Dr. Stephen Kirby writing at Frontpage Magazine analyzed the 61-page booklet prepared by one of the major federal refugee resettlement contractors, ‘My Neighbor is Muslim, Exploring the Muslim Faith,’ and tells us the shocking news that they relied on an Imam with highly questionable ties for the ‘enlightenment’ of naive Minnesotans about the goals of their “new neighbors.” Frontpage: Jodi Harpstead is the CEO of LSS of MN and as such is responsible for the deceptive booklet. She is making over $300,000 a year to seed St. Cloud and other Minnesota towns with Somali Muslims. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/03/26/lutheran-social-service-of-minnesota-is-responsible-for-the-somali-chaos-in-st-cloud/
In 2015 the Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota produced a 61 page booklet titled My Neighbor is Muslim, Exploring the Muslim Faith. The purpose of the booklet was to enable Lutherans to learn about Islam in order to better understand their “new neighbors” who were arriving as refugees.
Kirby then lays out his argument in great specificity (read it all!) and wraps up with this:
Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota created a booklet seeking to educate non-Muslims about Islam and encouraging them to have a welcoming attitude toward Muslim refugees coming into their neighborhoods. Ironically, the Muslim imam selected to endorse this booklet appears to be a Hamas supporter, believes that Shariah Law should be enforced in American communities where Muslims are the majority, heads one of two mosques that have been the focus of articles about Somali youth leaving Minneapolis to fight for a terrorist organization, and was recently refused a government security clearance. Welcome to the neighborhood!
Part 2 will look at how Islam is presented in this booklet. [watch for it!—ed]
See our many many posts on Minnesota by clicking here. Lutheran Social Service has been resettling Somalis in that state for three decades.
Be sure to see my newest post at American Resistance 2016! Someone needs to take on the mission of exposing every move LSS of Minnesota is making, including figuring out how their income is going to skyrocket to $123 million this year. Click hereto learn more.
Editor: It is very exciting that our learning curve is growing exponentially now that so many of you are digging into documents and asking questions where you live. Here is one more piece of information activists have found in St. Cloud, MN.
The other day I reported that the US State Department told Rep. Trey Gowdy that the resettlement subcontractors “hold community consultations” to gather information to prepare plans for your town.
But, guess what! You, the concerned citizen and taxpayer are not permitted to attend!
Lutheran Social Service of MN, director of Refugee Services Kim Dettmer (far right) in a panel discussion held by the Bremer Bank Foundation. Follow the money! Everyone must begin investigating the role these large rich foundations are having as they work to change your communities. Photo is from a 2012 meeting in St. Cloud: http://nonprofitresource.blogspot.com/2012/06/building-healthy-communities-through.html
I have received your email regarding your interest in refugee resettlement consultations. I will attempt, here, to clarify the purpose of these meetings .
The U.S. State Department requires all resettlement organizations, such as Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, to comply with federal program regulations that call for quarterly meetings among the key stakeholders directly involved in coordinating or providing services to refugees as part of the resettlement process.
The regulation reads:
” The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) issued guidance in their Program Announcement # 14, dated September 26, 2013 (Appendix 1), to all Reception and Placement Agencies and State Refugee Coordinators concerning the need for greater Reception and Placement (R&P) local consultations concerning the placement of refugees. PRM requires all local R&P affiliates to convene quarterly consultations with stakeholders involved in the resettlement process.
Furthermore, per the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), requires states to convene meetings, no less than on a quarterly basis, where representatives of local resettlement agencies, local community service agencies, and other agencies that serve refugees meet with representatives of state and local governments to plan and coordinate the appropriate placement of refugees in advance of the refugees’ arrival.”
The regulations go on to state:
“The consultations may take place in-person, via teleconference, videoconference, or a combination of these. Resettlement agencies should ensure that the representatives from the following sectors are invited to the consultations.
· State refugee coordinator · State refugee health coordinator · Local governance (city and/or county, as applicable) · Local and/or county public health (local health partners) · Welfare and social services · Public education
Local resettlement organizations should ensure discussion includes:
· Year-to-date arrivals and projections through the end of the current federal fiscal year compared to approved placement numbers · Characteristics of arriving refugee populations, including nationality, ethnicity, average family size and composition, language and education background, and medical conditions · Participant stakeholders’ abilities to adequately serve the actual and projected caseload · Best practices · Issues that prevent adequate resettlement or result in changes in placement plans”
To summarize, the purpose of these quarterly meetings is to convene those individuals and organizations directly engaged in delivering services to refugees during the resettlement process, and provides us with a crucial forum through which to coordinate those services.
