Darn! It is comments like that which will force me out of semi-retirement because no one in the media ever calls them on this crap!
Thanks to a reader for sending me this news from CNN that appeared in a few media outlets around the country, here at CBS 58 in Milwaukee.
But, before I give you the money quote, pay attention to this story. The refugee contractors have long wanted to see a private refugee sponsorship program set up as a way to increase the numbers of ‘refugees’ admitted to the US.
The private sponsors would be in addition to their paid work as government resettlement contractors.
The massive number of Biden’s Afghans cannot be accommodated under the present system so this trial run at finding private sponsors for thousands of families outside the present system could be just the ticket they have long hankered for.
HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield
Note too that Afghans could be placed anywhere, and that the long understood one hundred mile radius of an approved refugee resettlement site will no longer apply.
Anyway, here is what Mark Hetfield of HIAS, Inc (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) says and continues to say about how the Trump administration decimated the contractor system.
It just is not true!
But after four years of historic low arrivals under the Trump administration, agencies had to close some of their offices around the country, limiting where refugees can be relocated — a significant hurdle at a time when housing options are already hard to come by.
“We just didn’t have the capacity after the beating we took under the Trump administration,” said Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society did NOT take a beating under Trump as you can see from data at USA Spending!
In fact, Trump upped their income from early years of the Obama Administration.
First year under Obama:
First year under Trump:
Last full Trump year:
You could actually say that Trump nearly doubled the federal dole to HIAS from Obama’s early years.
But, now, they are in the money as Biden has gifted them just about $50 million of your tax dollars for their charitable (ha!) good works.
Apparently salaries did not suffer under Trump either!
This is big and it is buried many column inches into a story at Business Insider entitled:
Biden said the US was committed to accepting more refugees. So where are they?
As longtime readers know, the US Refugee Admissions Program has traditionally paid its nine contractors*** on a per refugee client basis.
I am speculating Biden said: Here is the deal! You shut up about the low number of admissions for FY21 and we will send you millions $$$ IN ADVANCE for FY22.
So, naturally during the Trump years, when refugee arrivals were low, the contractors were not raking in the federal bucks (your tax dollars) at the rate they did when Obama, for instance, was President.
They whined and complained about having to cut staff and close offices and now they want to get up and running before the promised 125,000 begin arriving in October.
They are getting ready in Idaho! where a controversial resettlement agency there had its budget (waaahh!) halved by Trump.
Although a good bit of the Business Insider article is a rehash of the recent Biden flip, flop, flipping on the refugee ceiling for this fiscal year, the article is nevertheless chockfull of useful information.
For the sake of time, which I am running out of this morning, here are just a few snips:
A spokesperson for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the Health and Human Services Department, said the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee admissions had hit the country’s humanitarian infrastructure hard.
“[H]umanitarian infrastructure” is code for government contractors’ budgets.
“The steady decrease in arrivals during the previous four years has resulted in decreased resettlement capacity at the local level,” they said. Between 2017 and 2021, “approximately one-third of the network had to close.”
[….]
That has raised the question: Can the US actually resettle as many refugees as Biden would like?
[….]
Officials at US refugee agencies said they would be able to meet the needs of any refugees sent their way. Rebuilding their capacity to do so is a hassle, but it has already begun. New staff are being hired, and new offices will soon be opened — the when and where hinging on support from local communities. [They are out scouting for fresh territory!—ed]
Okay, here it is for all of you refugee policy wonks! As I said, this is big!
Alicia Wrenn of HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)
Wrenn, of the resettlement agency HIAS, said her group would soon be receiving from the State Department “capacity building funds so that we can actually start to hire up and train people for arrivals.”
LOL! “agency partners!” They try so hard to avoid using the word contractors!
For the first time, the government will also be paying its agency partners and their partners on the local level ahead of time and more consistently.
“It has historically always been a per capita system,” she said. Before, “as arrivals fell, staff volume fell, because that’s the way it worked.” Now the plan is to provide a separate budget for the staff — social workers, language and cultural experts, educators — that will not be based, after the fact, on the exact number of refugees that agency ended up serving.
And, a shout-out to a refugee policy wonk I know who predicted that this was what they are doing during this time when refugee arrivals are still low.
Can you imagine the competition going on among the nine as they scramble for the Biden bucks no longer tethered to the number of refugees each contractor can manage.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris andlobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locationsfor the Unaccompanied Alien Children.
At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients. See Winchester, VA.
Here I go again, another post on the incredibly amusing muddle the Biden Administration has gotten itself into in regards to the flip-flop-flipping on his decision to aim to admit a certain number of refugees into the US this fiscal year.
