Hawaii judge places restraining order on Trump EO involving refugee pause

03/16/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Unless I find a definitive article about what exactly the judge in Hawaii ruled on the Trump Executive Order in the next couple of hours (I have a doc appt.), here is one news story from the AP (thanks to reader Theodore).
Also, according to several news sources discussing other pending cases, including Fox News , one argument in the Maryland case is absolutely nuts. I worry that judges ruling on the cases have no idea about what the US Refugee Act of 1980 says or how the program has been administered for 37 years!

Judge Derrick Watson. Photo and story “One Unelected Leftist Judge in Hawaii Decided Security for the Entire Nation” http://www.independentsentinel.com/one-unelected-leftist-judge-hawaii-decided-security-entire-nation/

It makes me want to scream!
The line that I see while searching just now, that is being spread by many news sources, is this one:

“The Maryland lawsuit also argues that it’s against federal law for the Trump administration to reduce the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year by more than half, from 110,000 to 50,000. Attorneys argued that if that aspect of the ban takes effect, 60,000 people would be stranded in war-torn countries with nowhere else to go.”

We are assuming that comes from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society suit we reported here. The true gist of their argument is that they, the federal resettlement contractors, were expecting more paying “clients” and had built their budgets around the per head payment they were expecting with the unrealistic 110,000 refugees Obama said would come in the year he no longer was president!
For the umpteenth time, that 110,000 that Obama set last fall is a CEILING that the Administration says it will not surpass, it is not a goal!
And, that 110,000 was the highest Obama had ever set in his presidency. Trump has the absolute authority to reduce the ceiling, but more importantly he can bring in any number under whatever he set, or whatever Obama set!
Forget the EO!

President Trump has all the authority he needs to not import any more refugees this entire year (I’m not sure that his team even knows that he has no legal obligation to bring in even 50,000!).

As of this morning, we have admitted 38,106 refugees this fiscal year (2017) via Wrapsnet. 783 refugees arrived in the ten day period from the announcement of this EO and today when the “moratorium” was to go in to effect.
I repeat! The President does not have to call it a moratorium or include it in this EO. He can simply stop processing new refugees abroad with no further explanation!

President George W. Bush had 4 years under 50,000! His lowest year was 39,554. Even Obama had two years under 60,000 and well below the ceiling! See here.

Now look at this chart (below) very carefully. When I found it at Wrapsnet, the last year, 2016, was not complete. Know that we brought in just short of the 85,000 ceiling (a rare occurrence).
The federal refugee resettlement contractors have long wanted the president’s ‘determination’ each year to be a GOAL (a target) not a CEILING! But, the law says it is a ceiling. Look at the column for CEILING and the column for the number actually admitted!
What do you see? Rarely does the number admitted reach the CEILING.
In FY2006, they were 28,777 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2007, they were 21,718 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2008, they were 19,809 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2009, they were 5,346 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2010, they were 6,689 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2011, they were 23,576 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama?
In FY2012, they were 17,762 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama for leaving thousands “stranded in war-torn countries”?
Obama got closer to the lowered CEILING over the next few years.
You get my drift!

Be sure to note that Obama never set a ceiling as high as 110,000 in all his previous years as president. That 110,000 was set in the final months of his final year! The average admissions over the years shown here is around 65,000. I could not find the chart that includes the last month of FY16, but we admitted only a few refugees short of the 85,000 ceiling because the Administration was hell-bent to get in thousands of Syrians.

I’m begging ignorant and lazy reporters to get the facts!
And, I am sure you are scared as heck, as I am, to see judges making decisions based on sheer ignorance of the law.
See my post from last Friday about how Hawaii hypocrites! have “welcomed” only a tiny number of refugees over the years—none from Africa and only 5 (total) from two Muslim countries.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’

Horowitz: Where is Congress? Why are they not helping Trump on immigration?

03/15/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That’s been my question too!

Here at Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz asks why Congress is not backing the President’s right to control immigration to America and determine how many refugees we admit and from where they originate.
Instead Congress is entangled in one major mess over Obamacare. And, frankly, although important, repeal of Obamacare did not motivate voters to support Trump in the way immigration restriction did.
Here is Horowitz (emphasis mine):

Where is Congress?

Look at the House GOP’s agenda since January. It has been devoid of any substance. What other majority party with control of the White House has failed to act on a single significant issue in its first 100 days? Why are they not passing bills defending Trump’s executive order, and why are they not stripping the courts of jurisdiction over immigration?