Each participant is responsible for bringing to those conversations any concerns expressed by the broader public; however, these consultations are not intended to include the general public. [Note that the regulations must not say the public is to be excluded, or she would have quoted that. They are simply writing their own law here!—ed]
I hope this clarifies the purpose of these required meetings, and I welcome any feedback or input you might have that I could share with the quarterly consultation group.
Kim M. Dettmer, M.A.
Director of Refugee Services
Lutheran Social Service of MN
2400 Park Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55404
612-879-5258
Please call Rep Trey Gowdy, tell him this lack of transparency (this secrecy!) is wrong! Hold oversight hearings and get this whole law reformed or repeal it!
Call 202-225-6030
Gowdy is chairman of the Subcommittee responsible for the Refugee Admissions Program.
I can’t emphasize enough that you, in your city or state, must begin to write a website, a blog or a facebook page to catalog everything you learn. Please exercise your free speech (people like Pamela Geller are putting their lives on the line for your right! ). Do your investigations and make sure you spread what you learn to others! Avoid the lazy, often hostile, mainstream media!
If you have just dropped in here at RRW today for the first time, you should readour reportfrom my visit to St. Cloud, MN, a small city a little over an hour from Minneapolis where Lutheran Social Service is dropping off Somali refugees who are now causing tension in the school system.
Although the Left-leaning St. Cloud Times couldn’t control itself completely and put up one story as newsthat was really an opinion piece, we are pretty satisfied that for the first time ever the readers of that paper received a tutorial of sorts on how the refugee resettlement program works.
The contractors, such as Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, are often happy to promote the idea that refugees simply “find their way” to your towns, rather than to tell you that the UN is picking them and the US State Department is assigning them to 9 contractors and 350 subcontractors (some masquerading as ‘religious’ charities), and paying them with your tax dollars to distribute them!
The original article generated lots of discussion, see the comments, and here is a letter to the editor published yesterday from Tennessean Don Barnett who has had over two decades of experience following the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program.
I would like to draw your attention to the airfare loan issue. Shortly after refugees arrive in the US the contractor begins nagging the refugee to repay the airfare loan money (that you ‘loaned’ them through the federal treasury). The State Department to my knowledge has not reported how much is actually ever collected, but we know that the contractors keep a chunk of what they manage to wring out of the refugees for themselves!
Remember readers this is big business for the contractors and for the industries in Minnesota looking for cheap labor!
Stating that Lutheran Social Services “receives $850 per arrival” is misleading. Refugee resettlement is very profitable, and money is earned in many ways. If a volunteer spends time with an LSS refugee or donates, say, a used couch, LSS submits a bill to the feds for the volunteer’s time or the used couch and receives cash from the misnamed federal Match Grant program.
If LSS’s parent organization collects the airfare from the refugee — which was provided by the taxpayer to the refugee as a loan — the organization pockets a full 25 percent of the amount as a collection fee.This relatively small program alone means millions for the larger refugee contractors. [In its 2012 annual report, for example, the contractor US Conference of Catholic Bishops reported over $3 million in cash for the collection of airfare loans.—ed]
There are many grant programs providing an opaque stream of money from almost all departments of the U.S. government. As a state refugee coordinator notes in a 2012 GAO report, “local affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
It is hardly the case that “refugees receive a one-time federal grant of $1,125” and “after that, refugees are on their own.” Most refugees are placed into one or another federal assistance program by the refugee resettlement contractors.
Just in the past few weeks Congressional Research Services provided data about welfare usage among refugees. Among refugees who had arrived in a recent 5-year period, 56 percent were receiving Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, 74.2 percent were on food stamps, 22.8 percent were in public housing, and 47.1 percent were on some form of cash assistance.
Unfortunately, it is the refugee resettlement contractor, such as LSS, which leaves the refugees “on their own” — abandoning them to the care of the taxpayer.
See our complete archive on St. Cloud going back many years byclicking here.
If you are interested in listening to my interview with Dan ‘OX’ Ochsner on KNSI radio in St. Cloud, click here and scroll down to podcasts part 1 and 2 on April 23, 2015.
