Tag: Bowling Green KY

Bowling Green, KY nervous about planned Syrian resettlement

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It sure looks like another ‘pocket of resistance’ is forming, this time in Bowling Green, KY (a growing Muslim community) the hometown of Senator Rand Paul and the resettlement site of two convicted Iraqi refugee terrorists who had been placed there a few years ago.
Before you read the story, you should visit our very large archive on Bowling Green by clicking here. There has been much turmoil over the years with resettlement there generally relating to refugees being dumped by their resettlement contractors.
And, consider the fact that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has never (to my knowledge) ever lifted a finger to question the program in his own state, it tells me that the program is driven there by Big Meat, the Chamber of Commerce and other industries who want a continuous supply of cheap immigrant labor.

Melinda Hill
Commissioner and Mayor Pro-Tem Melinda Hill is an outspoken critic of the Syrian resettlement plan for Bowling Green. Photo here: http://www.bgdailynews.com/news/q-a-with-melinda-hill/article_a755552e-335a-544c-9b4d-6a7b39c30b41.html

Senator Rand Paul has spoken up a few times over the years, but with a ‘conservative’ governor there now and if Paul sticks with past comments, it’s time to reevaluate Kentucky’s WILSON-FISH program.
Here is the news from WKU radio:

Bowling Green is preparing to welcome Syrian refugees later this year who are fleeing their country’s civil war. The Warren County-based Kentucky International Center has agreed to resettle 40 Syrians, but the decision is raising concerns in the local community.

[….]

The plan to open the city’s doors to Syrian refugees is creating backlash in what has otherwise been a welcoming environment. City Commissioner and Mayor Pro-Tem Melinda Hill has been one of the most outspoken critics of the plan to resettle Syrians in Bowling Green. She says she doesn’t have confidence in the federal government’s screening process.

“Our country has systems in place where our criminals, we know what they did, when they did it,” Hill tells WKU Public Radio. “Many of these people are from countries that do not have systems like that in place, or if they did have them, these people have not been entered into the system, they’ve not been kept up to date, or those systems have been destroyed. We don’t have access to any background checks. It’s all questions and answers.”

[….]

Some locals residents are more apprehensive since the 2011 arrest of two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green. Both are now in prison for conspiring to send weapons and cash to the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

[….]

The Syrians represent a small fraction of the 400 other refugees coming to Bowling Green this year, including from Africa, Asia, and Cuba. If approved by the federal government, 40 Syrians will start a new life that they hope won’t be derailed by fears of terrorism.

Concerned Kentuckians should be letting your governor know that he could be the one brave governor needed!  Go here and see what he could do!  If he is worried about being alone, he could call upon Chris Christie and Sam Brownback to join him! Three brave governors is surely better than one!
P.S. If anyone knows Commissioner Hill, please send her this post.  She may not know some information we have linked in here.

Kentucky: Iraqi refugee convicted terrorist back in the news; wants conviction and sentence reviewed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update:  There is a 2013 ABC News expose of the arrest and conviction of these two refugees with information on how they lied to get into the US.  A long time reader suggested that many of you may never have seen it.  Watch it here.

He says he was misrepresented and didn’t understand English well enough (you can be sure he had been supplied with a translator!).

For you, in new towns being urged to ‘welcome the stranger’ and take in Muslim refugees, there are several lessons in this one short news story.

First, don’t believe them when they say that refugees are thoroughly screened! This pair of convicted terrorists LIED on their refugee applications and there was ample evidence, one not mentioned in this news story, that they were in fact fighting (and possibly killing) Americans in Iraq.  One of them had fingerprints on an IED shard the US had already collected from an attack on Americans.

Second, US and state taxpayers are footing the bill for translators and expensive trials and other legal proceedings.

And, third these two were placed by a resettlement contractor in an American town and you paid for it.  But, the media, in this case AP, cannot bring itself to tell readers that these two were REFUGEES.

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi lied on his application for US refugee status. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2012/02/17/kentucky-iraqi-terror-suspect-lied-on-refugee-application/

Every reader of this AP story who is unfamiliar with the US Refugee Admissions Program is probably scratching their head and asking, well how did these terrorists get in here?

From AP at the Bowling Green Daily News (hat tip: Robin):

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — An Iraqi man convicted of terrorism charges in Kentucky is asking a federal judge to change his conviction and prison sentence because he says he was misrepresented by his court-appointed attorney.

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi pleaded guilty in 2012 to being involved in a plot to send weapons and money to al-Qaida in Iraq.

Hammadi says in a motion filed last month that he felt pressure to plead guilty to a dozen charges and was told by his attorney, James Earhart, he would not get a life sentence. He is asking a judge to throw out or correct the sentence.

The motion asks the court to “vacate, set aside or correct” the conviction and life sentence he received in January 2013.

[….]

Hammadi said in the motion that he was pressured to plead guilty the day before his jury trial. Earhart, a longtime lawyer and former federal prosecutor in Kentucky, told Hammadi “no American jury would find him innocent following the events of Sept. 11, 2001,” according to the March 16 motion.

The AP wants you to think that they just simply “arrived” in the US, not a word about the US State Department bringing them in!

