Udate: Reader Elena found this tiny mention in the local news, rescheduled for April 10th. Liban Mohamed was found guilty in December of attempted sexual assault of a special needs woman. He was arrested last July after reportedly only being in the country for one week.
Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen has been an advocate for making Aberdeen another refugee placement site. Meat packing political power? See here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/16/heads-up-aberdeen-south-dakota-new-resettlement-site-being-proposed/ We are waiting to hear whether his sentencing will go ahead today as originally scheduled. (No mugshot is available!)
If you missed the story yesterday, go here, to learn about how an arrest, an indictment and a guilty verdict all went missing from local news reports about a Somali refugee who had been in the country one week before his July encounter with a special-needs woman.
Here is a recap and an update from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:
A South Dakota newspaper that failed to report on the case of a Somali man convicted of trying to molest a severely handicapped woman, changed gears Wednesday after being outed by WND and decided to publish a story about the crime.
Continue reading here.
There are still many outstanding questions. Lutheran Social Services, the refugee contractor in SD, has never indicated whether that agency resettled the now convicted Somali refugee. We are all still puzzled about how he was able to be wandering around an Aberdeen neighborhood after only a few days in the country. The only resettlement city in South Dakota now is in Sioux Falls (a couple hundred miles away) since reportedly the office in Huron has been closed for new resettlement.
Mohammed was reportedly scheduled to go to work for Dem Kota Ranch beef.
Meanwhile be sure to see that the Huffington Post is going after WND’s Leo Hohmann today.
See all of our previous reports on South Dakota by clicking here. I stopped in both Aberdeen and Huron during my summer tour of cities troubled with large numbers of refugees.
P.S. I have about 5 or 6 other Somali stories I need to post. Hope to get to them soon, but needless to say things are crazy. I apologize to all who are trying to reach me, but it is just me here!
If Trump doesn’t turn off the spigot, both of refugees and funding/regulations for low income housing (Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing!), then expect refugee contractors to find your town!
Changing the heartland one town at a time!
Tyson Foods is the top employer in Garden City, Kansas and the primary reason Somalis and other refugees move there. If you have a Tyson Foods plant (or any BIG MEAT plant near where you live, you will have refugees too. Here we have news from Kansas where a federal refugee contractor crows about all the new housing that could be available for refugees in Liberal, Dodge and Garden City, Kansas. Governor Brownback recently withdrew the state from the Refugee Admissions Program, but that means nothing unless he is willing to sue the federal government on states’ rights grounds.
His withdrawal means that contractors, like the International Rescue Committee,will move in to run the program with Washington. As we said here, Brownback cannot be trusted on this issue!
From KSN.com(Refugees may double for southwest Kansas in 2017):
GARDEN CITY, Kan. (KSNW) — Southwest Kansas welcomed 67 new refugees to the area in 2016, just shy of the 80 the International Rescue Commission [Committee—ed] was authorized to re-settle, but that number could soar this year.
Any Longa, director of the International Rescue Committee office in Garden City, says she is working to expand housing opportunities for refugees. http://www.gctelegram.com/news/local/ugandan-natives-share-sorrows-humor-of-moving-to-america/article_0639af00-30b8-55c9-9028-5c39ede42b6b.html
“We do have the capacity to settle 140,” said Amy Longa, who manages the southwest Kansas site of the Commission. “I do not know how many we’ll end up settling by the end of the fiscal year.”
It depends on many factors at play in the international resettlement efforts, but the number of new refugees settling in Dodge, Liberal, and Garden could potentially double this year over last year.
[….]
The housing shortage in the region is an obstacle, but it is being addressed.
“We’re now seeing a little more opportunity with the recent building,” said Carol Davidson with Garden City Community Development, “and we also have plans in the future, this next year 2017, we do have a development that’s going in.”
“19 duplexes, 12 fourplexes, and five 36-unit apartment complexes,” said Cory Hodapp, who owns the company building a new housing complex in Garden City. “We’ll have half of the duplexes and half of the fourplexes complete this year.”
Good news for the IRC and Tyson Foods!
It’s good news for the IRC, which competes with the market to help find homes for refugees.
“What we have been working on the past two years is reaching out to landlords and creating partnerships with landlords to create housing,” said Longa. “Not only in Garden City, but in Dodge and Liberal as well.”
As we have reported on many previous occasions, the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program works closely with large companies like Tyson Foods and others to supply them with cheap immigrant labor. Those laborers are further subsidized by your tax dollars including those used to expand low-income housing.
