Trump is on target to beat Obama numbers in two of O’s fiscal years!
There are some fascinating statistics at the Refugee Processing Center for those of you interested in getting the facts.
Below is a screenshot graph at Wrapsnet showing this year and ten previous fiscal years. It doesn’t yet include the month of April, but checking that number separately I found we admitted 3,316 in April. So add that to the 39,098 on the chart (for the end of March) we see that we are now up to 42,414. That is the highest number for this time in the fiscal year (FY17 ends on September 30th) than in any of the previous ten fiscal years. If Trump reaches the 60,000 refugee admissions mark (900 a week would get him there), for the remainder of fiscal year, he will have surpassed Obama admissions in FY11 and FY12!
I especially want to direct your attention to the column for ceiling and the one for actual admissions. Note that we never reach the ceiling (although Obama came awfully close in his last year as he was driven to admit thousands of Syrian Muslims).
See that Obama never set a ceiling anywhere 110,000 until his final months in office. Why?
The average admissions in the previous ten years is around 66,000 and if Trump’s State Department does bring in 900 a week as they said they would, here, then Trump will admit just over 60,000 this fiscal year bypassing his supposed reset of the ceiling to 50,000. If Trump reaches the 60,000 mark he will have surpassed Obama admissions in FY11 and FY12! I don’t remember any crying and moaning, or Obama bashing, in the media from the federal refugee contractors in those years.
Here is the chart. Remember the ceiling is just that—a ceiling!Nothing in refugee law says the President must bring in that number!
The chart has not been updated for April yet. However, looking up data separately, we admitted 3,316 refugees last month. So if you tally up the columns you will see that as of the end of April (7 months in to the fiscal year), we have admitted more refugees, at this point in the year, than any of the previous ten fiscal years.
Since Inauguration day (as of today), Donald Trump’s Dept. of State has admitted 12,594 refugees. 43% of those are Muslim refugees from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and even Burma (406 are Rohingya Muslims).
The so-called budget deal being ironed-out to fund the government to the end of the fiscal year commits billions to the refugee program. You might think that Obama was back in the White House and that Donald Trump never campaigned on slowing the flow of refugees from countries that produce terrorists. President who? This budget “deal” makes me wonder if Obama is still in the Oval Office!
I can’t make heads or tails out of the budget bill language, but here Alex Pfeiffer at the Daily Callertells us it is full steam ahead with refugees because if they have your money, you can bet it will be spent.
It isn’t too late….
Trump could flex his muscles this week and say to Congress, go back to the drawing boards.
He could say: we will do another continuing resolution for a couple of weeks until you get it right. (After all, it isn’t just with the refugee program that Congress is dissing the Prez).
You may have seen the Dems gloating about their apparent budget victory yesterday.
And, the RINOs are pretty slick too! Look at it this way, the Dems and the RINOs join forces to make sure almost none of Trump’s campaign promises are fulfilled, voters blame it on Trump and Trump becomes a one-term President. The only question is, does Trump get that and will he show some muscle and fight back right now!
Here is what the Daily Callersays about refugees:
The budget deal to keep the government funded through September agreed upon by congressional leaders would continue funding the refugee resettlement program.
An agreement on the omnibus budget was reached by leaders from both parties Sunday, as a government shutdown looms on Friday. The proposed spending agreement includes no money to construct the president’s border wall, and continues funding Planned Parenthood.
[….]
The bill would include a total of $3 billion towards migration and refugee assistance, which is roughly the same that was spent in Fiscal Year 2016. It would also include $50 million towards the emergency refugee and migration assistance fund, which is also the same amount spent in the previous fiscal year.
With President Trump’s executive orders temporarily blocking refugee resettlement held up in court, 12,397 refugees have been resettled during his presidency.***
Pay close attention to the last line here, and below.
This is why I have been saying that Trump did not have to include changing the ceiling or language about a moratorium in the Executive Order. He has the power to stay anywhere under the ceiling! The Refugee Act of 1980 tells the President to set the ceiling in advance of the fiscal year, before October 1, and if he wants to raise the ceiling during the year he must inform Congress, but he does not have to reach the ceiling—few Presidents in recent times have reached the ceiling—or even inform Congress that he will be coming in under it!
The Obama administration set a goal in September of 110,000 refugees admitted in Fiscal Year 2017. A State Department official told The Daily Caller in early April that “this language represents a ceiling on refugee admissions – it is not a mandatory target.”
It isn’t too late for Trump to quietly institute the 120-day moratorium, as he originally planned, to assess whether our security screening is adequate. It gets much harder if the agencies are awash in money that they want to send out to government contractors!
