Just a quick mention so that you know that one advanced country after another is tightening borders and getting its illegal migrants sent home. We reported on Denmark yesterday, here. Heartburn at the UN?
Here is the Washington Post, but a similar story can be found at many media outlets:
India deports Rohingya Muslims, drawing U.N. ire
NEW DELHI — India deported seven Rohingya Muslims who had fled their native Myanmar back to their country Thursday, sparking concerns that the move could endanger their lives and violate international laws that protect refugees.
Rohingya protesters in New Delhi in 2017. Indian government says they have ties to terror groups. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/india-rohingya-muslims-terror-ties-170918134840406.html
The move comes as India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has escalated its rhetorical attacks on migrants who have entered the country illegally.
The party’s powerful president, Amit Shah, has repeatedly promised to deport all such migrants, and portrayed them as a security threat. At a public rally in September, he likened them to “termites.”
The northeastern state of Assam, where the seven men were imprisoned since 2012, has been ramping up efforts to identify and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“If someone enters the country illegally, we will send them back,” Bharat Bhushan Babu, spokesman for India’s Home Affairs Ministry, said. When asked if that included people fleeing violence in their native countries, he said, “This is applicable to everyone.”
[….]
An additional 40,000 Rohingya refugees are thought to be in India, although only 18,000 are registered with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Many of India’s Rohingya refugees came before the most recent wave of violence in 2017. A statement from the UNHCR said the seven men deported Thursday were not registered with the agency.
Just so you know, Rohingya Muslims are being resettled in the US by the Trump Administration, see here. In June, Rohingya were the top ethnic group of Muslims we were admitting.
Leave it to the refugee industry’s public relations apparatus to get a story planted in the Kansas City Starjust as Donald Trump arrived in the state next door for a rally for Kansas Republican candidates including gubernatorial candidate, a leading immigration control advocate, Kris Kobach. One story is here.
(This Somali family lives in Kansas City, Missouri)
Here is the headlinewith the usual story line (family happy to be in America, only wish Dad was with them).
As Trump cuts refugee numbers, outlook dim for father to join KC Muslim family of 9
But, why wasn’t Dad with them and caring for them in Kenya (a safe country btw)?
The family arrived from Kenya in 2017 to cheers from local advocates for more refugee admissions. https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/fox-24/somali-family-of-nine-touches-down-in-kansas-city-mo/653945636
Somali refugee Sahra Hassan Absuge and her eight children today enjoy what they could only dream of two years ago.
A two-story house. A couple of jobs. Schools. Donated appliances. [Food stamps and Medicaid fills the gap says the story.—-ed]
“I am so lucky,” Absuge said. “It’s by the grace of God that we are here.”
All that’s missing is her husband.
Also a refugee from Somalia, he seeks to one day join his Kansas City family after four years of being separated, trapped in another war zone. But chances for a reunion anytime soon appear slim, given ever-deepening cuts in the number of refugees allowed into the U.S.
Absuge and her children barely got in themselves.
Twenty months ago, dozens of cheering supporters at Kansas City International Airport greeted the family after they had squeezed through a tightening slipknot on refugee travel.
Continue here for all the happy talk and mention of their resettlement agency—Della Lamb—a Methodist group, a subcontractor of the Ethiopian Community Development Council (one of nine federal resettlement contractors that work for the US State Department).
Then a lament about a slowdown in family reunification:
At Della Lamb, Hyde and director of refugee resettlement Abdul Bakar could think of resettling only one Muslim on the Missouri side in the past year.
Absuge’s husband, the father of all eight of the children, is Muslim.
“There used to a good pipeline for family reunification,” said Judy Akers, Della Lamb’s executive director. “But there hasn’t been much spoken of that recently.”
Family reunification suspended in 2008 for Somalia….
Longtime readers may remember that the US State Department had to suspend the whole family reunification program for Somalis beginning in 2008 due to massive fraud in the P-3 (family reunification) program, see here. The suspension lasted several years.
I sure hope Homeland Security is doing some robust vetting of Dad. He left their Nairobi village in 2014? (Someone check the age of the youngest child!). But other news reports say they were living in a UN camp.
He went to Sudan looking for work in the middle of civil unrest there? And, then instead of returning to his family in a safe Kenya he ‘flees’ to Uganda. WTH!
Dad then ‘finds his family’ on YouTube videos?
He could have found them if he had returned to safe Kenya from his sojourn in Sudan instead of hotfooting it to Uganda!
KC Star continues….
….father left their Nairobi refugee village in 2014 to seek work in Sudan. He instead encountered homelessness, civil war and hunger before fleeing to Uganda. When his family resettled in America, his wife didn’t know if Abdullahi was alive or dead. [Really! Or did this family have a better shot of getting in to the US as women and children only?—ed]
Wow! Dad found after the family got to KC!
The father, through friends in Nairobi, learned of the family’s whereaboutswith the help of the internet and those YouTube videos. “Search ‘refugees’…and our family of nine pops up,” Absuge said through the interpreter.
