The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) said in a press release in recent days that they were going ahead with their plans to open an office in Rutland, VT for the purpose of placing 100 Syrians (the first 100!) in the city where those plans have drawn heated controversy since last spring. Lavinia Limon with Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya. Ms. Limon’s organization, USCRI, helps Chobani Yogurt by sending refugees to Twin Falls, Idaho. Limon headed Bill Clinton’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Warning to Mr. Trump: These are not squishy do-gooder organizations and people who you can easily roll. They are sharp, experienced political fighters.
Throwing all caution to the wind (shelling out money they don’t know they will have) and gambling that they can back Trump down, the federal resettlement contractor headed by longtime Clinton ally Lavinia Limon is hiring staff for a proposed opening in a couple of weeks—timed, I surmise, to happen just about the time Donald Trump is inaugurated. Setting up a showdown with Donald Trump…..
If Trump does what he said he would do and quickly pauses refugee resettlement at least from terror-producing regions of the world, USCRI will be in a position to scream bloody murder—how dare Trump stop these poor women and children who were headed to a ‘welcoming’ Vermont town.
By the way, the NYT puff piece on Rutland recently was likely part of the propaganda set up to nail a heartless Trump.
These resettlement contractorshave been around for over 30 years! Lots of big salaries depend on the continuation of the industry (yes, it is an industry), not to mention cheap labor for global corporations. Goals also include increasing Democrat voter rolls and generally driving all of us to accept a multicultural borderless world.
They are not going to give up easily or quietly!
From Valley News:
Rutland —
The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program’s Rutland office is expected to open and be fully staffed within a couple of weeks.
According to Stacie Blake, director of government and community relations with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the office will have three full-time employees. Primary guidance will come from the Colchester, Vt., office and will be based on the organization’s 35 years of experience working with refugees in Vermont.
“The program expects to welcome the first refugee families to Rutland in January,” Blake said in a news release.
[….]
“Sites across the country are continuing to welcome new arrivals as their travel from overseas is booked,”Blake said in an email. “We have no information regarding changes to the resettlement program.”
I’ll bet you those travel bookings at IOMare going through the roof! The articlegoes on to say how excited the volunteers are who are anticipating their very own Syrians (how cool is that!), and these local refugee advocates can be counted on to wailif Trump pauses the program (and they will have no clue that USCRI used them).
See our extensive archive on Rutland, here. And for more on Lavinia Limon, go here.
Sheesh! The International Organization for Migration (IOM) yesterday said, don’t stop the boats and the boat people from Africa and the Middle East, find ways for them to migrate legally to Europe. (See former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott tell the Europeans to turn back the boats, here.) Scene from the movie that fizzled ‘The Good Lie.’
The IOM was for years a quasi-non-profit organization (getting most of its money from governments) and a US refugee contracting agency whose job it was, and still is, to get refugees ready to fly to your towns and cities. You will see refugees in US airports with blue IOM bags.
Now the agency has been folded in to the United Nations and it is one more reason to sever our ties with the UN! Here, yesterday, they reported on the number of illegal migrants who have arrived in Europe in 2016.
Switzerland – IOM on Friday (06/01) reported preliminary totals for all 2016 migrant and refugee arrivals to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea, as well as estimated fatalities. Arrival totals were 363,348 split almost evenly between Italy and Greece, with much smaller numbers arriving in Malta, Cyprus and Spain. Fatalities and missing migrants reached at least 5,079 although IOM emphasizes that some incidents reported in the month of December and earlier have not been fully accounted for.
According to IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, incidents off Spain, Morocco and Tunisia have been reported whose victim totals could add another 300 or more fatalities to the 2016 total. The year 2016 already is the deadliest for migrants ever recorded by IOM in the region.
The probable addition of several hundred more fatalities recorded in 2016 only deepens the tragedy, said IOM Director General William Lacy Swing, who added, Europe’s frustration with a seemingly endless cycle of migrant rescue followed by reports of shipwrecks and more drownings won’t end until governments throughout the region find a way to manage migration comprehensively.