Since I last wrote here on Wednesday, I posted a piece at Frauds and Crooks on the topic, because I am so fascinated by how the Biden White House has made such an enormous political blunder and that the corporate media has reported on the blowback Biden has received from the liberal wing of his party.
The Frauds and Crookspost focused on how quickly the refugee lobby went into action to slap Biden around on his unforgiveable waffling and announcement that he would leave the refugee ceiling/cap at the Trump level for the remainder of the fiscal year sending HIAS and other refugee pushers ballistic as heads exploded throughout the refugee industry.
There are so many things I could have written about today, but instead, I just spent part of an hour listening to a podcast at something called Skullduggery where HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) CEO Mark Hetfield gives Michael Isikoff some inside skinny on what went down last week in the White House implosion over the refugee cap for the year.
Additionally Hetfield reveals a few other nuggets of information that you may find illuminating. I did.
Hey, and if you think that somehow I pick on Mark Hetfield and HIAS, I don’t.
Mark Hetfield protesting President Donald Trump’s refugee policy decisions.
It just happens that Hetfield appears to be the most political of the refugee contractor CEOs and is out and about talking to the media and organizing protests. (See all contractors*** below.)
He also was the leader of the pack suing the Trump administration every time Trump attempted to reform the Refugee Admissions Program.
Calling all refugee policy wonks! This podcastis worth listening to as Hetfield describes the situation with the White House as “bizarre.”
Here are a few takeaways (some nuggets we already know, but confirmed by Hetfield):
~ The refugee admissions controversy was the first blowback Biden received from the liberal wing of the party. By May 15th a new refugee ceiling will be announced by the capitulating White House.
~ We learn that Secretary of State Blinken wants the increase, but some unknown players in the White House are politically “spooked on immigration.” That tells us that we must, for all its worth, keep talking about immigration and the southern border as a “crisis.”
~ With the refugee program it is the Muslim refugees that most scare the public. There was a few minutes of discussion about the 2015 governors’ revolt when 31 governors told Obama they refused to admit Syrian refugees to their states. Even presidential candidates such as moderates on immigration, Bush and Rubio, became “xenophobic” in their rhetoric. That really freaked-out Hetfield.
~Hetfield claims the public is mostly positive about bringing in more refugees, but apparently some unnamed advisors in the White House are looking at polling that does not confirm Hetfield’s optimistic view.
~Hetfield is “infuriated” by all of the focus on vetting refugees that delays their arrival in America. He says that no refugee has committed a lethal terror attack on US soil, but doesn’t mention that many have been stopped and apprehended before they could carry out a planned attack! And, he doesn’t mention the killers and rapists who have gotten past the screening.
~Isikoff finds Tucker Carlson’s great “replacement” theory “vile.” And then asks if Hetfield watches Carlson. This is the funny part: Hetfield says he “made the mistake” of going on Tucker’s show a few years ago.
By the way, that did not go well for Hetfield. If you missed it, here it is:
~ Hetfield called the replacement concept “beyond offensive.” He and the podcasters are concerned about whether this “strain of thinking” by the likes of Carlson, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller is “ascendant.” Hint to you: Keep it going.
~Hetfield called the administration’s border crisis a “lose-lose” situation for the President.
~As for the ceiling/cap, he wonders how the Biden team got so muddled over it as he said “set the damn cap” and set it higher than Trump’s cap. It doesn’t matter exactly what it is because it is a cap, a ceiling. He just wants to get the program moving and then Biden should fulfil his promise for FY2022 which begins on October 1, 2021 to admit 125,000 refugees from the Middle East, Africa, South America and Asia.
For those of you new to the Refugee program there was some useful basic information about how the program works.
Listento the whole interview entitled ‘Biden’s Refugee Problem.’
***If you are new to RRW, here are all of the federal refugee resettlement contractors.
The border crisis is damaging refugee resettlement!
The contractors worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and they lobby for open borders.
From the earliest days of writing this blog it has perplexed me because if they truly cared about the refugees they legally help, they would not encourage leniency toward lawbreakers at our borders because the general public makes no distinctions.
To the average American it is all the same—too many people having too many needs for Americans to pay for.
Holy cow! This storyat the New York Timesyesterday was revealing and that was because, first and foremost, it says to me that there is discord, and there are leakers willing to leak about that discord, inside the Biden/Harris administration!
The entire issue of refugee resettlement had gone into sleep-mode in recent months, so I’m surprised that the topic is now front and center, not so much because of refugee numbers per se, but because it is giving us a window into an extremely dysfunctional (back stabbing) administration.
Is Biden a racist?
Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the foot-dragging and flip-flopping, and I am happy to see so many Open borders pushers with their undies in a wad, but it is disquieting to see such an erratic decision-making process.
Not to mention, if Biden’s rationale is that he doesn’t want to piss-off more voters (or members of Congress) on immigration issues before the mid-term elections, that ship has sailed.
Everyone already knows he has unleashed the invasion.
We are being overrun by illegal aliens and the average American isn’t sitting out there saying, well, we can cut him some slack because at least he isn’t bringing in tens of thousands of legal refugees from across the entire globe.
See my post yesterday about how the border and the refugee admissions program have long ago been “conflated” in peoples’ minds.
Here is a bit of what theNew York Timesis saying in what is likely the first, hopefully not the last, reporting on the bloom-off-the-rose for Biden. It is long, and likely only the wonkiest of refugee wonks will read it all.
Forgive me for my fixation on this, but I have never seen anything quite like this mess in all the years I’ve been writing about the US Refugee Program, and I especially love to see the Lefties at each others’ throats!
An Early Promise Broken: Inside Biden’s Reversal on Refugees
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to President Biden.
(If Biden brings in fewer refugees than Trump did in a year, will they call Biden a “racist?” Just wondering!)
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden.
Ha! Is it Blinken’s team doing the leaking?
In the meeting, on March 3, Mr. Blinken implored the president to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
But Mr. Biden, already under intense political pressure because of the surge of migrant children at the border with Mexico, was unmoved. The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this?
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House, according to an account of his decision making from more than a dozen Biden administration officials, refugee resettlement officials and others.
Mr. Biden was eager for the praise that would come from vastly increasing Mr. Trump’s record-low limit, people familiar with his thinking said, and he decided to increase the cap even earlier than the usual start of the fiscal year, Oct. 1.
If Chief of Staff Ron Klain thinks holding refugee numbers down will bring some bipartisanship in Congress and brownie points for the midterm elections, he has very seriously miscalculated.
But only weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, immigration and the border had already become major distractions from his efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and to persuade Congress to invest trillions of dollars into the economy — issues championed by aides like Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, as more central to his presidency.
[….]
The exchange on March 3 took place shortly after Mr. Biden had dispatched Mr. Blinken and two other cabinet secretaries to formally tell Congress that he would increase refugee admissions during the next six months to 62,500 people from the annual 15,000-person limit set by Mr. Trump.
Instead, the president undercut his emissaries and left hundreds of refugees in limbo for weeks.
For the next month and a half, Mr. Biden’s aides stalled, repeatedly telling reporters and refugee advocacy groups that the president still intended to follow through.
[….]
On Feb. 12, the president delivered on the specific commitment to Congress, pledging to resettle 62,500 refugees fleeing war and persecution at home. Mr. Blinken delivered the message to lawmakers along with Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, and Norris Cochran, the acting health secretary at the time.
Hetfield is surely the leader of the pack as he stirs the political pot and I’m guessing the ringleader in guiding the NYT reporters with the help of his sources in the State Department.
“They went there and presented a really thoughtful plan, and we were so thrilled,” said Mark J. Hetfield, the chief executive of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a resettlement agency.
“And then,” Mr. Hetfield said, “it just evaporated overnight.”
[….]
As the weeks stretched into months, it became clear that Mr. Biden’s presidency would not be the panacea some had thought.
The biggest knife-cut of all! Biden wanted to stick with Stephen Miller‘s cap!
Instead of making good on his promise to significantly expand refugee entry into the United States, Mr. Biden was sticking to the cap engineered by Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.
“This reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses,” Mr. Miller tweeted, adding that if it were still up to him, “Refugee cap should be reduced to ZERO.”
The idea that Mr. Miller and Mr. Biden were in agreement about anything was anathema to most of the president’s supporters, many of whom flew into a rage.
[….]
By Friday evening, the White House was in full damage-control mode.
Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, held an emergency conference call with refugee advocates at 7:30 p.m., emphasizing that the administration would work to welcome in the refugees with haste.
That is enough to show you what a hash the administration has made of the refugee admissions program and immigration in general!
I’ve wondered for over a decade why Biden’s Delaware never welcomed refugees in any numbers.
Only a handful have ever been placed there and no one seems to know why. It isn’t because it is a small state, because Rhode Island is smaller and has welcomed thousands more than Biden’s home state.
According to the US State Department data base at the Refugee Processing Center, Delaware has only ‘welcomed’ 171 refugees since the beginning of fiscal year 2003. (Data before 2003 is not easy to access.)
Well it is a small state you say!
It is twice the size of Rhode Island which took in 3,122 poor third worlders in the same time period.
