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.
“We have neither the resources nor the obligation to solve the federal government’s problem and foot the bill for the consequences of this Administration’s misguided actions.”
Maybe you have already seen reports where you live that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement(within HHS) is out scouting locations to shelter Unaccompanied Alien Children(mostly teens and mostly males!) in unused facilitiessuch as old schools.
Well, twenty Republican governors are saying Not in My State!
Presumably this demand by the governors applies only to shelters for UACs.***
Here is the opening salvo in their letteryesterday:
Here are those who signed:
Although it didn’t involve illegal alien ‘children’, I am reminded that many of the governors above did not supportPresident Trump’s efforts to strengthen their states rightswhen Trump proposed a plan to give them a greater say in refugee placement in their states.
There are twenty-seven Republican governors, seven did not sign the letter.
Missing are the REPUBLICAN governors of Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Vermont and West Virginiasignaling that it is hunky dory to send illegal aliens to shelters in their states.
***UACs are being placed with sponsors in most states.
You can see, by clicking here, where some of the mostly teenagers have been placed with sponsorsthrough the end of March.
But, the radicals in the White House, including Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted the refugee ceiling bumped up to 62,500 for the remainder of the year.
Years ago, care for the Unaccompanied Alien Children was shifted to the Office of Refugee Resettlement which is in the Department of Health and Human Services and is thus the root of today’s problem—an agency in crisis as it attempts to deal with thousands of children who are not refugees illegally arriving at our borders at the express invitation of the Biden administration when its original mission was to manage refugees selected for admission to the US.
Here is Politicoon the internal scuffle using just the nicest tones they can muster so as not to make it sounds like the Biden ship is foundering.
I am laughing to myself because this sort of internal squabbling during the Trump years would have been blown sky high by corporate media with the help of deep state leakers in a way to make Trump look foolish.
Somebody, other than Saint Joe, has to be the fall-guy in the dream administration’s first major public relations fiasco and it looks like the long knives in the White House have found their man.
For a little chuckle, watch Biden announcing his pick for HHS Secretary butcher the name of the Department of Health and Human Service before butchering Becerra’s name in the first minute of this youtube video.
Becerra’s cautious border play rankles White House
Xavier Becerra spent decades urging congressional leaders to support liberalized legal immigration. But he’s sounding a different note as Health secretary, responsible for caring for upwards of 21,000 migrant children.
Biden’s kids in cages!
Becerra has argued for maintaining the historically low Trump-era cap on refugee admissions to the U.S., according to two people with knowledge of the matter, for fear of stretching the already-thin resources of his department’s refugee office.
His insistence on a more cautious approach to immigration policy has, moreover, contributed to his shaky standing with some quarters of a fast-paced White House where senior aides have spent weeks pressing the Health department to speed its intake of thousands of children at the southern border, and bristled at what friends and skeptics alike described as Becerra’s at times deliberate manner.
“He cares about raising the caps — but let’s take one challenge at a time,” one person close to Becerra said of his mindset. “Emotionally, he’s there. But he’s always a pragmatist.”
Becerra apparently had some common sense!
President Joe Biden in April initially agreed to keep the refugee limit in place, siding with Becerra and overruling top officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But the blowback from immigration advocates and Democrats on Capitol Hill was immediate and intense, and Biden has since reversed course.
Becerra in the meantime has been privately frustrated by the White House’s rush to ease a series of immigration guardrails well before he was confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, allies said, including a key decision to allow unaccompanied immigrant children to remain in the country.
[….]
That responsibility for caring for unaccompanied children has landed chiefly on HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which also handles foreigners seeking refugee status, though the two operations are not intertwined.
[….]
For Becerra, a relative latecomer as one of Biden’s last Cabinet officials to be confirmed, it represents an early and steep management test.
And it comes after years in Congress and state government as a vocal immigrant-rights advocate who pressed both Democratic and Republican administrations to take more aggressive efforts to overhaul the immigration system and “open the doors of opportunity” for those coming to the U.S. Becerra frequently invokes the experiences of his immigrant Mexican parents and once chided fellow Latinos for “running from their heritage” in advocating for tough immigration restrictions.
Although we have no idea where large numbers of the ‘children’ will be placed in facilities around the US (unless information leaks out like in this North Carolina case), you can see where some of the mostly teenagers have been placed with sponsors through the end of March.
State and county data is available. Don’t miss the fact that tens of thousands were placed during Trump’s tenure.
Where have the refugees, placed via the US Refugee Admissions Program, gone so far this fiscal year?
Call your local elected representatives at the city or county level and ask if your community is being selected to ‘welcome’ either the illegal aliens invading our southern border now, or are being asked to become a refugee resettlement site as I reported recently about Winchester, Virginia.
If the answer is yes, you must get to work to create controversy where you live.
That is, if he and Kamala make it to the White House.
They campaigned on reversing all of what they claim were draconian policies by the Trump White House to slow the flow across our southern border and to halt the influx of impoverished, possibly sick, low skilled workers, eg. refugees to America.
Will Biden be called a racist if he leaves many of Trump’s immigration policies in place? Not a chance!
Since the Chinese virus reared its ugly head in the spring, much of the Trump team’s actions were to slow the arrival of the COVID-19 virus potentially arriving with the migrants.
As a result Trump was called a racist and a white nationalist by the Biden-supporting media.
Now I am seeing one story after another about how the Harris/Biden administration might have to go very slowly to unravel Trump’s efforts to keep America safe and Americans working.
