Category: The Opposition

Biden Expected to Tap Julieta Valls Noyes (Who?) to Head Refugee Program at State Department

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Noyes, a career diplomat, seems a surprising pick.

I was fully expecting a hardened Leftwing ideologue like Obama’s former Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), Anne Richard, or possibly the insider Lawrence Bartlett, a bureaucrat, who wouldn’t have a long learning curve.

And, then another likely choice could have been Mark Hetfield of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), but he would have to take a hefty pay cut if selected and confirmed.

I expected Anne Richard to be back joining the others of Obama’s orbit populating the O-man’s third term.

Indeed the lobbying arm of the refugee industry was pushing hard for someone with “robust experience” in the complex workings of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) so they can immediately get to work to bring in as many refugees as possible before Trump, or someone with Trump’s concerns about mass immigration, returns to the White House.

Know that President Trump never filled this position and he likely would have not been able to get someone (who might do any good for us) confirmed.

Julieta Valls Noyes

Of course, it is possible that Ambassador Noyes is experienced with the USRAP, but I’ve never heard of her.  And, maybe that is the point—Biden wants to get someone past the Senate confirmation that looks and sounds reasonable.

LOL! But that can’t make the refugee pushers happy unless they plan to manipulate her as they did George Bush’s recess appointment Ellen Sauerbrey who they came to love.

Here is Foreign Policy on Biden’s expected choice to head PRM:

Biden to Tap Career Diplomat as Top Official on Refugee Policy

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to name three new nominees to senior diplomatic and foreign aid positions, including the top State Department official on refugee issues, a White House official told Foreign Policy.

Julieta Valls Noyes, a veteran career diplomat, is expected to be nominated as the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration—a senior post that could play a key role in the Biden administration’s efforts to reverse Trump-era sharp restrictions on the number of refugees entering the United States. Noyes, the acting director of the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and former ambassador to Croatia, is a first-generation American whose parents entered the United States as refugees from Cuba.

[….]

If confirmed by the Senate, all three nominees would join agencies widely perceived as hollowed out and damaged by politicization and mismanagement under former President Donald Trump.

The State Department’s top post overseeing refugee issues was left unfilled during the Trump administration’s four years in power, though lower-level officials assumed the job in an acting capacity.

Several senior career diplomats in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration who defended refugees were reassigned or temporarily sidelined during a shake-up in 2018 as the Trump administration worked to slash refugee admissions to record lows.

Refugee lobbyists at the Refugee Council USA wanted someone with “deep understanding” of “complex issues.”  See their letter to Biden here.

Nothing less than “robust experience” is acceptable.  (I want to barf every time they use the word “robust!”)

Refugee advocates had been urging Biden for several weeks to swiftly nominate someone to the population, refugees, and migration assistant secretary role. In April, John Slocum, interim executive director of Refugee Council USA, a nonprofit advocacy organization, sent Biden a letter obtained by Politico urging him to pick an assistant secretary “who has a deep understanding of the complex issues surrounding forced displacement, refugee resettlement, and other forms of humanitarian protection.”

More here.

Checking out Noyes’ wikipedia page we learn this interesting nugget.

She is the daughter of Cuban refugees and we know most Cubans sensibly loathe communism and loved Donald Trump in 2020.

She also has strong (we might say robust!) feelings about the Islamic State as well. Here in 2014:

“The financing of this barbaric organisation allows it to continue its operations. What we have to do is degrade its abilities and ultimately to destroy it.”[7]

Hmmmm!  Sounds like something Donald Trump would say.

If confirmed, the biggest problem she could have is to avoid being rolled by the career bureaucrats and their contractor pals***.

As soon as the contractors begin to weigh-in, we will have a better idea of who this woman is and how she might run the program as Biden promises it will soon be on steroids to admit 125,000 refugees beginning on October first.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!

Unaccompanied Alien Children are NOT Refugees, Tennessee Controversy Highlights “Conflation” Issue

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A post for diehard refugee watchers!

For more than a dozen years (that is the time I’ve been following the US Refugee Admissions Program), I’ve watched the Open Borders propagandists and their media lackeys sell the idea that those mostly teenaged illegal alien border crossers that began flooding our southern border in massive waves during the Obama administration are legitimate refugees.

Legal (whether they are legitimate is another question) refugees are selected abroad (supposedly able to prove they are being persecuted) in a process that begins with the United Nations, the US State Department admits them with screening in advance by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services provides funds for many of their initial needs.

