Tag: Donald Trump

Catholic Bishops, Lutherans lament: not enough refugees coming in to pay our bills

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

LOL! No of course they didn’t say it that way, but that is what they mean.  Instead, once again, it is about the poor refugees left in the lurch in some third world hell hole because of that meany Donald J. Trump.
This is a broken record alert, but I plan to continue to pound the issue of payment to contractors being tied to the number of refugees admitted, so there is never a reasonable discussion about any slowdown or reform of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

If they were paying for their Christian ‘charity’ out of the pockets of good and kind-hearted parishioners, I would have nothing to say. But, until the USCCB admits to the media that they receive 97% of their annual migration fund budget (about $83 million in 2014) from taxpayers, I will be a broken record on the issue.

It was only six days ago I did a new accounting report for the nine federal refugee contractors*** quasi-government agencies that monopolize all resettlement in the US.
Both the Bishops and the Lutheran contractor are 96-97% funded by US taxpayers!
You will never know that by reading this news.  Indeed, Charity Navigator, a service that rates charities to help you decide if you want to give, said this about LIRS (they would have said the same about the USCCB except that outfit doesn’t file a Form 990, that we can find).

This organization is not eligible to be rated by Charity Navigator because, as a service for individual givers, we only rate organizations that depend on support from individual contributors and foundations. Organizations such as this, that get most of their revenue from the government or from program services, are therefore not eligible to be rated.

In this story from Crux (a Catholic publication) we learn that Catholics and Lutherans are #1 and #2 in the number of refugees they drop off in American towns and cities.
Here is Crux (lamentations):

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Amid a federal judge ordering the government to broaden the exemptions to the immigration travel ban partially upheld by the Supreme Court, Catholic and Lutheran leaders lamented that the immigration cap had been reached for refugees without such exemptions for the 2017 fiscal year.

The federal government suspended travel July 12 for refugee immigrants without close family connections after confirming that 50,000 refugees – the limit imposed by President Donald Trump in a March 6 executive order – had arrived on U.S. soil.

“We remain deeply troubled by the human consequences of the revised executive order on refugee admissions and the travel ban,” said Bishop Joe S. Vasquez of Austin, Texas, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, in a July 13 statement.

“Resettling only 50,000 refugees a year, down from 110,000, does not reflect the need, our compassion, and our capacity as a nation,” Vasquez added. “We have the ability to continue to assist the most vulnerable among us without sacrificing our values as Americans or the safety and security of our nation.” [Be sure to see my post on the ceilings going back 30 years, here.  Note that Obama got no where near 110,000 until he was virtually walking out the door, now that has become the standard measure!—ed]

“The pause on resettlement and restrictions on the number of persons who can enter our country as refugees will have an immediate effect on our ability to conduct the lifesaving work of providing safety and protection,” said a July 12 statement by Kay Bellor, vice president for programs of Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, which is second only to the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services in the number of refugees it helps resettle in the United States.  [Yes, it will have an immediate effect because your organization raised virtually NO PRIVATE MONEY!—ed]

William Canny is the Bishops’ lobbyist in DC. He gets his salary, whatever it is, largely from the US taxpayer. Photo and bio here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-canny-989616b1

[….]

“As Bishop Vasquez said, it’s very sad, deeply troubling,” MRS executive director William Canny told Catholic News Service July 14.

Pushing for 75,000 refugees in FY18!

At least they have tempered the demand for 200,000 they made of Obama for his last year. If Trump admits 75,000 he will be about 10,000 above the average admissions for the last ten years (which included their dear leader’s years).
Crux continues….

“What we’re advocating for is 75,000” refugees to come into the United States during fiscal 2018, Canny told CNS. “We understand that the administration has security concerns. The administration made some initiative to reduce the number of refugees coming into the country. We don’t agree with it, so at a minimum, we think we should be bringing in 75,000.”

Bellor agreed with the 75,000 figure, noting the number is “less than the need.” Citing United Nations World Refugee Day figures, “the numbers are definitely not shrinking,” she said. “The number of people on the move is 66 million.”

LOL! 75,000 must be the point where they can keep their budgets plenty full with your money!
There is more at Crux, go here to read it all.
Come on all of you (not just the Lutherans and the Catholics), admit that your ‘charitable’ work with refugees could not happen without a huge infusion of more than a half a billion $ a year in federal funding.
And, come on mainstream media, it is time you told the truth!
***Federal contractors/middlemen/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities.  Because their income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, the only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the contractors from the process.