So, don’t fall for the humanitarian mumbo-jumbo! Refugee resettlement is an industry! Chambers of Commerce want it, housing developers want it, big industries want it for cheap labor, local mosque leaders want it, politicians want it (money!), and the resettlement contractors get jobs and nice salaries all while pretending to wear a white hat of humanitarianism!
We have many previous posts going back several years on Garden City,click here. And, see Garden City’s wikipedia pagewhere someone had to be sure that the recent arrest of three Kansans who allegedly planned to blow up one of the Somali apartment complexes has been added to the page.
There is another article about Kansas and refugees, here, in recent days. You might want to have a look at.
If you missed the story yesterday, go here, to learn about how an arrest, an indictment and a guilty verdict all went missing from local news reports about a Somali refugee who had been in the country one week before his July encounter with a special-needs woman. Here is a recap and an update from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:
A South Dakota newspaper that failed to report on the case of a Somali man convicted of trying to molest a severely handicapped woman, changed gears Wednesday after being outed by WND and decided to publish a story about the crime.
Most SD refugees are placed in Sioux Falls. How Mohamed got to Aberdeen within a week of his arrival in the US and was left unsupervised is still unexplained.
The story ran on page three of the Aberdeen American News under the headline “Sentencing later this month for a man convicted of attempted sexual contact.”
But the newspaper left out an important detail.
The convicted sex criminal, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, was a recently arrived refugee brought to the state from Somalia at the invitation of the U.S. government. He had been in the country only about a week and in Aberdeen only one day when he wandered up to a group home and tried to molest a 31-year-old mentally handicapped woman who was sitting outside the facility.
Mohamed, freshly arrived in the U.S. just days prior, wandered more than a mile from his hotel on foot and preyed upon a mentally handicapped woman at the Aspire Inc. residential care facility, which houses about 150 handicapped people. His victim was left unattended for only minutes. When a caregiver returned, she caught him with his hand between the disabled woman’s legs, reaching toward her private parts.
AAN’s belated story also neglected to mention that Mohamed had been brought to Aberdeen to work in the local meatpacking plant, DemKota Ranch, which has become a magnet for cheap refugee labor.
I did some looking around last night and there is some very funny business that went on with this particular meat plant and its former owners that involved the state government and then-Governor Rounds (now US Senator for SD). It would be good if someone out there took time to investigate the broader story.
Near the end of his update, Hohmann, reports on a group of citizens who met with the South Dakota Attorney General in October (when surely this AG would have known about this case while the citizens did not!): What did AG Jackley know and when did he know it?
Meanwhile, a citizens group tells WND they met with South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley on Oct. 3 at the state Capitol in Pierre to discuss their concerns about refugee resettlement and its impact on safety.
The meeting was affable with the approximately 10 citizens sharing concerns about refugees who might put the safety of their communities at risk.
Then the atmosphere changed:
“If you guys know of anything, can cite anything [negative] that’s happening in your communities, then please tell me,” he reportedly said.
“He wouldn’t give the concerned people the answers they were looking for,” said one person present at the meeting. “I watched him and was thinking what are you doing? It was more like dodge ball and ‘what do you know?’”
He told the group refugee resettlement was a federal issue and “his hands were tied,” one participant of the meeting said. “What’s upsetting is, he already knew, he would have known that this crime had happened in Aberdeen.
So what are they hiding in South Dakota? The situation is shaping up there to look very similar to what happened in Twin Falls, Idaho where a sexual assault case blew things up—big company/big money wants foreign laborers, pols going along, newspaper covering for them all, citizens treated like troublemakers and labeled racists for wanting answers about why their community is being radically altered and wanting to know who is behind it?
Update January 5th: Be sure to see my next installment of this story, here.
A newly arrived Somali refugee*** who court records show had arrived in Aberdeen, SD to work for the controversial meat packing plant there was found guilty by a jury on December 20th of attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman.
Read the story! And, ask yourselves, why didn’t the local media report on the case?