While you are at Conservative Review, be sure to check out their very useful ‘scorecard.’ I think you will be surprised at the low scores of many members of Congress and Senators you might have once thought were conservative. https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard

Trump’s only major accomplishment thus far was the refugee moratorium and that is hanging by a thread thanks to the erroneous outsourcing of legislative and executive authority to the courts. It’s time for Trump to work with House conservatives to bolster his immigration agenda against the courts, instead of fighting conservatives to enshrine Obamacare into law.

Trump must demand that Congress back his immigration order in the April budget bill by defunding the refugee resettlement program and the issuance of any visas from the six countries on his list. House conservatives should also work with Trump to defund Obama’s executive amnesty.

Instead of threatening conservatives with primary challenges if they fail to betray Trump’s own election mandate, why not threaten to primary the RINOs for not backing his immigration agenda? Or is it easier to go after conservatives because they are politically expendable?

Read the whole column here and see how “rogue” judges are taking control of the immigration issue in America.
For more on Congress, see my tag ‘Where is Congress‘ especially on the appropriations issue!

One report: Trump Dept. of State to cut funding to UN by 50%

03/15/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the news from The Hill two days ago!
Finally an elusive number I’ve wondered about for years is mentioned here:

The US pays $1.5 billion of the $4 billion annual budget of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees glass-fronted building in Geneva. Imagine what this costs to staff and run in Switzerland! American taxpayers pay 37% of it! ($1.5 billion of an annual $4 billion budget).

That is the agency of the UN choosing our refugees for your towns and cities!
The Hill:

President Trump’s administration has told the State Department to cut more than 50 percent of U.S. funding to United Nations programs, Foreign Policy reported.

The push for the drastic reductions comes as the White House is scheduled to release its 2018 topline budget proposal Thursday, which is expected to include a 37 percent cut to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budgets.***

It’s not clear if Trump’s budget plan, from the Office of Management and Budget, would reflect the full extent of Trump’s proposed cuts to the U.N.

[….]

The U.S. spends roughly $10 billion annually on the U.N., and the cuts could have the greatest impact on peacekeeping, the U.N. development program and UNICEF, which are funded by State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

The fate of other popular [?—ed] programs, like the World Food Programme and U.N. refugee operations, are less clear. The World Food Programme’s funding comes from the Department of Agriculture.

Let the wailing begin….

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the alterations would spark “chaos” if true.

Richard Gowan, European Council on Foreign Relations, said cuts would bring “chaos.” Photo: http://www.ecfr.eu/experts

“[It would] leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” he told FP, pointing to how the U.S. provided $1.5 billion of the U.N. refugee agency’s $4 billion budget last year.

“Multiply that across other humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme and you are basically talking about the breakdown of the international humanitarian system as we know it.”

More here, and then yesterday The Washington Post reported the news as well, but does not mention the UNHCR.
The Post quotes Trump’s UN ambassdor Nikki Haley as saying the following in her confirmation hearing in January. (Just a reminder dear readers that Haley works for Trump, so let’s hope she is now on the same page as the President!)

“I do not think we need to pull money from the U.N. We don’t believe in slash-and-burn.”

***Let’s talk about USAID for a minute!

We haven’t written much over the years about the Agency for International Development which also gives gobs and gobs of (your) money to some federal refugee contractors.
I knew the International Rescue Committee couldn’t be pulling in millions from solely seeding refugees in places like Missoula, Montana, so I checked USA Spending just now to see what they were getting from USAID. Yikes! Here is a screen shot of one tiny portion of one page. (These are grants from 2008 to 2016).

The IRC received nearly $1 billion from US taxpayers during the Obama years!

No wonder they have money to community-organize against citizens in small city America!

For our complete archive on the IRC, click here.

Cut Donald, cut!

Pew: Almost 2,500 refugees from travel-restricted countries entered US since Trump took office

03/15/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Pew Research has done a handy little summary of where we stand with refugees admitted this fiscal year, but most importantly they made a useful graph of how many entered from travel-restricted countries since the first week of December, through Trump’s inauguration and up to last Friday.
There is nothing we haven’t already been talking about as we reported also from Wrapsnet over recent weeks and months, but they put it in a neat little package for your review on the eve of the 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement.
Pew Research Center:

A total of 2,466 refugees from six countries under new travel restrictions – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – have resettled in the United States since Donald Trump became president, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data. The number of refugees from the six travel-restricted countries represents 32% of all refugees who have entered the U.S. since Trump took office.

Do you see that big spike ending on inauguration day? That is because the Obama State Dept. was working night and day to get as many Muslims in to the US as possible in the week before the Trump team took over.