 

Australia "dumb deal" looks dead for now

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

How did a Reuters reporter get tipped off that the deal was fizzling?

Some men in Australian detention centers are talking to the press.

By a ‘refugee’ with a pipeline to western media!
Makes you wonder if these ‘refugees’ will be trouble-makers if they ever get to America.
This news should not come as a shock since we did reach the 50,000 CEILING last week (for FY17) and these ‘refugees’ likely have no “bona fide relationships” with anyone in America or with federal contractors (except maybe the IRC could claim a relationship?).
 
The story is from AAP (Australia Associated Press):

US officials interviewing refugees held in an Australian-run offshore detention centre have left the facility abruptly, throwing further doubt over a plan to resettle many of the detainees in America.

US officials halted screening interviews and departed the Pacific island of Nauru on Friday, two weeks short of their scheduled timetable and a day after Washington said the United States had reached its annual refugee intake cap.

“US (officials) were scheduled to be on Nauru until July 26 but they left on Friday,” one refugee told Reuters, requesting anonymity as he did not want to jeopardise his application for US resettlement.

In the United States, a senior member of the union that represents refugee officers at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a Department of Homeland Security agency, told Reuters his own trip to Nauru was not going forward as scheduled.

[….]

The Australian Immigration Department declined to comment on the whereabouts of the US officials or the future of a refugee swap agreement between Australia and the United States, which President Donald Trump earlier this year branded a “dumb deal”.

An indefinite postponement of the deal would have significant repercussions for Australia’s pledge to close a second detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus island on October 31.

Only 70 refugees, less than 10 per cent of the total detainees held in the camp, have completed US processing.

Sure Malcolm, you got a deal! The US will take over 1,000 of your rejected asylum seekers (mostly from terror-producing Muslim countries) and you will take some undetermined number of Central Americans, mostly Catholics, who are not refugees and who are safe in Costa Rica—what a deal!

“The US deal looks more and more doubtful,” Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said.

Former US President Obama agreed a deal with Australia late last year to offer refuge to up to 1250 asylum seekers.

[On the backs of US taxpayers!—ed]

The Trump administration said it would only honour the deal to maintain a strong relationship with Australia, and then only on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.

[On the backs of communities that must absorb these men from terror hot spots—ed]

In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a centre in Costa Rica, where the United States has taken in a larger number of people in recent years.

[Any fake refugees in Costa Rica are not our problem—ed]

The swap is designed, in part, to help Australia close both Manus and Nauru, which are expensive to run and have been widely criticised by the United Nations and others over treatment of detainees.

[And American taxpayers and communities get the short end of the stick—ed]

[….]

The majority of the detainees interviewed on both Manus and Nauru by US officials in April are from Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

More here at AAP.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong!

As early as 2012 I testified to the US State Department that the US Refugee Admissions Program should not be used to solve extracurricular diplomatic problems around the world.
Only legitimate refugees in need of humanitarian assistance should be considered for the program.  Instead we repeatedly move certain people (including troublemakers! Uzbeks for instance!) around the world for reasons other than humanitarian ones and that is wrong!
This is what I said (beginning in 2012) in Ten Reasons there should be a MORATORIUM!

7)   Congress needs to specifically disallow the use of the refugee program for other purposes of the US Government, especially using certain refugee populations to address unrelated foreign policy objectives—Uzbeks, Kosovars, Meshketians and Bhutanese (Nepalese) people come to mind.

Now it is mostly Muslims held in Australian detention centers we might be bringing to your towns!
Why should helping Australian Prime Minister Turnbull get off a political hook be solved on the backs of US taxpayers?

And why should American communities be saddled with these questionable people as neighbors? 
I ask that of the Trump White House and the Heritage Foundation, here, where their expert on refugees seems to see this (diplomacy) as a legitimate purpose of the USRAP—see five reasons the USRAP is good for America as a tool for diplomacy.
See all of my previous posts on the Australia “dumb deal” by clicking here.
Write to the White House.  Today you can encourage the President to kill this deal altogether!

Hawaiian rogue judge has until Tuesday to respond to Trump SCOTUS motion

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Justice Clarence Thomas: “compromise will invite a flood of litigation….”