“Migrants and refugees aren’t coming because they believe their lives will be rescued at sea once they leave Africa or Syria or wherever conflicts drives people to seek safety,” Ambassador Swing said. “They’re leaving because they believe their lives will be doomed if they stay. The answer lies in finding creative means to permit safe, legal and secure migration, be that through work visas, family reunification or temporary protected status. [UNHCR is searching for “alternative pathways” to move the third world to the first since most of these migrants are not legitimate refugees.—ed] Instead of doubling down on tactics that don’t work, let’s use this New Year to try something that’s actually new.”
Italy and Greece suffer the most.
Read the whole article, these numbers are way down for Greece, but up for Italy.
See our complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here. Editor: I hope to get a lot of things posted today, yesterday was a wipe-out due to computer problems!
If you missed the story yesterday, go here, to learn about how an arrest, an indictment and a guilty verdict all went missing from local news reports about a Somali refugee who had been in the country one week before his July encounter with a special-needs woman. Here is a recap and an update from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:
A South Dakota newspaper that failed to report on the case of a Somali man convicted of trying to molest a severely handicapped woman, changed gears Wednesday after being outed by WND and decided to publish a story about the crime.
Most SD refugees are placed in Sioux Falls. How Mohamed got to Aberdeen within a week of his arrival in the US and was left unsupervised is still unexplained.
The story ran on page three of the Aberdeen American News under the headline “Sentencing later this month for a man convicted of attempted sexual contact.”
But the newspaper left out an important detail.
The convicted sex criminal, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, was a recently arrived refugee brought to the state from Somalia at the invitation of the U.S. government. He had been in the country only about a week and in Aberdeen only one day when he wandered up to a group home and tried to molest a 31-year-old mentally handicapped woman who was sitting outside the facility.
Mohamed, freshly arrived in the U.S. just days prior, wandered more than a mile from his hotel on foot and preyed upon a mentally handicapped woman at the Aspire Inc. residential care facility, which houses about 150 handicapped people. His victim was left unattended for only minutes. When a caregiver returned, she caught him with his hand between the disabled woman’s legs, reaching toward her private parts.
AAN’s belated story also neglected to mention that Mohamed had been brought to Aberdeen to work in the local meatpacking plant, DemKota Ranch, which has become a magnet for cheap refugee labor.
I did some looking around last night and there is some very funny business that went on with this particular meat plant and its former owners that involved the state government and then-Governor Rounds (now US Senator for SD). It would be good if someone out there took time to investigate the broader story.
Near the end of his update, Hohmann, reports on a group of citizens who met with the South Dakota Attorney General in October (when surely this AG would have known about this case while the citizens did not!): What did AG Jackley know and when did he know it?
Meanwhile, a citizens group tells WND they met with South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley on Oct. 3 at the state Capitol in Pierre to discuss their concerns about refugee resettlement and its impact on safety.
The meeting was affable with the approximately 10 citizens sharing concerns about refugees who might put the safety of their communities at risk.
Then the atmosphere changed:
“If you guys know of anything, can cite anything [negative] that’s happening in your communities, then please tell me,” he reportedly said.
“He wouldn’t give the concerned people the answers they were looking for,” said one person present at the meeting. “I watched him and was thinking what are you doing? It was more like dodge ball and ‘what do you know?’”
He told the group refugee resettlement was a federal issue and “his hands were tied,” one participant of the meeting said. “What’s upsetting is, he already knew, he would have known that this crime had happened in Aberdeen.
So what are they hiding in South Dakota? The situation is shaping up there to look very similar to what happened in Twin Falls, Idaho where a sexual assault case blew things up—big company/big money wants foreign laborers, pols going along, newspaper covering for them all, citizens treated like troublemakers and labeled racists for wanting answers about why their community is being radically altered and wanting to know who is behind it?
Those two countries are Syria and Somalia*** as the Obama Administration works overtime to pour as many refugees in to the US as they can before Donald Trump takes office on January 20th.
The numbers we have been reporting in recent weeks go way beyond anything we have seen in the last nearly ten years of writing this blog. Trump transition needs to know that John Kerry’s State Department is cutting corners and knocking themselves out to get as many Muslim refugees placed in US towns and cities before January 20th as they can!
Questions are also beginning to arise about whether the refugee agencies (the non-profit resettlement contractors) can properly care for them due to those high numbers of arrivals. We have reports of refugees placed in hotels, delays in medical screening, and refugees without winter clothing, all are violations of US State Department regulations for contractors.