LOL! I will be looking for the Leftist media to label Biden an evil racist when he will almost certainly not be able to fling open America’s gates for months or even years!
It wasn’t long after Election Steal Day in the weeks following November 3rd, that the stories began popping up about a new surge on the border.
U.S. agents apprehend 1,000 migrant children in 6 days as crossings along Mexican border rise
By the way, unaccompanied alien children are the responsibility of the US Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Many paragraphs into the story we learn that oopsy(!), maybe Joe and Kamala cannot immediately reverse Trump’s immigration control strategies, especially as Americans will be furious if it is done while the virus rages on.
Mr. Biden’s team has also pledged to review the expulsions policy to ensure border-crossers “have the ability to submit their asylum claims.”
Andrew Selee, president of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, said ending the “Remain in Mexico” program and the expulsions too quickly could lead to a surge in border crossings.
He suggested the incoming Biden administration could end Remain-in-Mexico but temporarily retain the expulsion policy, a scenario that could be complicated by legal challenges and reporting that shows public health officials were pressured by the White House to authorize the expulsions.
Selee said an influx in border arrests could hurt chances of a divided Congress passing immigration legislation, including one that provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries. Republicans lawmakers blamed the DACA program for a surge in border apprehensions of Central American children in 2014, even though the policy, established in 2012, did not benefit new arrivals.
Before completely ending Mr. Trump’s policies, Selee said the incoming Biden administration should deploy more asylum officers, surge resources to the border and expand case management programs that allow migrants to complete their U.S. immigration proceedings outside of detention centers. Otherwise, he added, a sharp increase in unauthorized migration could leave the U.S. government unprepared, worsen conditions in temporary migrant holding facilities and lead to more draconian enforcement policies.
“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: Either you start releasing people in the general population or you hold them in the middle of a pandemic,” Selee said.
“If you try to be the anti-Trump on day one, you will end up acting like Trump in the end,” he added. “If you try and throw out everything Trump has done on day one, without having an alternative in place, you’ll end up doing the same things Trump did.”
And, here (read it yourself) is a more recent warning about the ‘kids’ rushing the border. From USA Today:
Thousands of unaccompanied minors arrive at US-Mexico border as Border Patrol grapples with COVID-19 deaths
Lowering expectations?
And, a little nugget in this news from the Pittsburgh Post Gazetteindicates that the Refugee Resettlement Industry has begun to tamp down expectations for a huge jump in new refugees being flown into your towns and cities anytime soon.
Biden campaigned on restoring the flow of refugees into the country from Trump’s less than 20,000 annual refugee admissions to a whopping 125,000 in year one he said!
Pittsburgh 2017 anti-Trump rally. Will they protest if Biden doesn’t move fast enough to reverse Trump’s policies? Not a chance.
Pittsburgh-area agencies await word on Biden’s refugee plan
Deep into this story we have this news that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Societyis telling its satellite offices that the flood isn’t coming right away.
While the Biden team hasn’t detailed its plans, Ms. Aizenman has heard speculation from her agency’s national affiliate that there might be some increases later in 2021, with a higher ceiling in 2022.
But wait! That is not what we heard BEFORE November 3rd.
(Ms. Aizenman is the director of refugee and immigrant services at Jewish Family and Community Services which is a subcontractor of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)).
We had a hint that increases in refugee numbers might not be cominghere the other day.
If Biden and Harris (or Harris and someone else!) are installed in the White House, we will be watching! I know it is serious, but I anticipate being amused as they squirm to get out from between a rock and a hard place.
Clever America Firsters will have to figure out how to keep up the pressure on that rock.
They call those being taken care of by the Office of Refugee Resettlementand its contractors “children,” but when you see the dataonly 15% in a recent year were under twelve and 71% of all those apprehended were boys. So, therefore, I refer to those being housed as teens.
3 migrant children in U.S. custody test positive for coronavirus
Three unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. government custody have tested positive for the coronavirus, federal officials said Thursday, highlighting concerns among advocates about the vulnerability of detained immigrants during the global pandemic.
The three minors, who are housed in a shelter in New York, are the first confirmed coronavirus cases among the 3,600 unaccompanied children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. In response to the outbreak, the refugee agency has stopped releasing migrant children in New York facilities to sponsors, who are typically family members living in the U.S.
Officials also revealed on Thursday that the number of positive coronavirus cases among staff members and contractors at facilities for unaccompanied migrant children has grown to seven.
[….]
Coronavirus is particularly dangerous for older people and those with underlying medical issues, but children and young people can carry and transmit the virus, even if the risk of serious illness is relatively low.Migrant minors in ORR custody crossed the southern border without parents or guardians, or in certain circumstances, were separated from them.
[….]
The announcement on Thursday is likely to fuel even more calls for the Trump administration to quickly release some of the tens of thousands of immigrants it is currently detaining, especially as the public health crisis to contain the coronavirus intensifies. On Wednesday, lawyers asked a federal court in California to require officials to release unaccompanied migrant children who have been in government custody for more than a month or transfer them to facilities where social distancing can be reasonably practiced.
If they want to keep the teens and the community safe they are better off keeping them in custody and not allowing them to mingle throughout city neighborhoods (interacting with the elderly!) that might not be taking the precautions that facilities supervised by the federal Dept. of Health and Human Services surely do about cleanliness.
Open Borders advocates never rest as they are, as usual, not letting a good crisis go to waste!
Where have the refugees, placed via the US Refugee Admissions Program, gone so far this fiscal year?
