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!
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!
CEO Harpstead pulls down a salary and benefits package of over $300,000 annually to head the $91 million a year operation. Link to Form 990 below.
If they succeed they will be placing 27 more than they did in FY17 which ended on the 30th of September.
Checking Wrapsnet, here is a summary (below) of the refugees (mostly Muslims) who were placed by a subcontractor (Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota) of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service mothership located in Baltimore.
Refugees who went to St. Cloud in direct resettlement (there are no reliable numbers on secondary migrants) last year are below.
Secondary migrants are refugees placed elsewhere who migrate (legally!) on their own to another town or city.
Minnesota does have the highest number of secondary migrants in the country as we learned a few years ago when such information was published.
In FY17 St. Cloud received 198 of the 1,623 refugees resettled in the entire state.
Burma (4)
Ethiopia (19)
Iraq (9)
Somalia (166)
St. Cloud had the second highest Somali resettlement after Minneapolis (364).
Here (below) is the FY18 R & P Abstract for St. Cloud.
This is the document that should be made available to the public BEFORE it goes to Washington. These numbers are determined by Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota (Harpstead’s organization) with the help of “stakeholders.” Stakeholders should include your local elected officials!
Normally this document is kept from the general public, but we were fortunate enough to obtain it. Knowledge is power and that is the primary reason there is so little transparency with refugee resettlement. The feds and the contractors don’t want citizens to have all the facts!
I maintain that if the program is a good one for the community, they should be able to sell it with all the facts on the table!
Below are screenshots of the pages. Serious students should go to this post where I explained some of the numbers, categories etc. But, I am far from an expert!
Documents like this (reporting the capacity of your town to ‘welcome’ refugees and from where) come in to Washington from hundreds of towns and cities and are put together to become the basis for the Presidential determination which we know is a maximum 45,000 refugees for FY18(which is now underway as of Oct. 1).
Again, knowledge is power!
I leave it to you, again with the help ofthis postto examine the plans that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in conjunction with the US State Department and the US Department of Health and Human Services have in the works for St. Cloud.
LOL! Do you see that line in the last chart about voluntary hours/miles? What that represents is the number of hours and the miles that volunteers put on their own vehicles converted to a cash value. The contractor uses that figure to show the federal government that they have put some skin in the game (it is supposed to be a public-private partnership after all). I wonder do volunteers know that they are worth money to the contractor?
Check out the actual cash from foundations/corporations in FY16 and the enormous jump estimated for FY18. Is that realistic? Can they just make up numbers?
Housing specialist? So the refugees get a housing specialist? Do just regular poor Americans get one from LSS of MN?
The most recent Form 990 for LSS of Minnesota is here (or see LSS financials page):
Citizens in St. Cloud, see my complete archive on what I’ve reported about your city since 2008.
Concerned citizens elsewhere, go to the list of contractor/subcontractors I linked above. Call one near you and ask for the FY18 R & P Abstract(Reception and Placement Abstract). Ask your local elected officials—mayor and council—if any of them have ever seen the plans for their town/city?
Addendum! If you get a runaround complain to your elected officials in Washington—your member of Congress and US Senators. If they can’t (or won’t!) get it for you, then you have even more to complain about!
As Isaid here, the swamp is not going to be drained anytime soon, so my best advice to all of you concerned about the economic and cultural disruption in your communities fostered by the US State Department and its contractors choosing your town/city as a resettlement site (and the lack of transparency by federal government contractors in the process) must renew your efforts at the state and local level.
Here we have an excellent example of citizen action to get their local mayor and council to pay attention to their concerns. The citizens are asking for a moratorium on resettlement until their questions and concerns are addressed.
Watch the council meeting here. Begin at 13:45 to hear private citizens and then here again at 1:17:50 to hear Councilman Jeff Johnson say that he will be placing a resolution before the board at the next meeting. (Hat tip: Ron)
You too can do this!
Again, go here to play the video: http://stcloudmn.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=1324
I had to laugh, check out their rule that a citizen may have 2 minutes only two times a year to address the high and mighty. And, they only take 5 commenters at each meeting.
You can learn more about the St. Cloud council at their website, here. They said at the meeting that they accept letters and e-mail commentary.
Let me be clear, there is nothing in refugee law now to address the issue of a city having any power to halt resettlement to their city. However, the State Department has repeatedly said they will not place refugees in communities that don’t want them. So, if the council were to ask the federal government for a moratorium, it would (should!) carry significant weight!
But, if the council turns down a resolution for a moratorium, it becomes a very important educational opportunity for the community. If council members votes are recorded, the political stance (in support of, or opposition to, more resettlement and continued secrecy) of each council member becomes clear to the whole city.
Again, see mypost here. Some of you in St. Cloud might decide to run for mayor or council based on what happens next. Even if you don’t win, the exercise will educate even more voting citizens.
Please visit my post yesterdaywhere I told you about the ‘stakeholder meetings (quarterly consultations)’ held without the public, and the R & P Abstracts that are kept secret from the public.
You should be demanding that your mayor and council members (or whatever local govt. format you have) attend those meetings and receive the planning documents before they go to Washington and make an opportunity available for the public to comment on the plans before they are submitted to Washington each year!
Just fyi, I have been to St. Cloud twice in recent years. You can see my whole archive on the controversy there by clicking here.
I think RRW’s first mention of St. Cloud was by Judy in 2008 when she wrote about Somali students harassing a fellow student’s service dog, here.
Lutheran Social Services of Minnesotais the primary contractor in St. Cloud responsible for placing large numbers of Somalis there.
This post is filed also in my category entitled ‘What you can do.‘
Because frankly the Washington swamp is alive and well! Some important swamp creatures are the Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbyists looking for more customers and cheap labor! Do not be fooled! Refugee resettlement is not, first and foremost, driven by humanitarian zeal!
