Tag: Idaho

Twin Falls, Idaho: College board (supporting refugee resettlement) limits free speech at recent meeting

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

News from a “Pocket of Resistance” to more federal government colonization of towns throughout America…..
Here is the latest from MagicValley.com *** the publication that sent a threatening letter to RRW and editorialized against us recently.

The College of Southern Idaho houses a refugee resettlement program.

One of the favorite techniques used to tamp down resistance to refugee resettlement was apparently on display at a recent Board meeting of the College of Southern Idaho (which houses and supports a refugee resettlement contractor).   They don’t want to hear the opposition, so they come up with methods to silence speech.
From local reporter, Julie Wootton, here is how the story begins.  But be sure to read the whole thing because this publication wants to be sure you visit them to see their paid ads and so forth (emphasis is mine):

TWIN FALLS • A crowd showed up Monday to a College of Southern Idaho meeting to voice opinions about the Refugee Center program.

It’s the third month community members have come in droves to a board of trustees meeting.

Board chairman Karl Kleinkopf told the crowd of more than 50 people that it’s board policy that those who have spoken within the last six months would be moved to the end of the list of speakers.

He set a time cap of 30 minutes for the public forum due to the “tremendous amount of new business.” This is the first time the board has set a time limit for a public forum.

One commenter who did get to speak was Terry Edwards who said the program is costly, secretive and puts the community at risk.  That about says it!

Note to ‘Pockets,’ you don’t have to always play in their sandbox!

Go on the offense! Why not call for a public meeting and invite all the players!    Invite the US State Department, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS), the major federal resettlement contractors (and their subcontractors) operating in Boise and Twin Falls, and the Idaho Office of Refugees/Jannus Inc. . 
Don’t forget to include elected officials at the city and state level who support the program, ask them to come to a public forum in order to answer the many questions citizens have.  Maybe CSI would offer a free auditorium for the evening because surely they would like all the facts reported to the public.  Surely, the elected officials and ‘stakeholders’ have nothing to hide!
Ask those who advocate bringing more UN-chosen refugees to Idaho to answer all of the public’s questions about how the program is run, who is coming to Idaho, what industries are seeking cheap immigrant labor, what will the resettlement cost be to local and state taxpayers, how are the refugees screened (for health problems and security concerns), what might the impact be on housing for Idaho’s own poor and disabled people, what will the impact be on the local health department, how many children are now going into the school system and how many are projected for the future, etc.
Let those who support the program make their case IN PUBLIC.  But, organizers, be sure that all questions are asked and answered if it takes all night!
This post is filed in our new “Pockets of Resistance” category to inform those of you forming ‘pockets’ where you live of what others are doing!
We first heard that phrase— pockets of resistance—(coined by the federal government to refer to us who want transparency!) at an Office or Refugee Resettlement meeting in Lancaster, PA in June 2013, here.  It is the same meeting where we heard that the “NEW Americans” are “seedlings” being purposefully planted in the “soil” of your communities.
Click here for our Twin Falls, Idaho archive.

As trial opens for Idaho refugee alleged terrorist, Idaho Statesman reports on refugee program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Twin Falls, Idaho has become a “Pocket of Resistance” (federal government’s term!) to refugee resettlement where citizens are asking questions and expecting answers about the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program. (See all of our coverage on Twin Falls by clicking here.) Although the Statesman reporter is trying really hard to put a positive spin on the lengthy article, the article itself is a win for the local citizens who want answers.  A year ago there would never have even been this much attention on Uzbek refugee Fazliddin Kurbanov’s trial or the federal program that placed him in rural Idaho.

Trial began this week for alleged Islamic terrorist Fazliddin Kurbanov, a refugee from Uzbekistan. http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/trial-start-uzbek-refugee-facing-terrorism-charge-boise-0

I’ve snipped just a little bit of the article, but please go read the whole thing! By the way, all of our previous coverage of the alleged Uzbek terrorist is here.  As we have reported in the past, there is something very fishy about the admission of a large number of Uzbeks during the Bush Administration. Some observers believe that after the extremists began rioting, we brought Islamic radicals here to help out the more moderate Muslim President of Uzbekistan. I’ve even heard rumors that they were flown in with the help of the CIA.  It wouldn’t be the first time that we brought supposed ‘refugees’ here for some other foreign policy goal of the US government. We will probably never know whether there is any substance to the rumors. The Idaho Statesman:

Some 80,000 people came to the United States as refugees in 2009, nearly 1,300 of them to Idaho. One of those arrivals, an Uzbek who landed in Boise, was later charged as a bomb-making terrorist. His trial starts Monday.

Citizens want answers!

Overwhelmingly, refugee stories fall into the more positive, and typically more mundane, camp. Even so, opposition to refugees and concerns about their backgrounds persist, getting the occasional boost from new threats, incidents or shifts in refugee policy.