Did it have something to do with the controversy roiling there among citizens who were vigorously opposing a plan to make Aberdeen a new resettlement site (only Sioux Falls and Huron were getting direct resettlements), a plan supported by the mayor, as we reported last April. Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen: ““We need workers, and we certainly would be glad to have more friends and neighbors and more children in our schools and more cultures that we can learn from.” [And you get to pay for it all while big business gets cheap labor!] https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/16/heads-up-aberdeen-south-dakota-new-resettlement-site-being-proposed/BTW, for new readers, my title refers to the sexual assault case that the media and elected officials downplayed in Twin Falls, Idaho earlier in 2016. Hereis what Leo Hohmann (WND) learned yesterday. After you read the whole incredible story, see what I have to say below about the timeline.
A refugee newly arrived from Somalia has been tried and convicted for attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman while she was sitting outside of a home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Liban Mohamed, 39, was in the United States for only about a week when he tried to force himself on a 31-year-old woman with severe disabilities.He is not a U.S. citizen, but whether he will be deported in the wake of his conviction remains unclear.
The trial for Mohamed was held just a few days before Christmas and not a word of the conviction has made it into the local media, residents of Aberdeen told WND on Tuesday.
Mohamed speaks no English and required two interpreters at trial, according to the state’s attorney who prosecuted the case.
“I do know he lived in Aberdeen,” prosecutor Christopher White told WND. “The day that it happened, he was staying at the White House Inn hotel in Aberdeen. What came out at trial, in his defense attorney’s opening statement, was that he arrived in Aberdeen that day and had only been in the United States for approximately a week, and he had come to work at the beef plant in Aberdeen.But I don’t know if he had already started working or was about to start work there.”
Mohamed mentioned to law enforcement that he had been hired on at the Demkota Ranch beef plant, White said. [Someone needs to do some research on DemKota Ranch Beef and figure out how closely they are working with Lutheran Social Services of SD and the US State Dept.—ed]
Read the whole thing! Click here. Don’t miss the line where Mohamed told the arresting officers that what he did was o.k. in his country!
Hohmann wraps up with this:
According to court records obtained by WND, Mohamed was arrested July 30 and indicted by a grand jury on Aug. 15. The jury was seated on Monday, Dec. 19, and the trial was held Tuesday, Dec. 20.
What a coincidence!
I was in Aberdeen meeting with residents on July 25, just five days before the arrest. Citizens there were becoming troubled by the changes they were seeing in their community and expressed fear about just such a thing happening. They told me that the meat plant was luring labor like these newly arrived Somalis and they had already noticed an increase in crime. They said that they did not want a resettlement office in town.
As we reported in April, there was a big push going on to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen which would presumably supply labor for DemKota directly from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. A small refugee office existed in Huron, but most refugees placed in South Dakota still go to Sioux Falls which is 200 miles away from Aberdeen. Tim Jurgens, State Refugee Coordinator. SD is a Wilson-Fish state which means that state elected officials have virtually no say about the program that is run by Lutheran Social Services and the US Dept. of State in Washington, DC.
Because of the public outcry in late summer and early fall, Lutheran Social Services appeared to back off a plan to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen after some of the citizens I met on July 25 organized a resistance. (I’ll give you some numbers below for SD).
The first public meeting organized by residents occurred a little over two weeks later and the Aberdeen News didn’t miss that event reporting on it on August 12th. Go hereto see what happened at the heated meeting and read about the paper’s biased news coverage.
Look at the timeline. Mohamed was arrested on July 30th (no local media coverage). A grand jury indicted him three days after (on August 15th) the paper wrote in negative (biased!) tones about the citizens who dared question what was happening in their quiet town. Did the paper cover up the sexual assault story on purpose because it confirmed the things citizens said they were worried about (or was it just incompetence)?
Look at what was happening in Twin Falls, Idaho in the first week of August! Click here. All hell had broken loose about a sexual assault there!
And, then of course it is quite stunning that no court reporter was present at the trial on December 20th. But, also not present was the family of the victim, and there still remains a question about how the guardians of the mentally-impaired woman were not told to be in court.
Many more questions remain!
Have the wheels come off the US Refugee Admissions Program? Are they trying to shoe-horn so many refugees in to the country that there is flagrant violation of contracts going on?
Refugees are to be placed by the contractor (LSS SD) directly in to apartments or rental houses and their initial resettlement period is about 3 months during which the contractor introduces the new refugee to American culture, signs them up for their welfare services, gets kids in school, tries to find them jobs, and arranges their medical screening (for things like TB!).
I am simply blown away by the information given by the state’s attorney that Mohamed had only been in the US a week and was walking the streets of Aberdeen unsupervised.