***See my post here from a couple of days ago about Trump’s refugee admissions.
I was pretty excited toreport herethat we were stepping up deportations of illegal alien/criminal Somalis, that thousands would be removed. But, now I see that even that administration effort is really not much to write home about!
The news here, if it is accurate, is that ICE won’t arrest illegal Somalis (who are not in detention) at their homes or work places. Already, “sensitive places” such as schools, places of worship and hospitals are off limits. Trump’s ambassador to Somalia (Stephen Schwartz) gives Somalia’s new Prez a special gift. A better gift might be to give Somalia back its people instead of hauling them by the thousands to the US! We will see how many of their illegal aliens they will repatriate as well! Photo: http://tribunist.com/news/american-ambassador-gives-make-somalia-great-again-hat-to-somalian-president/
So are we expected to believe that federal agents are going to wait on the streets to nab them coming and going from home to mosque? Only, if we hire a lot more agents!
Over the many years I’ve written RRW there would be flurries of pronouncements that Somalis in the country illegally would be sent back to Somalia and each time there would follow squishy, mealy-mouthed discussions about how can we do such a thing (send people back) because Somalia is still a hellhole!
Is Somalia ever NOT going to be a hellhole? Is this administration headed that way (to weakness and squishy talk) again? In case you missed it, Trump has admitted 1,359 supposedly persecuted (by whom?) Somalis since inauguration day.
According to Wrapsnet (as of today) the US ‘welcomed’ 5,167 Somalis in FY17 (so far). And, we are supposed to be excited by the removal of 237 of them in that same time frame? Net gain is 4,930 since October of 2016!
Somalia’s ambassador to the U.S., Ahmed Isse Awad, says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has informed his embassy the agency will no longer arrest illegal Somali immigrants in their homes or at their workplaces. However, federal authorities have not confirmed that there has been any shift in policy.
Awad said the agency reached the decision after his embassy expressed concern to immigration authorities regarding the recent arrests of 11 Somalis in Virginia, Minnesota and Georgia.
“Once we found out that 11 Somalis were arrested from their homes for removal, we thought the arrests looked [like] profiling and targeting Somalis. Then we submitted our concern to ICE and asked clarification,” Awad told VOA’s Somali service. “Fortunately, they came back to us tell us that they would no longer arrest Somalis from their homes or at their workplaces.”
[….]
However officials have previously said that ICE does not have specific exemptions in place for certain groups of people. The agency policy currently directs that anyone in violation of immigration laws may be subject to arrest, detention and removal from the United States.
Authorities say the agency’s policy directs personnel to avoid conducting enforcement activists at “sensitive places” such as schools, places of worship and hospitals, unless they have prior approval from a supervisor.
The U.S. government said almost 5,000 Somali nationals in the United States face deportation orders.
“As of April 1, 2017, there were 4,801 Somali nationals with final orders of removal,” ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy said last week. “As of that same date, 237 Somali nationals have been removed to Somalia in fiscal year 2017.”
[….]
Most of the Somalis facing final orders of removal are not in detention centers and are unlikely to be removed in the near term because their cases are making their way through the system. [I thought they said most had failed their asylum bids?—ed]
Since Somalia’s embassy in Washington reopened in November 2015, the ambassador said, about 170 Somali immigrants who either ran afoul of U.S. law or had their asylum applications rejected have been deported to Mogadishu, the Somali capital.
Most of those previously deported had applied for, but been denied, political asylum in the United States, he added. Another group of Somali applicants whose requests for asylum have been denied are now in detention centers or prisons, awaiting deportation.
Big Whoop!
Fewer than 300 Somalis are scheduled to be moved out in the next couple of months, Awad told VOA, adding that his embassy was awaiting information from U.S. authorities on who the deportees were and when they would depart.
And, as soon as they get that information, they will tell those Somalis to head to Canada ASAP!
See our category ‘Trump Watch’ for more on what Trump has changed and what he hasn’t changed regarding refugees.
This (below) is a comment (in response to Thursday’s post) that I received from a diehard Trump supporter, not the first to send a comment like this.
So let me be clear. I have been writing about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for ten years come this July. I was also a Trump supporter from day one. I even had an opportunity to tell him briefly what was wrong with the US Refugee Program in May of 2015. Nancy took offense at my mention of Ivanka’s position on Syrian refugees. See what Ivanka (the expert) said about refugees: http://www.ajc.com/news/national/ivanka-trump-reportedly-differs-with-president-trump-syrian-refugees/Egi1VwnovaeRvmjllhwncN/ But, someone has to be willing to NOT PULL PUNCHES and tell the public where he is going wrong on this subject which I happen to know a lot about. (Just a tad more than Ivanka knows!)