Those nine federal contractors*** I’m always talking about are contracted and funded by the US State Department to settle them in your towns and cities and those nine receive additional grants and contracts from ORR to supposedly care for them for an initial three month period.

The ‘children’ we see being flown around the US, the ones who caused that recent uproar in Tennessee, here, came to our border, crossed it illegally and were then turned over to ORR and therein I believe is where the confusion began.

I believe, with no hard proof, that the Open Borders lobby wanted the ‘care’ of the children placed in the Office of Refugee Resettlement to further advance the idea to the media and to you, that the ‘children’ are legitimate refugees who would ultimately be entitled to all of the benefits legal refugees receive and thus ultimately acquire citizenship.

Coming back to bite them….

For all of these more than a dozen years I’ve watched this, the big nine, because they clearly want to see the most third worlders admitted to the US as possible, have supported the influx of UACs.

In my early years this was a surprise to me as I assumed the contractors would put the legal refugees they were committed (and contracted!) to care for ahead of any concerns for illegal aliens, but they don’t.

This year their lack of discernment has come back to bite them as Biden himself recognized (briefly) that funds for legal refugees were being consumed by the expensive care being provided to the illegal alien kids.

Here at the Detroit  News, in an article about the “decimated refugee infrastructure” we learned that indeed money for legal refugees was being shifted to the illegal ‘children’:

When Biden initially announced he would keep the Trump-era refugee admissions cap of 15,000 — before backtracking amid widespread outcry — he hinted that resources needed at the border were being drawn from the refugee resettlement program.

“The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people,” he said in April. “We couldn’t do two things at once.”

Funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program, which manages custody of child migrants at the border, and the HHS portion of the refugee admissions program, which reimburses states for refugee-related expenses, are indeed part of a single appropriation within HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and can be internally redirected.

Of course, this money shortage won’t last long as the Biden team will simply allocate billions more (and probably already has) to accelerate the process of changing America by changing the people.

Unforeseen consequences of years of conflation….

But, perhaps an unforeseen result of years of selling the media and the public on the false notion that the UACs (Biden says we aren’t supposed to call them Unaccompanied Alien Children) are legal refugees is that furious tax paying Americans are going to (already are!) lump the illegal alien teens in with legal refugees making it much harder for the contractors to sell communities with the idea of welcoming more legal refugees.

In other words, most Americans think too many are coming no matter what category they fall within. 

For those of you who have gotten this far in this morning’s post and are thinking that you don’t give a damn about the bureaucratic details and are saying to yourselves—we are admitting too many migrants of all stripes while paying for them out of our wallets—stop reading now.

Otherwise, know this, and keep reading.

Even our so-called political leaders don’t know what they are talking about and are adding to the confusion, or  dodging and weaving.

In my post on Friday about the Tennessee uproar, the conflation issue raised its ugly head as politicians scurried to look like they were doing something to push back against the Biden migrant dump.

Good for two writers to begin to unravel the mess.

Green apparently fell for the “conflation.” Editor: I sure would like to see a little better preparation by a Tea Party endorsed candidate. Some of the best experts in the country on refugee resettlement are right there in his own back yard. Here is an idea! Call them before looking foolish.

A lack of legal understanding by a lawmaker is of concern.

Jumping on the bandwagon is US Rep. Mark Green who apparently thinks he is doing something with a bill that will go nowhere in Nancy Pelosi’s House.

For politicians, it is the outrage that matters!

Pat Hamsa writing at Tennessee’s Daily Roll Call calls out Green for adding to the confusion by referring to the UACs as refugees!

Is Mark Green Conflating Illegal Aliens With Refugees?

It’s anybody’s best guess why Green’s explanation of his bill, H.R.3500, doesn’t match what he’s telling folks it’s supposed to do.

Green’s press release about his new bill, “Leads Fight to Block Refugee Resettlement Without State Consent”states in part:

“Last week, in the dead of night, unaccompanied migrant children were flown into Tennessee without our approval or consent. I am alarmed that the Biden Administration would use taxpayer resources to transport refugees into Tennessee without transparency or coordination with state authorities. This overreach and secrecy has to stop.”

In a recent interview with WRCBtv Chattanooga, Green said that he drafted the bill in response to what happened in Chattanooga and that “this bill would mandate permission of the state before they move illegal migrants to Tennessee.”