Alwan and Hammadi arrived in the United States in 2009. Both admitted to taking part in insurgent activities in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Prosecutors said federal authorities became aware of Alwan when they found out he had been held in an Iraqi prison in June 2006 for insurgent activities.

Searching RRW for ‘Kentucky Iraqi’ I see that we probably have a couple of dozen posts in which we mention these convicted refugee terrorists.   In fact, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s fleeting criticism of the refugee program was surely inspired by his anger at the time about this case.

If you see Rand Paul on the campaign trail, ask him why he stopped criticizing the Refugee Admissions Program!

Make this issue a 2016 Presidential campaign issue!  In fact, ask all of the candidates if they support it and I bet you get a ‘deer in the headlights’ look!

Scary photo of the day! Somali woman at driving simulator

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I was just working on a larger piece about Bowling Green, KY when this photo jumped out at me!  There was a driver training program for immigrants at the National Corvette Museum.

 

Oopsy! About to crash…. Photo: Miranda Pederson/Daily News

 

 

The full story at the Bowling Green Daily News (Crash Course) is here.  I guess I shouldn’t laugh!

See our extensive archive on Bowling Green, KY refugees, by clicking here.

Kentucky: Convicted Iraqi refugee terrorist wants chance to withdraw guilty plea

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Longtime readers may remember the case of two Iraqi refugees resettled in Senator Rand Paul’s hometown of Bowling Green (see our extensive coverage of the diversity jungle created by resettlement contractors that is B.G. today by clicking here).

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi

We covered the arrest and trial of the Iraqi pair over the years (go here for an archive on the case).

Perhaps one of the most shocking revelations, and evidence of very shoddy processing of refugees, was the fact that at least one of the Iraqi’s fingerprints was found on fragments of an IED that killed American National Guard troops.

Here is the latest from Kentucky.com thanks to reader Robin:

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — An Iraqi man convicted in a Kentucky terrorism case has asked a federal judge to give him access to his complete case file so he can try to withdraw his guilty plea.

U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell had not ruled on the request from 26-year-old Mohanad Shareef Hammadi as of Friday morning.

Hammadi and 33-year-old Waad Ramadan Alwan pleaded guilty in 2010 and 2011 to taking part in a plot to ship thousands of dollars in cash, machine guns, rifles, grenades and shoulder-fired missiles from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to al-Qaida in Iraq in 2010 and 2011. The pair was working with an FBI informant who squelched their plans.

Alwan is serving a 40-year sentence and Hammadi are serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.

In a letter to his court-appointed attorney that was filed in the court record, Hammadi said he wanted to review the records to file motions to attack his guilty plea before the statute of limitations runs out.

By the way, I would love to see the US State Department made responsible for legal fees incurred by the refugees they let in to the country.  And, just imagine what this pair’s incarceration will cost the US taxpayer for the next forty plus years!  So much for refugees bringing economic benefits—these two imprisoned refugees will likely offset the small economic benefit of thousands and thousands of non-criminal refugees.

And, don’t forget, right now Iraqis are the top group of refugees we are resettling in your towns and cities, here.

For ambitious readers, we have a huge category on Iraqi refugees, here, with 635 previous posts!

Taxpayers fund savings accounts for refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

How do refugees get money for cars, houses, education, businesses?

The program is known as Individual Development Accounts through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (HHS).

Albert Mbanfu, Director of the International Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky. http://www.bgdailynews.com/new-international-center-director/image_02fb9de4-89e7-5d6d-97e8-6cf648b73901.html?mode=jqm

This is one of the many ways your local refugee resettlement contractor is able to hand out government (your) cash to refugees and surely get a little cash for themselves for administering the program.  (There are also micro-enterprise loan programs especially for refugees as well).

The local contractor gets a grant from ORR and then refugees may sign up for the savings plan.

For every dollar they save toward certain savings goals, they are matched with a dollar from the US Treasury.  Frankly the complete unfairness of the program to American low income people is often responsible for the hard feelings toward some refugees in certain areas.

We have heard disgruntled citizens ask, for example:  how are they getting cars?

We have reported on this program often but the story we mentioned from Kentucky (yesterday) contained a reference to the program that you may not have noticed, so I thought some clarification was needed.

Here is the section of the ‘Refugees get new homes’ Bowling Green article (hat tip: Robin) that I want you to see:

When Me Meh and her family escaped Burma for a refugee camp in Thailand, they lived in a bamboo house without electricity or other amenities.

The family of 10 resettled in Bowling Green in 2009, bringing with them only some clothes and important papers, Meh said. She was 17. Meh’s two older brothers and her father started work while she went to school and her mother took care of their home.

After a couple of years, the three had saved $4,000. She said the International Center gave them a grant that matched their savings, and they were able to put a downpayment on a house.

The reader is left with the impression that this very nice resettlement contractor—the International Center—was being generous, but this is taxpayer money that was only passed-through the contractor’s coffers!

Go here for a recent list of grantees for the multi-million dollar program.  And, for more information you might want to look at page 38-40 of the FY2012 Annual Report to Congress.   While you are visiting the Annual Report, check out all of the other grant programs that refugee contractors can apply for.  You will be amazed!

Addendum:  I was once told by an official involved with the refugee program in Washington that there is no financial audit done of these resettlement contractors.