The recent U.S. pledge to resettle several thousand of the estimated 4 million Syrian refugees displaced by war is prompting renewed concern in Idaho. That’s loudest around Twin Falls, where the College of Southern Idaho has worked to resettle refugees since 1982. It now assists up to 300 people annually, and a local group has mobilized in protest.

“We’re not against refugees,” said Rick Martin, of Buhl, who leads the group that wants the college to end the program. “We’re against this program because there’s just so many unanswered questions that are not being addressed.”

What the heck!  Act of bias! Wendy Olson has just demonstrated her bias by suggesting that concerned citizens might be violent.

With the trial of Fazliddin Kurbanov set to start, U.S. Attorney for Idaho Wendy Olson announced on Friday that her office and other law enforcement agencies are on high alert for potential acts of bias against members of the refugee and Muslim communities.

We are told repeatedly (lectured actually!) that refugees are thoroughly screened,  but we aren’t supposed to notice every time a terrorist turns up in the refugee flow?

But what looms larger for concerned opponents is not that forest of millions, but the lone tree, such as an Uzbek in Boise who gained entry to the U.S. despite security checks that were supposed to stop him. Kurbanov is accused of planning bomb attacks at military bases and large public venues. He was arrested in May 2013 after FBI agents raided his Boise apartment and found chemicals and bomb-making components.

Measured against a population of millions, cases like Kurbanov’s are exceedingly rare but still cause for concern. The 2013 Boston bombings were committed by refugee brothers from Chechnya. With the rise of the Islamic State in the war-ravaged Syria in 2011, those who oppose refugees say greater risks could be on the horizon.

It is not just terrorism that concerns local residents…

“For our committee, even if they had said the Syrians are not coming, we would still pursue getting the college out of the refugee business,” said Martin, who with others has worked for years to install new college trustees who would end the program. “They need to focus on their core mission, which is to continue to be a center of higher learning for adults.”

Martin said his group, which counts more than 100 members on a closed Facebook page, also objects to the overall cost of refugee resettlement, its effect on the local job market and the “slumlike” conditions in which he says refugees are housed. [We hear this all the time—refugees in slums—and it’s because the contractors don’t want to spend too much money on them.  So instead of saying that we are taking more refugees than America can afford, let’s reduce the numbers, they live in slum housing.—ed]

This post is archived in our ‘Pockets of Resistance’ category as an example of the fine work citizens are doing in demanding transparency and economic accountability when refugees are resettled in local communities.  Media attention is vitally important.
An afterthought:  I just looked again at the AP story where I got the photo and realized that the title identifies Kurbanov as a “refugee.”  When I first began exposing the Refugee Program, the word ‘refugee’ was virtually never mentioned in any negative story about a refugee, let alone in a title!

"Pockets of Resistance" growing and spreading

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You’ve heard me often refer to “Pockets of Resistance,” those towns/cities and states where activists are demanding answers to the many questions citizens have about the United Nations/US State Department colonization of their towns by third worlders through the Refugee Resettlement Program.

resitance
Join the resistance! Save America! http://www.filmsdefrance.com/film-review/La_Bataille_du_rail_1946.html

We did not coin that phrase, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement did here in June 2013 (or at least that is the first place I heard it) when they also announced that they had hired ‘Welcoming America’ to head off new ones, and get those already existing ones under control.
In 2013, ORR specifically mentioned that there were ‘Pockets of Resistance’ in New Hampshire, Tennessee and Georgia.
By the way, it was at that meeting that I first heard the information about “seeding” our towns and cities with immigrants.
Now we can report there are growing pockets in the following states in addition to the three just mentioned: Idaho, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia (that I know of!).  I know I risk tipping off Welcoming America agitators to head to those states, but if I don’t mention this, many of you might get discouraged thinking you are alone.

New category here at RRW

What I am going to do is make a new category here at RRW for posts specifically on what concerned citizens are doing to demand answers—to demand TRANSPARENCY—where they live.  The purpose of which is to help give you ideas and to learn about efforts to resist already underway. Having all of those posts in one place will make it easier for new readers to find them.
I’m going to go back to a few previous posts—recently on Idaho and Minnesota—and place them in the new category.  Unfortunately I won’t be able to go back through 6,000 plus posts to select those involving citizen action!
Here is a Minnesota example!
Last week a concerned citizen in Willmar, Minnesota, Bob Enos, made a presentation to the County Board Meeting in Willmar (Kandiyohi County).  One bit of information that interested me was his assertion that the second highest number of refugees going to Minnesota were going to Willmar and not to St. Cloud (a very active ‘pocket’). Enos has done his homework and I direct your attention to this video of the County Board Meeting to see the kind of presentation that you could be making where you live.  Click on the video and go to 2:35:09 mark.
Some people have had difficulty loading it.  It loads for me on Firefox although on the second viewing I only got sound (but that is adequate for your purposes!).
Be sure to see this post we wrote about resistance and sabotage.
Do you have an action item that throws a shoe in the machinery of government that you would like to report?  Please let us know!
Again, see our new category—Pockets of Resistance.  (I will be adding posts to it as soon as possible)

Idaho citizens concerned with Syrian refugee resettlement plan get organized

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of all of our earlier news on Twin Falls, Idaho and the refugee resettlement contractor’s controversial plan there to resettle Syrian refugees in Magic Valley in FY2016 which begins on October 1 of this year.