Oh, was Justice Clarence Thomas right—what a hash has been made in the courts as the fight goes on to define “bona fide relationship.”
Are you as sick of this as I am?  Go here to read my previous post on the judge in Hawaii (the state that only “welcomes” a tiny number of refugees) who thinks he has the legal right to write refugee law (just as  the Supreme Court did as well!).
This just an hour ago from Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court has asked the State of Hawaii to respond by Tuesday at noon to President Donald Trump’s motion to block a judge’s ruling that prevented his travel ban from being applied to grandparents of U.S. citizens and refugees already being processed by resettlement agencies, the court’s public information office said on Saturday.

In a court filing on Friday, the administration asked the justices to overturn Thursday’s decision by a U.S. district judge in Hawaii, which limited the scope of the administration’s temporary ban on refugees and travelers from six Muslim-majority countries.

Don’t get too hung up on the grandparents part of this, the important point for followers of RRW is the question of whether a federal refugee contractor*** is a “bona fide entity.”
See all of my previous posts on the really really dumb thing the Supreme Court did in the first place in my category: Supreme Court.
***Federal contractors/middlemen/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities.  Because their income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, the only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the contractors from the process.

 

New Hampshire: Congolese refugee escapes prosecution in domestic violence case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It was  only two days ago that I told you that “assimilation” is a dirty word in the lexicon of the Open Borders/Refugee industry.  I also told you that we have admitted over 40,000 ‘refugees’ from the DR Congo (so  far) with a UN agreed upon goal of taking 50,000.
(DR Congolese refugees are the largest ethnic group coming in under the Trump Administration. Only 3.8% are Muslim, if you are wondering.)

UNHCR asked us to help clean out the camps and we said ‘Yes, sir!’

Now both posts serve as background for this stunner from Manchester, NH about a refugee from DR Congo who beat a woman (no mention if it was his wife) and was given a free pass by the legal system because he had come from a violent culture.
After reading the story here and here, I realized why the refugee advocates and officials have mentioned in the past that women from the DR Congo will need lots of (costly) mental health treatment.

Not just women and children!

Augustin Bahati “lacked the cultural competency to participate in the American justice system.”

And, we were led to believe that we were getting mostly women and children.  I just checked the demographic data at Wrapsnet and was shocked to learn that men and women are pretty much equal in number and in fact in the 21-30 age group in most years, men arriving here out-numbered the women in that group!
Here is a bit from the story at ImmigrationReform.com (hat tip: Joanne):

Assimilation is one of the most critical aspects of any successful immigration system. It determines whether an aspiring migrant will be able to adapt to a nation’s values, laws, and culture. And no, this type of assimilation doesn’t mean that one must throw away all of the cultural heritage that makes a person who they are. Rather, it means that they must reconcile their heritage with the laws and values of the nation they wish to join.

A breaking story in New Hampshire highlights the importance of this concept. According to court records obtained by the New Hampshire Union Leader, a prosecutor dropped domestic violence charges against Augustin Bahati, a Congolese refugee, when she unilaterally decided “that he lacked the cultural competency to participate in the American justice system.” In essence, this means that the prosecutor determined Bahati was still so rooted in his old culture – where domestic violence is presumably acceptable – that he was incapable of being legally responsible for violating American domestic abuse laws.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Bahati is originally from, sexual abuse and domestic violence are commonplace. In fact, The DRC is often referred to as “the rape capital of the world.” Throughout the 20-year, ongoing civil war within the republic’s borders, the Brooking’s Institution estimates that as many as 48 rapes occur every hour, largely stemming from members of rival militias. In addition, there are very few laws on the books aimed at protecting women from spousal abuse.

This decision is highly troubling, especially since Bahati’s alleged crimes include “striking, pushing, grabbing, kicking and pulling out the hair” of a woman who was 27 weeks pregnant, according to the Union Leader. What the Manchester prosecutor seems to be saying, is that Bahati’s domestic abuse should be tolerated, because he is new to the United States and still acting according to the moral and legal standards of his native country.

Continue reading here.
And, don’t miss the Union Leader story here.

Does your state ‘welcome’ refugees from the DR Congo? 