For the umpteenth time, Trump did not have to include the US RAP in an Executive Order that was stopped by the judges. It is a separate issue from the ‘travel ban.’ The Trump team has the legal power to stop the flow of refugees altogether IF THEY WANTED TO! (Now they have this handy excuse which Nancy has bought, hook, line and sinker—it is all about the judges!)
Using the liberal judges as as excuse, the Trump Administration is admitting an average number of refugees to the US at great expense to taxpayers and risking our security by including large numbers of unscreened Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Rohingya and Somalis. Nevermind that he said many times while campaigning for office that he wouldn’t do that!
I don’t want to hear anything about all the bigger issues Trump is dealing with!
There is nothing bigger than changing the demographic, cultural and religious makeup of America. That is irreversible.
We can fix Obamacare and our tax system AFTER immigration is controlled!
The most benign explanation for what, at the moment, appears to be a flip-flop by the Trump team is that they haven’t hired anyone tough enough to rein-in the bureaucrats at the Department of State (which doesn’t look good for Trump, the great manager, either!). That is not to say, they won’t get their act together eventually, but right now someone has to tell them they are screwing up! Although I am not in her class, at least Ann Coulter is willing to tell Trump he is screwing up on immigration, in her case the wall with her new daily report on how many miles of the wall are being built each day—so far zero!
(See my report in the right hand sidebar of how many refugees Trump is admitting.)
Here is what Nancy and others (some more diplomatically) are telling me:
Shut up Ann, our man Trump can do no wrong!
Hi Ann,
While I enjoy your site, I do take exception to the Trump refugees article you posted. I think the same article should have been directed to the Ninth Circuit court, not Trump. It would appear to me that he has been trying …. and trying … to prevent this only to be thwarted again and again by a court that get’s literally 80% of it’s judgments overturned. Dare I say I’d get fired if only 20% of my work was accurate.
Also – the dig to Ivanka wasn’t fair either. Stop with the daddy comments – it’s classless and offensive. It should be beneath you to make such asinine comments. What she SAID was that it should be part of the discussion, not part of the solution. To me, a very diplomatic statement and perhaps way of getting a long-stalemated conversation going for real resolution. Perhaps you’re the dumb-dumb here.
My guidance is to stick to the issues and not the nonsense if you truly want resolution on this paramount matter. Thank you for listening
Regards Nancy
Thanks for listening Nancy!
One more thing, it is a wonderful thing to write a blog with no boss and for no financial gain to myself, because it doesn’t matter one bit to me whether I lose readers who don’t like what I say!
This post is filed in ‘Comments worth noting.’ Click here to see what other readers have said over the years.
Since we are coming up on 100 days I was anxious to see how Trump was doing with his campaign promise to (at least) put a moratorium on the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days to review how refugees are vetted and look to assure “extreme vetting” was put in place. My guess about the flip-flop: His friends in the hotel and food production industries told him they needed this steady supply of low wage refugee laborers whose wages you supplement with welfare payments. Great business model!
Ho hum! Isn’t happening! And, I don’t want to hear of one defender who says he was stymied by judges. He never had to place a refugee slowdown in an Executive Order! The Refugee Act of 1980 gives the President enormous powers.
Here (below) is a screenshot map of where the 12,218 were placed since Inauguration Day up until this morning’s data at Wrapsnet.
This puts the number for the fiscal year, as of today, at 42,235.
Trump also said he was capping the number for the year at 50,000, but at the present rate of admission, he will surpass 60,000 (an average number since 9/11). Top resettlement countries included:
Burma (1,497) 401 of these are Rohingya Muslims who, like Syrians, cannot be vetted.
DR Congo (1,866) We are well on our way to reach 50,000 we promised the UN we would scatter across America.
Iraq (1,503) Over 122,000 have been admitted since 2009.
Somalia (1,359) We have admitted well over 100,000 over past 20 years, will it ever end?
Syria (1,472) Remember Trump said he would stop them completely, even said he would send some back, ha! ha!
How many Trump refugees did you get?
Alaska got 23 while the diversity-lovers in Hawaii got a big fat zero (again!). LOL! Of course, DC got none. And, for new readers wondering about Wyoming, it is the only state in the nation to have never joined the program.
Biggest tests for Trump come in September.
If he throws billions of taxpayer dollars to the refugee industry in the 2018 budget and doesn’t drastically cut refugee admissions for the upcoming year, then we will know for sure that the United Nations/US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed. Endnote: I was just reminded of the story from yesterday about Ivanka Trump’s views on Syrians, here. Sure hope Daddy isn’t listening to Ivanka (again!).
