Wisconsin Refugee Agency may have scammed taxpayers big time!

10/09/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Call home Paul Ryan! This outrageous “savings” program is one of many, you as Speaker of the House, need to investigate!

paul-ryan-beard — Speaker Paul Ryan has shown zero interest in reforming the Refugee Act of 1980. I wonder could we suggest Janesville (his home town) as one of the many new resettlement sites in America!

I’m guessing this is not an isolated case.
For new readers, Speaker Paul Ryan has not allowed any serious Refugee Act reform bills (he allowed one sham bill because he knew the Senate wouldn’t pass it anyway) to move forward in the House during his tenure as speaker and for that matter neither has Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
These so-called ‘Individual Development Accounts’ are an abomination and potentially rife with fraud. When taxpayers learn about them (we have mentioned them on many occasions) they are shocked.
The federal government actually gives grants to non-profit refugee agencies to administer a program which allows refugees to get matching funds when they save money for four things (Education, business, home or car).
How would you like to get such a deal:

For every dollar a refugee saves, he/she is matched a dollar out of the US Treasury (your pocket)!

But, again the program is managed by a resettlement contractor (with no accountability to the taxpayer) like this one in Milwaukee. Financial audits/investigations of the contractors are rare.
From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (hat tip: Joanne):

A Milwaukee nonprofit that offers after-school programs for refugee children and other assistance for refugees is under investigation for alleged misuse of federal funds.

The Pan-African Community Association gave money to at least 32 people who were not eligible to receive funds, investigators with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement have found, according to records obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Ethiopian Community Development Council is one of nine federally funded refugee contractors that could not exist without your tax dollars. Go to this link to see if they have an office near you: http://www.ecdcus.org/Where_We_Work/affiliates.html

In addition, the organization violated terms of federal grants by spending more than 35% of its annual budget on administrative costs and paying individuals in the form of money orders, rather than paying vendors directly for items purchased, the reports state.

The association received more than $440,000 in federal funds from 2012 to 2015 to help refugees from Africa and around the world buy cars and houses and to open businesses in Milwaukee. Using Individual Development Accounts, the program was designed to offer matching grants to refugees who, for example, saved at least $2,000 of their own money to go toward the purchase of a car or $4,000 toward a house.

[….]

The Pan-African Community Association is contracted through the “preferred communities program,” with the Ethiopian Community Development Council. The council, in turn, is one of about 10 [nine actually—ed] national organizations — mostly faith-based — that the federal government contracts with to provide services to refugees.

Continue here for more of the gory details and denials.
I haven’t written about “preferred communities” since here in 2014. But, you might have a look and see if your city is one of them. They don’t change often.

Call Congress!

Time to listen to ‘Mom for Trump’ (I am not going to quit trying to persuade you that right now there is only one place to put pressure to slow the flow of third worlders to your towns—Congress!):

Ann, could you tell all your readers on a daily basis to call our useless Congress @ 202 224 3121 and have them say DEFUND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM. I call daily and if enough of us do so, we can make a difference.

If you have problems getting a live person on the phone when you call Washington (like I did when I called my Congressman John Delaney (D-MD) the other day), then find out the locations and phone numbers of their district and state offices and call those. When you have someone on the phone on Tuesday (they surely won’t be there on Monday), in addition to telling them to defund the program, find out where your member or Senator will be in the coming weeks and be there! Ask (in person, in front of an audience) if he or she will Defund the Refugee Resettlement Program when they get back to DC after the election.

DNA testing required in wake of widespread Somali family reunification fraud

10/21/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In an otherwise whining piece about how the feds are too slow to admit family members of refugees, at least this Frontline ‘news’ story admits that thousands of Somalis entered the US fraudulently resulting in a 4-year closure (in 2008) of the so-called P-3 family reunification program of the US State Department.

Dadaab-refugee-camp-007 — Somali refugees in Dadaab, a massive UN camp in Kenya. Truth be told, there is no way to thoroughly screen the refugees we accept from the UN any better here, than those we are accepting from UN camps in the Middle East. Photo: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/12/somalia-kenya-murder

You should read the whole long article, but here (below) is the segment on Somali fraud (btw, none of those who got in here by lying were ever deported).
For our thousands of new readers: We covered the discovery and aftermath extensively, here. The fraud was originally reported at the Wall Street Journal in August of 2008.
The nine major federal resettlement contractors fought tooth and nail to keep the State Department from requiring DNA testing.
Frontline on DNA testing:

Even if those restrictions are loosened, refugees applying for family reunification will face another hurdle to clear: DNA testing.

The inspiration for this requirement was born in East Africa, where more than 1 million Somalians have been displaced from their country by civil war and famine. In the mid-2000s, the U.S. was providing refuge to about 10,000 Somalians a year*** — many of whom went on to apply to the family reunification program to bring over relatives.

Immigration officials suspected that some were inventing “ghost children,” and filling out applications for children not related to them. There had even been some reports of brokers who sold the ghost children’s slots for profit, according to a U.S. Department of State official who spoke to FRONTLINE but asked not to be named.

So in early 2008, the State Department launched a pilot program to determine the extent of fraud by testing relationships using DNA.

In the initial pilot of 476 applicants in Nairobi, Kenya, only 16 percent were genetically related to every person they said was in their family. Another 39 percent tested false for at least one family member. In the remaining 45 percent of cases, applicants either refused to participate or didn’t show up for the test.