Most states do. Only HAWAII, Delaware, West Virginia and Wyoming have escaped!
Since this big resettlement began in earnest in FY2013, we went back to that year (up to the present day) at Wrapsnet.  40,216 are living in your towns and cities.  Only 9,784 to go to please the United Nations, but I have never seen one of these camp clean out projects end when they promised it would!
 

 

If you can’t read Florida, it is 1,433. Alaska got 81. NH, where this travesty of justice for women happened, got 703. And, Hawaii which is just dying for more refugees got ZERO!

 
Here are the Top Ten states with the most DR Congolese refugees arriving since FY2013:
 
So much for Texas getting out of the program. And, where is California, it is most often #1 or 2???

 

Did you write to ‘The Donald’ today???

Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to tell the White House what you think!

Hawaii: Rogue judge once again rules for the Imam, attempts to thwart Trump on refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This latest was predicted and reported here by Michael Leahy at Breitbart two days ago.
Update:  Here is Leahy’s (Breitbart) take on this latest legal mess the Supreme Court is responsible for creating!

Judge Derrick Watson

Judge Derrick Watson took advantage of the mess the Supreme Court made in its recent ruling (as Justice Thomas predicted) to once again attempt to stop President Trump from carrying out a simple 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement in order to analyze the program and determine whether security screening is sufficient.
The Supreme Court literally unconstitutionally legislated when it created a way to go around a Presidentially-determined ceiling as defined by over 3 decades of refugee law and said refugees with a “bona fide relationship” to a family member or to an “entity” could come in over the 50,000 ceiling reached yesterday (here).
BTW, today we have now exceeded the 50,000 ceiling by 168. We are at 50,168 this morning.

Before I give you Politico’s version of the judge’s decision in Hawaii yesterday, let me be clear!

The US State Department under Sec. of  State Rex Tillerson must ignore this decision!

(They should have ignored this rogue judge’s earlier decision as well! You should write to the White House and tell Trump to stand against this runaway judiciary!)
One Hawaiian judge deciding for one Imam (and the refugee-rejecting state of Hawaii!) should not be the one to define “bona fide” a wholly new legal term and a new construct for resettlement thanks to the overzealous SCOTUS.  Where the hell is Congress, btw? Writing law is their job!
Here is Politico:

A federal judge in Hawaii ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to allow grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles and other relatives of people in the U.S. to circumvent the travel ban policy, dealing a temporary blow to one of the president’s signature initiatives.

In an order issued Thursday evening local time in Honolulu, Judge Derrick Watson also prohibited the administration from blocking refugees with a commitment from a resettlement agency in the U.S., a move that could revive the flow of refugee admissions this year.

Along with the State of Hawaii, Imam Ismail Elshikh is a plaintiff in the case (again). In case you missed it, Hawaii is at the bottom of the list of states resettling refugees having only ‘welcomed’ 3 this entire fiscal year so far.

The decision was a victory for opponents of the travel ban, who hoped to broaden the universe of people who could bypass the president’s policy, which temporarily bars travelers from six majority-Muslim nations and suspends the refugee resettlement program.

The Supreme Court issued an order on June 26 that allowed the embattled measure to go into effect, but included the caveat that affected travelers with “bona fide” ties to a person or entity in the U.S. should not be subject to the ban.

[….]

In the realm of refugee resettlement, the administration stood by the contention that a connection to a resettlement agency alone would not meet the criteria to avoid the ban.

[….]

The federal judge added that a refugee with a commitment from a resettlement agency met the standard for a “bona fide” relationship spelled out in the Supreme Court order.

[….]

“It is formal, it is a documented contract, it is binding, it triggers responsibilities and obligations, including compensation, it is issued specific to an individual refugee only when that refugee has been approved for entry by the Department of Homeland Security, and it is issued in the ordinary course, and historically has been for decades,” he wrote. [Don’t let the refugee contractors*** fool you, here we have it, this is about their compensation by you, the American taxpayer!–ed]

“Bona fide does not get any more bona fide than that.”

[….]

On Twitter, an attorney for the plaintiffs, the state of Hawaii and a local imam, celebrated the momentary legal win, which could be met with appeals by the federal government.

Appeals! The Administration better simply ignore this single judge and the Imam!

This post is filed in my ‘Supreme Court’ category, click here for other stories on the hash the Supreme Court has made of refugee law.
***Federal contractors/middlemen/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities.  Because their income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, the only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the contractors from the process.