Then why does he call them refugees in the headline to his press release?

More here.

Then this….

I am amazed at the amount of real research a writer at a local Tennessee paper put into this story attempting to unravel the conflation confusion.  It is so rare to see links to solid information to back the reporting.

From Wyatt Massey at the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Massey points out that Governor Lee is on record supporting more legal refugees to Tennessee while acting outraged by the arrival of the ‘children,’ even as during his tenure, the Chattanooga facility for the ‘children’ was licensed.

Refugee, migrant shelters for children referenced in Tennessee debate are separate under federal rules

Controversy in the past week about the movement of migrant children through Tennessee and into a Chattanooga shelter licensed by the state in May 2020 has led to confusion about the immigration status of the children housed in Southeast Tennessee and those video recorded exiting a plane in Chattanooga.

Gov. Bill Lee opposed Trump’s efforts to give states a greater say when the feds placed refugees in a state. He wants more legal refugees, but is distancing himself from the very unpopular drop-off of UACs, so it is to his advantage to make a distinction between the two programs.

Gov. Bill Lee has previously been criticized for his strong words against President Joe Biden administration policies related to the unaccompanied minors after announcing in 2019 the state would continue resettling refugees.

[….]

The governor faced criticism from some conservatives at the time for continuing to accept refugees. Lee cited his Christian faith, calling it a “moral obligation” and a “biblical mandate” for the state to remain in the program.

This is a separate program from federal efforts to care for unaccompanied children who, after they cross the border, are initially in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. ICE and CBP have three days to move the children away from a temporary border shelter to a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Children stay in ORR shelters, like the one in Chattanooga, for about a month while caseworkers locate and vet a sponsor, usually a relative, to take custody of the child until immigration proceedings can begin.

[….]

On May 19, WRCB aired video of children getting off a plane at the Wilson Air Center to be transported to shelters or placed with sponsors throughout the region. The video sparked outrage from members of Tennessee’s congressional delegation and Lee, who said he had declined a Biden administration request to house unaccompanied minors in the state.

However, documents from the state show Lee’s own Department of Children’s Services licensed the shelter near downtown Chattanooga to house “unaccompanied minors” in May 2020.

On Monday, the Times Free Press asked Lee why his administration approved the license for the facility, conducted monthly inspections and issued monthly reports if the governor was then raising concerns about a lack of transparency over migrant children and saying he declined a federal request to house unaccompanied children.

Although the Times Free Press asked specifically about the migrant children, the governor said the Times Free Press was conflating unaccompanied minors with refugees.

Keep reading. Massey even digs into the finances of the contractor, the Baptiste Group from Georgia, that is housing the UACs in Tennessee.  Good work!

Now, after all that, if you made it this far, I suspect you are saying:

Conflation or not there is just too darn much poverty, cultural conflict and potential crime and terrorism being brought into the country and I don’t want to pay for it!

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!

Fargo, North Dakota: Deputy Mayor Surprised to Learn Refugees Still Arriving

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor:  I started this post yesterday, but couldn’t finish it as RRW went down for awhile making me very nervous.  I don’t know what that was about, but it seems to be working fine today.  Sure hope you didn’t experience any problems visiting.

 

I told you back in January that Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota had filed for bankruptcy after getting mired in some affordable housing scheme that is too complex to bother with here.

In the process they are losing their fancy and expensive building, a building I saw in my 2016 travels to the state.

North Dakota: Lutheran Refugee Contractor Closes its Doors

So the assumption was that refugee flow into the state was going to be halted at least for awhile.

You might recall that North Dakota’s Republican governor did NOT support President Trump’s effort at reforming the Refugee Admissions Program by allowing local and state governments to have some say in the process of determining the target sites for resettlement.

Here is what I said in December of 2019:

North Dakota Republican Governor is a Definite Yes for More Refugees

That brings us to the latest breaking news as Fargo’s Valley News Live says that refugees are being placed in Fargo:

FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn said Tuesday that he sat in on a phone call in which Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services stated that they had resettled approximately 25 refugees in Fargo-Moorhead. Deputy Mayor Piepkorn shared concern that he had not been made aware of the resettlement and he questioned whether the City of Fargo was notified prior to rehoming the refugees.

Too funny! NOT! The woman who ran LSSND as it was financially crashing is now working for the governor!

Questions have been raised as to how the action was coordinated. Prior to filing bankruptcy, Lutheran Social Services (LSS) was tasked with refugee resettlement in the state.