For those who want to read the whole long (anti-Trump propaganda) story,click here.
Sobia Siddiqui, communications coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Texas Chapter, said the cuts are discriminatory.
“Our president ran his campaign and one of his strongest and most vocal points is that he called for a ban on all Muslims,” said Siddiqui.
She said there are refugee families in Houston who can’t be reunited with family members facing dangerous situations abroad because of the ban.
“There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about if people will be able to have their families rejoin them back here in the United States or even in Houston,” said Dan Stoecker, CEO of The Alliance, which offers refugee services in Houston.
The Alliance is a subcontractor of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, the smallest, and likely most vulnerable to a federal budget cut, of the nine refugee contractors that monopolize all resettlement to the US.
In 2016, I excitedly reported that the State of Texas withdrew from the US Refugee Admissions Program, but you can see that without a follow-up legal challenge by the state it was a meaningless move. The contractors now run the program in the state!
A week ago it was Cargill in Ft. Morgan, CO recalling beef that was believed to be responsible for at least one death and scores of illnesses from E.Coli. (See here that a Tennessee family is suing Cargill!).
We recently told you about Cargill herewhen they settled a religious discrimination suit with Somali refugee workers.
JBS Swift is headquartered in Greeley, CO. I took this photo in the summer of 2016 on my tour of refugee-overloaded towns. See here how worried JBS was when Trump lowered the refugee cap. Big Meat braces for refugee shortage: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/02/09/bloomberg-trumps-refugee-ceiling-of-50000-could-hurt-big-meat/
This week it is JBS Swift headquartered in Greeley, CO that is recalling even more than Cargill.
Both JBS and Cargill hire extensively from the refugee population with the help of the nine federal resettlement contractors*** and the US State Department.
JBS in massive beef recall over 16-state Salmonella outbreak with 57 illnesses
Raw ground beef is the probable source of a new 16-state Salmonella outbreak involving 57 illnesses, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Thursday, along with a massive recall.
The recall is for more than 6.5 million pounds of beef products from JBS Tolleson Inc. in Tolleson, AZ. The traceback investigation by FSIS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state health and agriculture agencies have identified JBS as the common supplier of the various raw, non-intact beef products.
[….]
Consumption of food contaminated with Salmonella can cause salmonellosis, one of the most common bacterial foodborne illnesses. The most common symptoms of salmonellosis are diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and fever within 12 to 72 hours after eating the contaminated product. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days. Most people recover without treatment. In some persons, however, the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. Older adults, infants, and persons with weakened immune systems are more likely to develop a severe illness. Individuals concerned about an illness should contact their health care provider.
[….]
Greeley, CO-based JBS USA is the American food processing company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of JBS S.A., a Brazilian company that is the world’s largest beef producer.
***Don’t miss this 2017 post! Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is one of the nine federally funded resettlement contractors.
Foreign-owned Big Meat hires Lutherans to help them find and retain refugee labor
That is the crux of this story and not in my wildest dreams did I think that money was directly changing hands between the meat industry and a federal refugee contractor, in this case Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service headquartered in Baltimore, MD.
“Whatever that number is, it will absolutely be driven principally by the capacity of my agency and the law enforcement, security, and vetting practices.”
(Francis Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS))
Granted we are only 4 days into the month of October so things could change tomorrow or the next day, but so far zero refugees have been placed since the new fiscal year began on Monday (October 1).
Here we hear from Voice of America and a distressed resettlement lobbyist about the disappointment in the refugee industry.
The Trump administration has missed the end-of-fiscal-year deadline to set the maximum number of refugees that will be allowed in the United States in the next 12 months.
An “extraordinarily disappointed” Mary Giovagnoli of the Refugee Council USA, the lobbying arm for the refugee contractors.
“Consultations and the subsequent Presidential Determination (PD) normally take place by Oct. 1. However, on some occasions, the consultations and subsequent PD have been completed later,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement to VOA. “We do not expect this will have any operational impact on the Refugee Admissions Program.”
The agency declined a request from VOA to provide a timeline for the consultations.
[….]
Last month, the administration proposed a record-low refugee ceiling for the 2019 fiscal year of 30,000 refugees. By law, Congress must be consulted about the cap before a final number can be issued.
“We are extraordinarily disappointed that the administration has failed to honor the spirit and the letter of the law when it comes to consultations,” said Mary Giovagnoli. executive director of Refugee Council USA. “For two years in a row now, the administration has just failed to take it seriously.”
President Donald Trump has dramatically cut refugee arrivals to the United States since taking office.
[….]
Cissna: operational realities will dictate the final number.
Francis Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said at a conference Monday that new vetting measures have increased processing times for refugee admissions.
He added that the suggested ceiling of 30,000 for FY2019 takes into account the “operational realities” of those measures for “national security and public safety.”
“The number is not final yet. The president has not signed the proclamation. Whatever that number is, it will absolutely be driven principally by the capacity of my agency and the law enforcement, security, and vetting practices,” Cissna said.