Officials interpreted these results as proof of widespread fraud. The P-3 program was suspended, and did not reopen for more than four years.

This stunned refugees around the world, many of whom had spent years waiting for P-3 applications to be approved. Most were told to apply for an alternate visa, but it was even more restrictive than P-3 and soon had a multi-year waiting list.

There is much more, read on.
*** We admitted 8,858 this past fiscal year, (9,000 the year before that!):

As the UNHCR is sending Somalis back to Somalia from its Kenyan camps we admitted 8,858 Somalis to the US in FY2015, here (many from the Kenyan camps!). Somalis are the third largest ethnic group admitted to the US this past year.

Go here to see how many Somalis entered the US through the Refugee Admissions Program since its inception. Notice some of the biggest years are in the George W. Bush Administration.

Why are we still admitting Somali refugees after three decades?

Illegal alien advocacy group alerts non-citizens to states where they can vote without ID

10/30/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, there are twenty, twenty! states including my Maryland that allow voters to show up (and vote!) at a polling place without any identification.

It is not just the illegals….

Remember also, we are not talking only about someone who recently sneaked across the border, but millions of legal immigrants who are here as refugees, temporary refugees in the Temporary Protected Status program (includes hundreds of thousands from Central America), the ‘Dreamers,’ and all sorts of others with permanent resident status who have not yet acquired citizenship. All are able to vote.

As a matter of fact, even in those states that do require ID, those LEGAL immigrants (non-citizens) with drivers licenses may well be voting too!

Here is the story at the Daily Caller:

The pro-amnesty Hispanic activist organization the National Council of La Raza helpfully promoted a Washington Post article explaining which states people can vote in without having to use a photo ID.

“Voter ID laws are at-issue across the country, with newly Republican-controlled legislatures having passed them in numerous states after the 2010 election,” explained The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “Most states still request some form of ID, but don’t require it. Another 20 states don’t require identification. In case you’re wondering where your state is at in all of this, a helpful (sic) graphic from the Post’s graphics team.”

So who ended up using the Post’s helpful graphic? The country’s foremost pro-amnesty Hispanic immigrant organization.

Go here (Washington Post) to see the list of states and what sort of ID (or none at all) that is required.

UNHCR whistleblower wins her case—nine years later!

06/02/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Readers, the UN agency that basically tells the US State Department what to do and which refugees to bring to your towns is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The present head honcho at UNHCR is socialist Antonio Guterres. We just mentioned him in our previous post this morning, here.

This is an incredible story about whistleblower, Caroline Hunt-Matthes, from the Government Accountability Project (emphasis mine):

After nine years of legal battles, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whistleblower has won her case. On May 28, 2013, the United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) – the court of first instance of the two-tier internal justice system through which UN employees contest violations of their rights – issued two judgments that found in favor of Caroline Hunt-Matthes, a former senior investigation officer with UNHCR’s Inspector General’s Office (IGO).

According to judgment 2013/85, Hunt-Matthes made numerous disclosures regarding UNHCR practices. These included, but were not limited to, disclosures about interference/obstruction into an investigation of an alleged rape of a UN staff member in Sri Lanka by another staff member; the decision of the IGO to hire a staff member who was himself under investigation by the IGO; the “failure to register a sexual harassment complaint” against the High Commissioner; the “unlawful detention of refugees by senior UNHCR staff, leading to the death of a refugee while in detention;” and a “report of sexual exploitation of a refugee by a UNHCR staff member.” (para. 34) In April 2006, Hunt-Matthes filed a request for protection with the UN Ethics Office, which is charged with reviewing retaliation complaints from whistleblowers. In December 2006, the Ethics Office issued a decision in which it found that she engaged in protected activity but concluded that there was no prima facie case of retaliation because there was allegedly no connection between the retaliation and her whistleblowing.

Read it all to see the far-reaching vindication of Hunt-Matthes and confirmation that she was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on the agency.

I’m reminded of UNHCR audit

High Commissioner for Refugees Guterres schmoozing with Angelina Jolie (AP photo)

For new readers, in 2012, the UNHCR came under fire for misusing millions of your tax dollars, here.

This is what FoxNews reported at the time:

EXCLUSIVE: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, two years ago was sitting on a stockpile of $437 million in unspent cash, even as a U.N. auditing agency warned that its sloppy handling of funds imperiled future contributions from U.N. member nations.

The report, issued last year but only introduced for member-state review in the U.N. General Assembly, cites UNHCR for sloppy bookkeeping, poor financial oversight, managerial disarray, and a lack of tools to judge how well it was doing its job of helping tens of millions of the world’s displaced people.

The U.N.’s independent Board of Auditors used remarkably straight-forward language to lambaste the refugee agency, whose largest donor, the United States, contributed $712 million to UNHCR in 2010, according to the State Department. The auditors noted that the relief agency, which is financed largely by voluntary contributions, spent about $1.9 billion in 2010; its budget two years earlier was about $1.1 billion.

The auditors pointed out that there were “strong indicators of significant shortcomings in financial management” at the agency, headed since 2005 by Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal. “This is a major risk for UNHCR,” the auditors warned, “given the increasing pressures on donors to justify why they provide public funds to international aid organizations.”

I don’t know if anything ever came of this revelation. But, to think that this agency has anything to do with the demographic make-up and economic situation of your American city is maddening.