Former LSS Director, Jessica Thomasson, now works as the Executive Policy Director at ND Department of Human Services.

The country of origin of the refugees was not made known. In a recent interview with Chris Berg, Gov. Burgum stated that he was open to resettling refugees in the state but he was unaware of any plan to resettle undocumented immigrants from the southern border.

Be sure to watch Chris Berg’s interview with Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn where Piepkorn says he doubts anyone was notified and mentioned specifically the school system.

In response to Deputy Mayor Piepkorn….

President Trump’s failed reform initiative sought to give local governments an opportunity to review plans for resettlement in their jurisdictions with a yes or no sign-off, governors would also have to approve or disapprove the plan.

Shockingly, most Republican governors, including North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, did not back the President’s efforts to shore-up their Tenth Amendment states’ rights.

Here is one of many, many posts on the feckless Republican governors:

White House Supposedly Blindsided as Republican Governors Cave on Refugee Resettlement

 

At present local governments are supposed to be consulted, but I will bet that the resettlement agency only talked to friendly “stakeholders” in the process of preparing an “abstract” that must be submitted to the US State Department in advance of placements in a given location.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/north-dakota/articles/2021-01-25/burgum-state-to-take-over-refugee-resettlement-after-lss

Any elected official should be able to request permission to attend a stakeholder meeting and be permitted to see a recent R & P Abstract  prepared by  a local resettlement contractor.

See one of my many posts on the topic here in January 2020.

Of course, in the case of ND (with no agency operating at the moment), one would most likely go to the state’s Department of Human Services for the most recent Abstract and a schedule of stakeholder meetings.

LOL! that would be the agency now headed by former LSS CEO Thomasson.

 

One final note:  For years we were able to see which refugees went to which towns and cities on an almost daily basis and all the way back to 2002. That database is no longer available. It was shuttered during Trump’s tenure.  The feds claimed the website is being overhauled.

Except for the most recent arrivals in the present fiscal year, we are left completely in the dark about the numbers, nationalities and resettlement locations of thousands and thousands of refugee arrivals.

That tiny bit of information is available here.

Contractors Scramble to Find Housing for Refugees in Low Income Neighborhoods

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They have been doing that all along as far as I can tell.

Now we are told that the post-pandemic housing market is tight and finding housing for impoverished people is going to get even tougher.

Just what America needs now—more cities that are tinderboxes due to lack of social cohesion and ready to blow.

From Yahoo News:

U.S. housing shortage presents new challenge for refugee resettlement

When the White House announced earlier this month that it would increase the number of refugees granted admission into the United States this fiscal year by four times the previous target, to 62,500 people, reversing course from President Biden’s initial plan, immigrant advocates applauded the decision. Yet groups working to help resettle refugees are now facing another new challenge: finding housing for new migrants.

Rajbhandari — hmmm! a little dissension in the ‘humanitarian’ industry?

Sheryl Rajbhandari, the founder of Heartfelt Tidbits, a Cincinnati-based organization that has helped resettle over 50,000 [their website says 40,000 but who is counting!–ed] people in western Ohio since 2008, worries that refugees will be pushed into inappropriate housing.

The government-approved resettlement agencies*** that sponsor refugees and provide services for the first 90 days will often place them in public housing with high crime rates.

Those agencies “want the money for each individual they resettle. So it’s like ‘We don’t really care if we move people,’” she said.

[….]

Once refugees are in the United States, a resettlement agency is responsible for finding and paying for housing for them for an initial period. In a real estate market driven to new highs by the pandemic, finding that housing has become increasingly difficult.

To be clear, the “resettlement agency,” one of the nine federal contractors*** doesn’t use its own money to pay for the initial housing, it uses your money that is passed through federal grants and contracts to their coffers.

Low-income and potentially dangerous housing may expose already vulnerable families to crime, and it can also restrict those families from getting the resources they need, Rajbhandari argued.

“If it’s a high-crime area, folks don’t want to go into that area,” she said. “So folks who might be able to provide assistance don’t feel comfortable driving into places where there are people being shot at and drugs are being dealt.”

Not so subtle pitch for more of your tax dollars to go to refugee resettlement.

The concerns over housing come as organizations working with refugees deal with two challenges: a sudden increase in the cap for people eligible for resettlement and limited government resources in place to help them.

[….]