Refugee program changing rural America by changing the people! Magic Valley, Idaho.

Here is the news about a citizens’ group forming to try to close the refugee center in Twin Falls.

It is amazing to me that Reuters and others, who are reporting on this controversy, say that Syrians are not in the mix of refugees expected to add to the thousands already in Idaho when there are many stories, including this one with the headline: ‘CSI refugee center expects influx of Syrians‘ from the biased MagicValley.com (which I am not allowed to snip from!).
None of the national coverage of this controversy I’ve seen has mentioned House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul’s warning either.  Don’t these reporters know how to google?

From Reuters (hat tip: Joanne):

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – A long-standing refugee welcoming center in conservative Idaho has found itself at the center of a campaign by adversaries seeking to force it closed, citing fears that the immigrants it hosts could include Islamist extremists.

The backlash comes amid an uptick in anti-Islamic protests and advertising campaigns in the United States, including a high profile May rally outside an Arizona mosque that saw more than 200 protesters, some armed, berate Islam and its Prophet Mohammad.

The ‘Magic Valley’ region of southern Idaho. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Valley

The newly formed Idaho group, whose 100 members plan a door-to-door information drive*** in July to win support for closing the refugee center in Twin Falls, said it was concerned the center will welcome Syrians displaced from that country’s civil war who may not have been adequately screened by the U.S. government for security risks.

“Bringing in Syrians, who are predominantly of Muslim background, may be opening the door to terrorists pretending to be refugees,” said Rick Martin, head of the so-called Committee to End the CSI (College of Southern Idaho) Refugee Center in nearby Buhl, a conservative agricultural area.

[….]

But center director Zeze Rwasama said his group had no immediate plans to serve Syrian refugees, adding that he did not know the origins of the refugees it will serve for the upcoming fiscal year.

Read it all.
No mention from Reuters that the House Homeland Security Committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul, has called the Syrian refugee resettlement plan by the United Nations (for 65,000 Syrians!) a potential “jihadi pipeline” to America.
Mr. Rwasama has a very good idea of which refugees they will “serve” this coming fiscal year because at this very moment they are working on their R & P Abstract for FY2016 which will list the nationalities of those expected to come to Twin Falls beginning in October.
The contractors everywhere (like CSI which is under the umbrella of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants) have been instructed by their lobbying arm in Washington (the Refugee Council USA) to keep secret their FY2016 plans.

Local elected officials should demand to see the plans for FY2016 and Mr. Martin’s group should insist they do!

In addition to the security concerns and the veil of secrecy surrounding refugee resettlement, Mr. Martin and his group should also look into the enormous cost of the refugee program being shifted from the federal government to the state of Idaho.  Idaho taxpayers are on the hook for education, health care, housing etc. for the impoverished refugees being brought there at the behest of the UN and US State Department.
And, while they are at it, find out which large employers are driving the resettlement in order to tap into a steady supply of cheap (captive!) labor.
*** By the way, I like this door-to-door drive idea necessary in most places where the media is biased in favor of more immigration/diversity and thus unwilling to fairly explain American citizen concerns.

More from Twin Falls, ID: Newspaper editor calls me a thief!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Matt Christensen
Matt Christensen, who less than two years ago was the NEW editor of a Montana paper, is now back in Idaho, and has editorialized claiming we posted too much from the Twin Falls Times-News.

Imagine what a nerve we must have struck to cause a newspaper editor in Idaho to spend money and time attempting to silence a citizen blogger nearly 2,000 miles away.

Almost every day for eight years I have researched the Refugee Resettlement Program of the UN/US State Department as a completely charitable endeavor so that just regular folks in America might know what is being done to their communities.
We have been extremely careful to give attribution and urge readers to see the original article when we snip news articles on which we comment.
And now, over 6,600 posts later, along comes an editor of a small city paper who calls me a “thief” in print as if it wasn’t enough to hire an attorney to send me a letter.
Imagine spending even a minute trying to silence a blogger!
What the heck are they hiding in Magic Valley, Idaho?  Maybe the newspaper there should do as much research as I have on how the secretive Refugee Admissions program benefits a few big businesses and then tell Idahoans the truth because they, taxpaying citizens, have every right to know who is changing their communities and why!
Click here to read all about me in: Stealing the News.
See all of our recent coverage of Twin Falls, here, here, here, here and here.
As my friend Richard always says, “When you are taking flak, you know you are over the target!”
Photo and story about Christensen is here.