Tag: Maine

Lewiston, ME: another huge government grant for special people—you guessed it—Somalis!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update October 5: Michael Leahy at Breitbart has written more on your tax dollars going to Maine’s large Somali community, here.
Do you think that maybe the Obama Administration is literally breaking the bank to give your money away before it clears out of DC for good. Just the other day we learned that a Somali ‘community’ group was given $300,000 to combat sexual abuse in the East African (that’s what they call Somalis when they don’t want to use the ‘S’ word) community and now this!
The USDA has awarded a $400,000 grant to help Somalis eat better and reconnect with their roots! No kidding!
From the CTPost:  Curbing food insecurity!

LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — The United States Department of Agriculture is committing nearly $400,000 to increase food access for the Somali community in Lewiston.

Somali women and their children walk through downtown Lewiston, Maine, Tuesday, in a May 8, 2007, photo. Over the past six years, as many as 3,500 black refugees from the wartorn African country have settled in this nearly all-white, heavily French-Canadian and largely Roman Catholic city of 36,000, giving Lewiston the highest concentration of Somalis anywhere in America."Their children are the only assets they have. They left everything else in Somalia," said Said Mohamud, manager of the Mogadishu Store. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Limited food access for Somalis in Lewiston?

Members of the Somali Bantu community in the city are partnering with the Cumberland County Food Security Council on the project. The funding is expected to support Somalis’ agriculture and help them reconnect with their cultural heritage.

The USDA says the objectives of the project include building the capacity of the Somali Bantu community and its farmers to produce food and address the problem of limited food access. The agency describes the Somali Bantu community as the poorest community in the city, which is the second largest city in the state.

Cumberland County Food Security Council will recruit people in the community to help increase access to healthy food.

I wonder is Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins involved in this giveaway too?
By the way, the next time you see one of those articles in which the resettlement industry brags about how refugees bring economic booms to struggling towns, remember this!  In the case of Lewiston, there is now an additional $700,000 sloshing around the community.  But, it is still tax money coming from the money tree growing in Washington (joke of course).
It is not that the Somalis have helped the economy in the way the industry wants you to think—it is basically welfare dollars flowing from your pockets to theirs!

Maine has a sexual assault problem in its Somali community

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, what else can you conclude when the federal government shovels a whopping $300,000 grant to a Somali women’s group located in Lewiston, ME.
How funny! The group was renamed with a more generic sounding name probably to more easily get the payola.

susan-collins
Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins is one of the worst Republican Senators on the Hill. Years ago I went to a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing she was co-chairing and I was stunned by her naive and silly way of looking at the terrorism issue as it related to Somalis leaving the US to join the jihadists.

BTW, when we first began writing RRW back in 2007 there were allegations in Tennessee that similar grant money, to a Somali group for the women, ended up in some Imam’s pocket who had mysteriously returned to Somalia.
Here is the short story from AP:

LEWISTON, Maine (AP) – The federal Office on Violence Against Women is giving a Maine immigration resource center $300,000 for sexual assault and domestic violence advocacy in the immigrant community.

The money is going to Immigration Resource Center of Maine, which is located in Lewiston. The center was formerly called the United Somali Women of Maine.

Maine U.S. Sens. Angus King and Susan Collins say the immigration resource center will create, maintain and expand sexual assault services for East African sexual assault victims who live in southern Maine. [I can assure you that white Mainers are not doing the assaulting!—ed]

The senators say the money will help provide culturally specific services to ensure that members of Maine’s East African community have support and education about sexual assault and domestic violence.

Wow! How many sexual assaults and domestic violence cases are there in Maine?

Where is the media on that hot story?

See our extensive archive on Maine by clicking here.

Maine: Former Iranian refugee who died for ISIS was on welfare in US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the headline, but what has the Leftwing media done in Maine?  They are attacking the governor because he released the information thus not respecting the Islamic terrorist’s privacy in death!  Ahhhh!
By the way Governor LePage is one of only a few governors who have had the guts to criticize the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program over the years.

Robyn Merrill
Robyn Merrill (left) speaking at the State House in support of continued state welfare for the many refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Maine. Photo: http://www.centralmaine.com/2015/03/03/critics-turn-out-in-force-to-oppose-lepages-plan-for-general-assistance/gallery/

Here is the news at Maine Public Radio:

Gov. Paul LePage has pounced on the recent unsealing of court documents showing an Iranian refugee who resettled in Maine and later joined the terror group ISIS.

But the governor’s eagerness to use Adnan Fazeli’s radicalization here to rail against welfare benefits for refugees may have led him to run afoul of a federal law designed to protect the identities of welfare recipients and their families.

State officials have not confirmed that Fazeli, or his family, received welfare benefits when he lived in Maine between 2009 and 2013. According to federal laws governing food stamps and cash assistance, they’re not supposed to.

“It’s concerning if that was indeed reported by Maine officials because federal law is clear that people’s confidentiality should be protected,” says Robyn Merrill, director for Maine Equal Justice Partners, an advocacy group for the poor.

Merrill’s concerns were raised by a report in the Boston Herald in which Maine state officials are quoted as saying that Fazeli, and his family, received cash and food stamp benefits. [Here is one of several stories about the terrorist on welfare in Maine—ed]

Those benefits, known also as SNAP and TANF, are federal programs, funded mostly with federal tax dollars.

According to federal rules, the identities of benefit recipients are confidential — only law enforcement, immigration officials and state administrators are allowed to know who receives the benefits.***

Those same officials, according to the law, “must adequately protect the information against unauthorized disclosure.”