I promised some maps for someone, which sent me to Wrapsnet.orgthis morning. These are maps (screenshots) for the placement and numbers of Syrians and Somalis for the last 15 months. That would include all of FY2016 and the first three months of FY2017 which ended on December 31, 2016. (The fiscal year for the placement of refugees runs from Oct. 1 of one year to Sept. 30th of the next year.) Obama said at the beginning of FY16 that his State Department would admit 10,000 Syrians (98% Muslim) to the US that year. We are now (in the last 15 months) up to 16,153! No Syrians went to Hawaii or Alaska, and if you can’t read Florida the number is 847.
Virtually all Somali refugees are Muslims. You should know we pick them up all over the world and place them in your towns and cities. So Donald Trump’s administration needs to be careful and not say we will halt refugees coming from Somalia (for example), because few if any come from Somalia directly. (We do expect Trump to halt them!)
Alaska received 36 Somalis, Hawaii 0, and that Florida number is 148. Again the map is for the last 15 months.
And, if you missed it yesterday, many questions remain about one Somali admitted to the US in 2016 who was free to wander the streets of Aberdeen, SD and attempt to sexually assault a special-needs woman there. See our post yesterday, here.
***Thousands more Iraqi, Afghan, and Burmese Muslims have entered as well during these same 15 months, but we chose to focus only on Syria and Somalia for this report.
Update January 5th: Be sure to see my next installment of this story, here.
A newly arrived Somali refugee*** who court records show had arrived in Aberdeen, SD to work for the controversial meat packing plant there was found guilty by a jury on December 20th of attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman.
Read the story! And, ask yourselves, why didn’t the local media report on the case?
Did it have something to do with the controversy roiling there among citizens who were vigorously opposing a plan to make Aberdeen a new resettlement site (only Sioux Falls and Huron were getting direct resettlements), a plan supported by the mayor, as we reported last April. Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen: ““We need workers, and we certainly would be glad to have more friends and neighbors and more children in our schools and more cultures that we can learn from.” [And you get to pay for it all while big business gets cheap labor!] https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/16/heads-up-aberdeen-south-dakota-new-resettlement-site-being-proposed/BTW, for new readers, my title refers to the sexual assault case that the media and elected officials downplayed in Twin Falls, Idaho earlier in 2016. Hereis what Leo Hohmann (WND) learned yesterday. After you read the whole incredible story, see what I have to say below about the timeline.
A refugee newly arrived from Somalia has been tried and convicted for attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman while she was sitting outside of a home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Liban Mohamed, 39, was in the United States for only about a week when he tried to force himself on a 31-year-old woman with severe disabilities.He is not a U.S. citizen, but whether he will be deported in the wake of his conviction remains unclear.
The trial for Mohamed was held just a few days before Christmas and not a word of the conviction has made it into the local media, residents of Aberdeen told WND on Tuesday.
Mohamed speaks no English and required two interpreters at trial, according to the state’s attorney who prosecuted the case.
“I do know he lived in Aberdeen,” prosecutor Christopher White told WND. “The day that it happened, he was staying at the White House Inn hotel in Aberdeen. What came out at trial, in his defense attorney’s opening statement, was that he arrived in Aberdeen that day and had only been in the United States for approximately a week, and he had come to work at the beef plant in Aberdeen.But I don’t know if he had already started working or was about to start work there.”
Mohamed mentioned to law enforcement that he had been hired on at the Demkota Ranch beef plant, White said. [Someone needs to do some research on DemKota Ranch Beef and figure out how closely they are working with Lutheran Social Services of SD and the US State Dept.—ed]
Read the whole thing! Click here. Don’t miss the line where Mohamed told the arresting officers that what he did was o.k. in his country!
Hohmann wraps up with this:
According to court records obtained by WND, Mohamed was arrested July 30 and indicted by a grand jury on Aug. 15. The jury was seated on Monday, Dec. 19, and the trial was held Tuesday, Dec. 20.
What a coincidence!
I was in Aberdeen meeting with residents on July 25, just five days before the arrest. Citizens there were becoming troubled by the changes they were seeing in their community and expressed fear about just such a thing happening. They told me that the meat plant was luring labor like these newly arrived Somalis and they had already noticed an increase in crime. They said that they did not want a resettlement office in town.