That supposedly ‘Christian’ charitable organization is directly responsible for the high Somali numbers in St. Cloud, and they are jointly responsible for bringing over ten thousand Somalis from around the world to colonize Minnesota towns in the last ten years alone—Catholic Charitiesand World Relief MN (now Arrive Ministries)*** helped also. Of course they have brought many more than 10,000 in over two decades and not just Somali Muslims!
Rumor has it that 1,500 new Somalis are going to be resettled by the Lutherans in St. Cloud this year. (This is part of former Rep. Michele Bachmann’s district!)
Doing well by doing good? Jodi Harpstead is making over $300,000 a year to seed St. Cloud and other Minnesota towns with Somali Muslims.
These three ‘Christian’ phony non-profits (phony Christians!) could stop the US State Department’s further seeding of the state if they just said NO! We won’t resettle any more Muslim ‘refugees.’ But they don’t! Why?
Why? Because it is big business (as we learned from Lutherans in New England)! They dare not challenge their sugar daddy—the federal government! And, they must be afraid of the growing power of the Islamists and the Islamist front group—Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—which they are responsible for unleashing on the city of St. Cloud.
So how much money does it take to buy the Lutherans?
Back in 2013we told you that then Minnesota Lutheran CEO, Mark Peterson, was pulling down a salary of $441,767.
We went to a recent audit linked on their website and here are some numbers we found (audit ending September 30, 2014):
They had total revenue of $103,135,439 and received $91,887,312 from GOVERNMENT FEES AND GRANTS. (Go here and click on ‘financials’ to see for yourself).
That makes them 89% government funded! That is a government agency not a charity, and surely not a ‘Christian’ charity!
The progressive ‘religious Left’ is living off of the US taxpayer!
Doing well by doing good?
Salaries and payroll accounted for $57,929,172 of your money—your tax dollars for that one year!
Jodi doesn’t pull down a salary as high as Peterson (LOL! War on women?) her predecessor did, but it is fairly substantial none-the-less as we learned from a recent Form 990. She was compensated with $280,812 and an additional $42,495 came from related organizations (whatever that is!).
Her second in command, Kenneth Borle, made $202,087 and $33,192 (from related organizations).
They have 8 other employees making over six-figure salaries!
Go herefor the others in leadership at Lutheran Social Service of Minnesotaresponsible for building the aggressive and demanding Muslim population of the state.
And if you are looking for more people to blame for what is happening to Minnesota, here is the Board of Directors (do you know any of them?):
Board of Directors
Greg Vandal, Chair
Nancy Rystrom, Vice Chair
Cathy Norelius, Secretary
Sue Haffield, Treasurer *
Bishop Thomas Aitken
Dan Anderson
Mike Anderson
Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto
Ann Beatty
Dr. Paul Dovre
Jon Evert
Nicole Griensewic Mickelson
Rev. John Hogenson
Rev. Dr. Rolf Jacobson
Jen Julsrud
John Mattes
Artie Miller
Joanne Negstad
Joan Wandke Nelson
Rev. Mark Skinner
Bishop Ann Svennungsen
Rev. Mari Thorkelson
Lori Wall
The main office of Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is here (below). It is time to let them know how you feel, to put the pressure on the organization directly responsible for disrupting St. Cloud.
Good Lutherans especially need to speak up!
Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota 2485 Como Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108
651.642.5990
800.582.5260
And, according to the US State Department’s handy list of contractors the St. Cloud Lutheran resettlement agency office is here:
LIRS
MN-LIRS-08: Lutheran Social Services Of Minnesota
Address:
22 Wilson Avenue Suite 110
St. Cloud, MN 56302
Phone:
320-251-7700
One more thing! Tell Rep. Trey Gowdy what he has in store for his community if a refugee resettlement site is established in Spartanburg, SC.
See our complete archive on St. Cloud here. And, click here, for an enormous archive on Minnesota. See especially our earliest post (2011), and one of our top posts of all time, when we first learned of the three ‘Christian’ groups swamping Minnesota with Somalis at the behest of the US State Department.
*** An indicator that the heat is on some of these phony Christian organizations is that they are changing their names. Note that World Relief Minnesota is now Arrive Ministries and Lutheran Social Services of New England is now Ascentria Care Alliance (here).