The Herald story also contained an interview with LePage, who told the newspaper that the Fazeli case prompted him to order a review of all benefit programs for refugees.

More here.
***Now how does the claim by Maine Equal Justice Partners square with a law we told you about in the previous post where the federal ‘Work Opportunity Tax Credit’ is available to businesses that hire people (refugees!) who are on welfare, including food stamps.  If there is supposed to be secrecy surrounding one’s status as a welfare recipient, how is a company which wants to take advantage of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit know which welfare programs the refugee (the prospective employee) is receiving?

It seems everyone is allowed to know who is on welfare, but you! the taxpayer paying for it all!

For new readers, our Maine archive is here.

Maine: One of three African refugees gets plea deal in last summer's beating death of man who befriended them

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We first posted the story of the grizzly murder here.  Initially a judge had sealed the documents in the case presumably to keep the public calm about the fact that at least two of the alleged murderers are Muslims and that a bloody Bible was found near the victim’s body. Freddy Akoa was a Christian.
From WGAN News Radio (hat tip: Frank):

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) One of three Portland men accused of beating and kicking a man to death in his apartment has pleaded guilty to manslaughter under a plea deal.

Maine killers
All three were charged in the brutal 2015 beating death of Christian Freddy Akoa in Portland, Maine. Left to right: Abil Teshome, Mohamud Mohamed, Osman Sheikh (the last two names are definitely Somali names, Teshome could be Ethiopian)

Twenty-four-year-old Abil Teshome entered the plea Thursday in Portland. He accepted a deal that caps his maximum prison sentence at 20 years. A murder charge against him was dismissed.

A sentencing date hasn’t been set.

The agreement comes weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial July 11 in the death of 49-year-old Freddy Akoa of Portland. Police say Akoa suffered 22 rib fractures, cuts and bruises to his head and torso and a lacerated liver from the fatal Aug. 9, 2015, attack.

Thirty-two-year-old Osman Sheikh and 37-year-old Mohamud Mohamed have pleaded not guilty in Akoa’s death.

Here is a description from the Portland Press Herald (August 25, 2015) of how Freddy Akoa died:

Freddy Akoa, the Portland man found dead in his Cumberland Avenue apartment this month, had been beaten, kicked and bashed in the head with furniture by his drinking companions during an assault that went on for hours.

Akoa, 49, had 22 rib fractures from the savage attack, cuts and bruises all over his head and torso, and a lacerated liver when his accused killers left him on his living room floor in Apartment 18 at 457 Cumberland Ave. on the morning of Aug. 10.

Those details were made public for the first time Monday when a judge at the Cumberland County Courthouse unsealed an affidavit filed by Portland police Detective Christopher Giesecke to obtain an arrest warrant for three men accused in the killing.

The affidavit had been sealed at a prosecutor’s request for one week after three accused killers appeared in court, each on a charge of murder by depraved indifference. The three – Abil Teshome, 23, Osman Sheikh, 31, and Mohamud Mohamed, 36 – are each being held without bail at the Cumberland County Jail.

[….]

The detectives who arrived found the apartment in disarray, with empty beer cans on the counter and clothes and trash strewn about. On the floor near Akoa’s head was a Bible splattered in blood. Beneath his body was an official court document with Mohamed’s name on it. On the kitchen counter was a purse with contents inside with the name of Jennifer Wilson on them, Giesecke stated.

Continue reading for more of the horrific details of Akoa’s last hours on earth.
I had been wondering what happened to this case.  Pay attention “welcoming” towns and cities, diversity is not beautiful!
P.S. And remember lucky taxpayers, you paid for their resettlement and now you get to pay for their incarceration for 20 plus years!

Little Lewiston, ME has 34 languages in the school system!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, one in four students is in an ELL class.
We haven’t mentioned Lewiston much recently (no Somali kids have burned down apartment buildings there in the last few years).
This is your usual fluffy story about coming to America and I’m just posting it to tell you about the school system challenges your town will face if it “welcomes” refugees this year.

Trying out headscarves
Changing America one town at a time. Photo: http://www.ci.lewiston.me.us/Index.aspx?NID=469

Besides the expense to the school system, this family obviously entered the US illegally and are in Maine where the welfare is good for so-called ‘asylum seekers.’  They are hoping to persuade an immigration judge that they are legitimate refugees and they have been told to go to Maine to wait out the legal process.
BTW, the article tells us Dad had a job selling cellphones and computers throughout Europe, so why didn’t he simply take the kids on one of his trips to Europe and ask for asylum there?  There must be much more to his ‘story.’
From the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal:

LEWISTON — Joao Rodrigues and his children moved to Maine this past winter from Africa.

His children are among the city’s 1,374 students in the English Language Learner program. One out of every four Lewiston students is in the ELL program; most are Somali children, but ELL students speak a total of 34 languages.

[….]

Speaking Portuguese and communicating through an interpreter, he shared how he and his children fled their native Angola, a country of unrest and violence. They escaped to the Democratic Republic of the Congo before making their way to the United States. [“making their way” is code for arriving through questionable means—ed]

They arrived in New York in January with nothing. A pastor there recommended he take his family to Maine, where there are African communities and where he could get help.

See our very large archive on the Somali capital of New England—Lewiston—here.  And, click here, for much more on Maine the welfare magnet where the governor was trying to slow the giveaways to non-citizens, but not sure he ever succeeded.