Pew continues….

Including refugees from countries with no travel restrictions, a total of 7,594 refugees have entered the U.S. during Trump’s first seven weeks in office (Jan. 21 to March 10). Of these refugees, 3,410 are Muslims (45%) and 3,292 are Christians (43%), with other religions or the religiously unaffiliated accounting for the rest.

So far in fiscal 2017 (which began Oct. 1, 2016), refugees who hold citizenship from the six restricted countries have accounted for more than a third (34%) of 37,716 refugee admissions.

More here.

President Trump has set the ceiling for the entire 2017 fiscal year at 50,000, a number we explained here is not that low!

This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’
Endnote: It is amusing to me to see research/articles like this because for years and years (I started writing RRW in 2007) no one paid any attention to the numbers, religions and ethnicities of refugees entering the US. It is nice to see so many news outlets educating the public!

Muslims and non-Muslims given guidance on how to fight Trump's refugee slowdown

03/11/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From a publication called Truthout comes words of advice for open borders activists on how to think, organize and push back against the Trump Administration’s refugee admissions and travel pause Executive Order.
Entitled ‘A guide to resisting Muslim ban 2.0’
(Here are just a few snips of advice from author Hoda Katebi, emphasis is mine)

Two big no-nos here according to author Katebi. Don’t pretend you are a Muslim, and for Muslims, don’t wrap yourselves in American flags! Reuters photo here: http://www.rediff.com/news/report/pix-in-new-york-protesters-take-to-the-streets-to-say-i-am-muslim-too/20170220.htm

….if national security is actually the problem — if the US government actually cares about ending the killing of American citizens — why does it not start with dismantling its own police forces? These forces comprise an armed, emboldened and deadly organization that receives training from a foreign apartheid state (Israel), and kills almost 1,000 people annually (including already over 200 people this year). United States law enforcement officers are a larger threat to the safety and security of individuals living in this country (particularly Black and Indigenous people) than “radical Islam” — whatever that means — ever will be. [Any sane person could see immediately the anarchy, looting and lawlessness that would engulf US cities in minutes if law enforcement officers stood down or were non-existent!—ed]

In fact, it is important to recognize that “national security” is only a code word for anti-Muslim policies domestically, as well as the justification for US military violence against Muslim communities internationally, which is often erased from public view.

[….]

Wherever you see it, challenge the normalization of bans on immigration and refugee resettlement. Do not ignore the rhetoric of the people around you. Do not think that this is OK. Do not think that this can go unchallenged. Here are some things to remember and steps to take as we move forward:

[….]

4. Do not make compromises. Do not compromise your values for the sake of having an extra white person join your protest.

[….]

6. As always, be intersectional. Half of the officially banned countries are Black-majority countries. Black, Muslim immigrants and refugees are oftentimes left out from both Black and Muslim spaces, so be intentional about centering those who are on the margins of the margins. Beyond making sure not to exclude your own people, keep in mind that Customs and Border Patrol, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, municipal law enforcement and other violent institutions that target people of color are just different enforcement mechanisms with the same goal: upholding white supremacy. You cannot succeed by ignoring those relationships.

And for our non-Muslim allies:

1. Show up. Support the ongoing efforts of Muslim-led organizing in resisting the ban. If you’re an immigration lawyer, volunteer. If you’re a teacher, connect your Muslim students to resources, and talk to your class about what is happening. If you’re a journalist, document the movement. Share the work of Muslim artists, writers, creators, organizers and scholars. Hold your racist friends and family accountable.

2. Do not claim an identity that is not yours. No, you are not #Muslimtoo — and claiming such only covers the voices of actual Muslims trying to share their real experiences. Rather, listen to the leadership, direction and experiences of Muslims who are speaking out and up. [Non-Muslim activists must listen to Muslims! Do what you are told!—ed]

3. Be careful not to perpetuate anti-Muslim undertones in your conversations. When talking about the Muslim ban, do not challenge it by saying there have been “no fatal attacks by immigrants from countries listed in the Muslim ban.” While that is true, this not only provides a justification for banning immigration from countries that have had someone commit violence, but also legitimizes collective punishment. Also, we are not all immigrants — that concept erases the histories of Indigenous people native to this land and Black people who were forcibly enslaved and brought here. Moreover, a Muslim refugee from a country the United States destabilized is not the same as an immigrant from the UK who is here getting a PhD. See Number. Another thing: Stop draping American flags over our hijabs.

I recommend that you read the whole thing, here.