What! Did LSS simply bring him in to Sioux Falls and put him on a bus to Aberdeen to work at the meat plant? And, then put him up in a hotel? (I’m getting more and more reports of refugees being housed in hotels when State Department policy has always been that the refugee is to be picked up at the airport and escorted to their furnished apartment with ‘culturally appropriate’ food in the refrig!). What is going on? Too many refugees for them to handle?
I know it is pretty easy to unload on Mohamed, but why was he literally walking the streets in Aberdeen? He didn’t even speak English. Was no one supervising him? Was no one giving him any instructions about American culture and laws especially as it relates to the treatment of women?
Does this guy have a family? Or are we admitting single men to work in meatpacking now? Didn’t Homeland Security find out during his vetting process that he might have a problem?
What did Aberdeen’s mayor Mike Levsen know (about the sexual assault case) and when did he know it?
What role did Aberdeen’s mayor play in bringing DemKota to Aberdeen, and did he encourage LSS to open a refugee office to supply the company with cheap labor? Is it even a US-owned company?
I think folks in Aberdeen need to start having a serious look at the man they elected mayor in 2004! What! 12 years! Isn’t it time for a new mayor? See one of many stories about him here.
South Dakota numbers
This is getting too long, so here (below) are some numbers from South Dakota (via Wrapsnet.org). I’m sure this story isn’t going away any time soon especially since sentencing is scheduled for January 30th! (After expensive-to-taxpayers incarceration, will he be sentenced to be deported?)
In the 8 fiscal years since Obama has been in office, South Dakota received a total of 4,319 refugees. The largest groups were Bhutanese and Burmese, but Somalis came in at #3 with 577 placed in the state. Almost all of them were resettled in Sioux Falls. 64 Somalis came in FY 2016 (Mohamed would have been one of them, but does he have a family that we are now completely supporting somewhere else in SD?).
***Almost all Somalis who get in to the US come as resettled refugees, however, if we learn that he came in with a work visa that is going to open up a whole new controversy for the incoming Trump administration. OMG! Work visas from terror-producing countries of the world! Jeff Sessions, as newly appointed Attorney General must look into this case.
Here is a storyfrom the Omaha World-Heraldwhich used those Pew numbers we reported yesterday, as the hook for this story about how “welcoming” Nebraska is for refugees.
Nebraska is one of the states I visited over the summer, and I am here to report that even if the Republican governor is thrilled about welcoming refugees, the citizens whose towns are being impacted by refugee labor at meat and chicken processing plants, aren’t too thrilled.
Downtown Nickerson, Nebraska where citizens objected to plans to locate a chicken processing plant in the area. One reason they said NO! is that they did not want an influx of Somali refugee workers.
No mention in this heartwarming report about Nickerson, Nebraska that actually fought and kept out a new chicken plant here last May.
Cut the humanitarian guilt-trip mumbo-jumbo and be truthful!
I live for the day when resettlement contractors like Lutheran Family Services here are completely out in the open about the work they do providing laborers for BIG MEAT and BIG POULTRY and also tell the public that their salaries and offices are paid for by the US taxpayer (this is not a Christian charity! this is not about passing the collection plate on Sunday morning!).*** Then we can have the debate about why it is in the interests of the American taxpayer to supply foreign labor to giant corporations some of which are not even US-owned!
From the Omaha World-Herald: Todd Reckling of Lutheran Family Services at least hints here that LFS works with BIG MEAT which wants refugee workers.
LINCOLN — Nebraska led the nation in resettling the most refugees per capita during the last year, according to newly released federal government data.
The state welcomed 1,441 refugees, or 76 per 100,000 Nebraskans, between October 2015 and September 2016, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Nebraska is a strong draw for refugees because of its strong economy with accessibility to jobs in hospitality and meatpacking, said Todd Reckling, a vice president of Lutheran Family Services, the state’s largest of three placement agencies. About 90 percent of refugees come to the state to reunite with family already living in Nebraska, he said.
“I’d say Nebraska has a reputation for being a welcoming state,” he said, “a place to provide safety and hope for the families that are coming together.”
Continue reading here, especially if you live in Nebraska!
You will notice at the end of the story that some who are not thrilled about the security concerns with refugees are hanging their hat on Donald Trump to take care of that problem.
For any of you in states (especially with Republican governors who are squishy on the refugee program) do some research on who is donating to their campaigns.
***Lutheran Family Servicesin Omaha is a subcontractor of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service headquartered in Baltimore which is 95% funded by taxpayers, go here.