As we reported in April, there was a big push going on to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen which would presumably supply labor for DemKota directly from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. A small refugee office existed in Huron, but most refugees placed in South Dakota still go to Sioux Falls which is 200 miles away from Aberdeen. Tim Jurgens, State Refugee Coordinator. SD is a Wilson-Fish state which means that state elected officials have virtually no say about the program that is run by Lutheran Social Services and the US Dept. of State in Washington, DC.
Because of the public outcry in late summer and early fall, Lutheran Social Services appeared to back off a plan to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen after some of the citizens I met on July 25 organized a resistance. (I’ll give you some numbers below for SD).
The first public meeting organized by residents occurred a little over two weeks later and the Aberdeen News didn’t miss that event reporting on it on August 12th. Go hereto see what happened at the heated meeting and read about the paper’s biased news coverage.
Look at the timeline. Mohamed was arrested on July 30th (no local media coverage). A grand jury indicted him three days after (on August 15th) the paper wrote in negative (biased!) tones about the citizens who dared question what was happening in their quiet town. Did the paper cover up the sexual assault story on purpose because it confirmed the things citizens said they were worried about (or was it just incompetence)?
Look at what was happening in Twin Falls, Idaho in the first week of August! Click here. All hell had broken loose about a sexual assault there!
And, then of course it is quite stunning that no court reporter was present at the trial on December 20th. But, also not present was the family of the victim, and there still remains a question about how the guardians of the mentally-impaired woman were not told to be in court.
Many more questions remain!
Have the wheels come off the US Refugee Admissions Program? Are they trying to shoe-horn so many refugees in to the country that there is flagrant violation of contracts going on?
Refugees are to be placed by the contractor (LSS SD) directly in to apartments or rental houses and their initial resettlement period is about 3 months during which the contractor introduces the new refugee to American culture, signs them up for their welfare services, gets kids in school, tries to find them jobs, and arranges their medical screening (for things like TB!).
I am simply blown away by the information given by the state’s attorney that Mohamed had only been in the US a week and was walking the streets of Aberdeen unsupervised.
What! Did LSS simply bring him in to Sioux Falls and put him on a bus to Aberdeen to work at the meat plant? And, then put him up in a hotel? (I’m getting more and more reports of refugees being housed in hotels when State Department policy has always been that the refugee is to be picked up at the airport and escorted to their furnished apartment with ‘culturally appropriate’ food in the refrig!). What is going on? Too many refugees for them to handle?
I know it is pretty easy to unload on Mohamed, but why was he literally walking the streets in Aberdeen? He didn’t even speak English. Was no one supervising him? Was no one giving him any instructions about American culture and laws especially as it relates to the treatment of women?
Does this guy have a family? Or are we admitting single men to work in meatpacking now? Didn’t Homeland Security find out during his vetting process that he might have a problem?
What did Aberdeen’s mayor Mike Levsen know (about the sexual assault case) and when did he know it?
What role did Aberdeen’s mayor play in bringing DemKota to Aberdeen, and did he encourage LSS to open a refugee office to supply the company with cheap labor? Is it even a US-owned company?
I think folks in Aberdeen need to start having a serious look at the man they elected mayor in 2004! What! 12 years! Isn’t it time for a new mayor? See one of many stories about him here.
South Dakota numbers
This is getting too long, so here (below) are some numbers from South Dakota (via Wrapsnet.org). I’m sure this story isn’t going away any time soon especially since sentencing is scheduled for January 30th! (After expensive-to-taxpayers incarceration, will he be sentenced to be deported?)
In the 8 fiscal years since Obama has been in office, South Dakota received a total of 4,319 refugees. The largest groups were Bhutanese and Burmese, but Somalis came in at #3 with 577 placed in the state. Almost all of them were resettled in Sioux Falls. 64 Somalis came in FY 2016 (Mohamed would have been one of them, but does he have a family that we are now completely supporting somewhere else in SD?).
***Almost all Somalis who get in to the US come as resettled refugees, however, if we learn that he came in with a work visa that is going to open up a whole new controversy for the incoming Trump administration. OMG! Work visas from terror-producing countries of the world! Jeff Sessions, as newly appointed Attorney General must look into this case.
