth! And, this is why Christians are not prioritized from Muslim countries!
Refugees must first register with the UNHCR to be eligible for resettlement.
Trump should immediately sever our ties with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, save us millions of dollars, and put in place a program where we, the US, chooses our refugees without the UNHCR middle men!
CNA continues……
“The Obama administration policy was to prioritize these groups, but despite this they remain severely underrepresented in U.S. refugee admissions, so it’s clear that a fair outcome is even more important than a stated priority,” he said. [Andrew Walther, vice president of communications and strategic planning at the Knights of Columbus.]
Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan of Antioch has warned that Christians hoping to be resettled in the U.S. or Canada have never even had the chance.
“I personally heard on several occasions from many of our Christian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, that their applications for refugee visas, either to the USA or Canada, are without any response, if not refused by the consulates of the USA and Canada,” he stated.
Never mentioned at CNA News is the financial reason the USCCB does not want to slow the flow for even a short period of time—$$$$$!
Here (below) is just one page of the income the USCCB is getting from you (from 2008-2016). This does not include the millions and millions of tax payer dollars received separately by individual Catholic Charities around the country.
My screenshot from USASpending.govcaptures only 7 of 227 transactions. For those of you interested in the USAID funding be sure to scroll through the pages and see how much of that money the USCCB gets!
By the way, since the Bishops are exempt from filing Form 990’s we can’t get at their salaries.
“The Internal Revenue Service gives serious consideration to complaints made alleging the abuse of the tax exempt status granted to certain organizations.”
(IRS website)
Looking for a little project to do from the comfort of home…..
For those of you getting very annoyed by the ‘non-profit’ federal resettlement contractors (which get gobs of federal funding) increasingly involved in political organizing, a reader (‘badboylookout’) did a little research and sent us a link from the IRS on how you can complain about a possible misuse of their 501(c)3 status. The nine VOLAGs *** and their subcontractors are especially active right now as we learned here (just one example).
It looks like you may never know if they are investigated, but it might make someone, somewhere take a look. Go here for the page itself with hotlinks, and below is a shot of what you should know.
You might also wish to complain to Inspectors General at the US State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Dept. of Homeland Security (all three have involvement with the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program).
This post is filed in our ‘comments worth noting’ category, here. And, in our ‘where to find information’ category, here. ***Go to this list to see if you have a non-profit VOLAG subcontractor near you.
One of the things I came to see in my travels around America last summer is that mayors in many cities with refugees, or about to get refugees, seemed to be quietly (so as not to tip off citizen critics) working behind the scenes for the federal pro-refugee resettlement contractors, and/or the businesses looking for cheap migrant labor. I often referred to those mayors as having been “captured.” Mayor Louras, who quietly worked with federal refugee contractor USCRI to begin resettlement of 100 Syrians to Rutland, caused a firestorm of public controversy. Photo: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/08/05/shrinking-small-towns-see-hope-in-refugees
Rutland, VT represents one such city.
It got so heated in Rutland, that the subject of refugees is the key issue that will determine if city voters return Mayor Christopher Louras to his seat at city hall.
From Burlington Free Press (hat tip: Joanne):
MONTPELIER – The mayor of Rutland, seeking his sixth two-year term Tuesday on Town Meeting Day, would like to focus his race against three challengers on his response to the issues facing the city, including drug use and joblessness, but his plan to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the city overshadows everything.
I’ve always wondered, why Syrians? Why not any of the usual refugee ethnic groups that the US State Department brings in. Did someone or some group specifically want Syrian Muslims (almost 99% of the Syrians we admit are Muslims) in Rutland? The same is happening in Charleston, WV, they want just Syrians. Why?
I digress! Back to the story…
Louras is being challenged on Town Meeting Day by City Councilor David Allaire, who ran against Louras in the last two elections; Michael Coppinger, the executive director of the Downtown Rutland Partnership, which promotes the community; and resident Kam Johnston, who is also running for the Board of Aldermen, school board and city assessor.
[….]
Both Allaire and Coppinger say a change in leadership is needed to heal a city that has been divided by Louras’ plans to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the community this year, and possibly more in years to come. They say it wasn’t the plan for the refugees, but the way Louras rolled out the program, announcing it last April without having sought input from the public and city officials.
When he announced his candidacy in December, Allaire said the issue was not with the city taking in refugees, but the secrecy of the program .
Continue reading here. See our Rutland archive here. One of the many reforms the Trump team must make is to get the secrecy out of the discussions by the US State Department, in collusion with federal refugee contractors, to target certain towns and cities as new resettlement sites.