…there are currently 35,000 refugees who have already passed security checks and have been cleared for entry into the U.S., and there are another 100,000 in the pipeline.

Independent resettlement organizations around the country are optimistic about reaching the 62,500 target, however difficult to achieve. The challenge now will be finding them appropriate housing.

[….]

Miry Whitehill https://www.momtivist.com/miry

Miry Whitehill, the founder of Miry’s List, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that assists families with the resettlement process, said this is a problem that goes deeper than just housing.

The cost of resettlement loans and plane tickets means many refugees enter the United States already owing money they must repay.

“Something that I think is really important to mention here is that refugees are starting out in debt,” Whitehill said. “Every refugee, they’re required to sign a financial contract agreeing to reimburse the resettlement agency for the cost of their flights.”

Whitehill isn’t telling the whole story on those airfare loans.

IOM bags at airports are the tip-off! Refugees Arriving!

The resettlement agency does collect the loan money from the refugees (when they can get it!), but it was your money, your tax dollars flowing through the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration that shelled out the money in the first place.

When one of the big nine does collect the airfare loan reimbursements, they get to keep a quarter of it for themselves, some years resulting in over a million in extra petty cash.  Judicial Watch attempted to find out exactly how much was collected, but got the runaround.

I digress….the takeaway from this story is that Biden’s promised high number of refugees will be placed in crime ridden slums adding to the tensions already evident in most US cities unless you, the taxpayers of America stop being so greedy and spend more money on nicer housing for New Americans (because the US has run out of our own poor people).

Of course, the other option, but never discussed, is to not ‘welcome’ more refugees at this challenging time.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!

 

Biden Administration to Pay Refugee Contractors in Advance, No Matter How Many Refugees Arrive

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is big and it is buried many column inches into a story at Business Insider entitled:

Biden said the US was committed to accepting more refugees. So where are they?

As longtime readers know, the US Refugee Admissions Program has traditionally paid its nine contractors*** on a per refugee client basis.

I am speculating Biden said: Here is the deal! You shut up about the low number of admissions for FY21 and we will send you millions $$$ IN ADVANCE for FY22.

So, naturally during the Trump years, when refugee arrivals were low, the contractors were not raking in the federal bucks (your tax dollars) at the rate they did when Obama, for instance, was President.

They whined and complained about having to cut staff and close offices and now they want to get up and running before the promised 125,000 begin arriving in October.

They are getting ready in Idaho! where a controversial resettlement agency there had its budget (waaahh!) halved by Trump.

Although a good bit of the Business Insider article is a rehash of the recent Biden flip, flop, flipping on the refugee ceiling for this fiscal year, the article is nevertheless chockfull of useful information.

For the sake of time, which I am running out of this morning, here are just a few snips:

A spokesperson for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the Health and Human Services Department, said the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee admissions had hit the country’s humanitarian infrastructure hard.

“[H]umanitarian infrastructure” is code for government contractors’ budgets.

“The steady decrease in arrivals during the previous four years has resulted in decreased resettlement capacity at the local level,” they said. Between 2017 and 2021, “approximately one-third of the network had to close.”

[….]

That has raised the question: Can the US actually resettle as many refugees as Biden would like?

[….]

Officials at US refugee agencies said they would be able to meet the needs of any refugees sent their way. Rebuilding their capacity to do so is a hassle, but it has already begun. New staff are being hired, and new offices will soon be opened — the when and where hinging on support from local communities.  [They are out scouting for fresh territory!—ed]

Okay, here it is for all of you refugee policy wonks!  As I said, this is big!

Alicia Wrenn of HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)

Wrenn, of the resettlement agency HIAS, said her group would soon be receiving from the State Department “capacity building funds so that we can actually start to hire up and train people for arrivals.”

LOL! “agency partners!” They try so hard to avoid using the word contractors!

For the first time, the government will also be paying its agency partners and their partners on the local level ahead of time and more consistently.

“It has historically always been a per capita system,” she said. Before, “as arrivals fell, staff volume fell, because that’s the way it worked.” Now the plan is to provide a separate budget for the staff — social workers, language and cultural experts, educators — that will not be based, after the fact, on the exact number of refugees that agency ended up serving.

Read on for more information.

And, a shout-out to a refugee policy wonk I know who predicted that this was what they are doing during this time when refugee arrivals are still low.

Can you imagine the competition going on among the nine as they scramble for the Biden bucks no longer tethered to the number of refugees each contractor can manage.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!