Tag: ORR

Refugee reports for your winter reading pleasure!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Someone asked me about refugee reports, and in this particular case where one could find information on welfare use by refugees.

Annual Reports to Congress

The best place that I know of for that information may be found in the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress.  (Not to be confused with the reports submitted by the State Department in September in conjunction with the Presidential Determination for the next year.)

screenshot-82
Annual Reports to Congress are very useful. In the FY2014 report ‘Public Benefit Utilization’ tables begin on page 105. See example below. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/orr_annual_report_to_congress_fy_2014_signed.pdf

Annual reports are listed here.
Federal law requires that the reports be submitted to Congress within 4 months of the close of the previous fiscal year.  So unless ORR has failed to update its website, they are now behind for FY2015 (and if they don’t get that one done by the end of January 2017, they will be two years behind!).
There was a point a few years ago (and we wrote about it often and loudly) that ORR was behind by as much as 3 years.  I did some research to see when they went off track with following the law and found out it was during Lavinia Limon’s tenure as the Director of ORR during the Clinton Administration.  What they apparently did during those years was to take the dates off of the covers, so you never really knew when it was actually submitted.  It might say FY1987 (oops typo supposed to be 1997), but with no date for its delivery to Congress.

But the fact that they were so far off also highlighted the fact that Congress clearly did not care whether they were on time.

See here that Senator Jeff Sessions and Rep. Marsha Blackburn did ultimately go after ORR in late 2015 to force the agency to comply with the law.
So go to the Annual Reports and you will find welfare use for refugees.  However, I want you to see page 112 at the end of FY2014 and understand that the reports for such things as welfare use are based on a small sample number of present and former refugees who are able to be found and who are willing to admit to welfare use!
Frankly, there should be a requirement to obtain that data from local welfare agencies, thus forcing local social service agencies to keep track of refugee ‘clients.’
One more thing, since Wrapsnet.org only keeps data back to 2002, you can go back to extensive tables at the end of older annual reports.  That is how I found all this information about Somali resettlement all the way back to the beginning.

Proposed refugee admissions for coming year report to Congress

The annual reports I mentioned above are done after the fact, while this report (which is still pretty useful) is sent to Congress usually in the month of September and informs Congress of what the President plans for the upcoming fiscal year.  See the most recent one here.

ORR’s Key Indicators

This is a relatively new report and I don’t know if ORR has ever done more than maybe two of these.  But, the purpose was to identify states that have the best situation (vis-a-vis social services) for refugees.  Here I told readers about how if your state expanded Medicaid, you had a better shot at getting more refugees. This report also tracks secondary migration something that I was told was not done way back in 2007 when I started writing about the Refugee Admissions Program (RAP).
Key Indicators for FY2014 is here.

Congressional Research Service Reports

I have not read the latest one issued just a few weeks ago, but these CRS Reports by Andorra Bruno have been very useful in the past.  See the most recent one by clicking here.

General Accounting Office Reports

There is a really good (useful) GAO Report issued in July 2012 which was commissioned by then Senator Richard Lugar entitled, ‘Greater Consultation with Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program.’
Go here to see that report.
I think there are more reports, but that is all my old brain can remember at the moment.  Will add more if you know of more!
Example of a table found near the end of the FY2014 Annual Report to Congress linked above (be sure to read the note under the table!). After 5 years 60% of refugees were still on Food Stamps!
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I have a category here at RRW entitled ‘Where to find information’ but it is huge and pretty unwieldy now, but ambitious readers might want to scroll through some of the material archived there.

Unaccompanied Alien Children eating up Health and Human Service's agency budgets

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You’ve probably all seen this news about the Dept. of Health and Services scrambling to re-direct money from other areas of the agency budget to take care of the largest number of ‘children’ (ever!) entering the US illegally.

train-map
Seems like the Trump Admin. might be able to figure out exactly where the wall needs to be!

I’m posting this so that as we move ahead in the coming days with news on the budget for FY17 and the Continuing Resolution, you have some background understanding of the dilemma the refugee program is in during the waning days of the Obama Administration.  The ‘kids’ (who are NOT refugees) are gobbling up limited funds putting their needs in direct competition with the refugees entering the US from all over the world. (In addition to depriving US citizens of other needed programs.)
For new readers, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is an agency at HHS which has been given the duty of taking care of the illegal alien kids.
Here is Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies:

An average of 255 illegal alien youths were taken into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) every day this month, according to the latest figures the agency provided to Congress. This is the largest number of illegal alien children ever in the care of the federal government. To pay for it, the agency says it will need an additional one or two billion dollars for the next year – above and beyond the $1.2 billion spent in 2016 and proposed for 2017 – depending on how many more arrive. For now, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where ORR resides, is diverting $167 million from other programs to cover the cost of services for these new illegal arrivals through December 9, when the current continuing resolution expires.

An email to congressional staff from Barbara Clark of the HHS legislative liaison office, dated November 28, 2016, stated:

Daily referrals of unaccompanied children averaged 247 over the last seven days, and 255 so far in November. For comparison, referrals averaged 185 per day in November of FY 2016 and 64 per day in November of FY 2015. As of November 27, 2016, the number of children in ORR care is approximately 11,200.

A separate email informed congressional offices of HHS Secretary Burwell’s intent to transfer money from other programs to ORR to pay for shelters, health care, schooling, recreation, and other services for the new illegal arrivals, who typically were brought to the border by smugglers paid by their parents, who often are living in the United States illegally.

Continue reading here and see which programs are being robbed to pay for the ‘kids.’
About the map: I was searching for a graph to show how many ‘kids’ (mostly Central American teenage boys, see here) had come in to the US in the most recent years, but every graph I found only went to 2014. So what is up with that!  I figured the map would be a nice addition to the post instead.
By the way, this post is tagged ‘Unaccompanied minors’ because many years ago they were called that and that is how I first tagged the topic.

ORR Annual Reports to Congress are very useful

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Someone asked me today where to find the number of refugees who were resettled in each state in the US over the years and it reminded me that we have many many new readers every day who are just beginning to try to get a handle on how the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program works.

Annual Report to Congress
Most recent Annual Report to Congress

Very useful documents are the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress*** which are full of all sorts of data, not just the statistics on how many refugees were resettled in your state, but they include data on welfare use, employment, housing, and medical assistance, among other things.
They also include reports from the VOLAGs (the federal contractors) and discussions of special problems that some refugee populations encounter here. And, of course there is information about the myriad grants these contractors receive each year.
I can’t say it enough, but knowledge is power.  If you want to begin to understand what is happening in your towns and cities, start by looking at one of these documents.
Click here for a list of available reports.
By the way, the Refugee Act of 1980 specifies that this report should be completed and sent to Congress by the end of January following the close of the fiscal year.  Thus, the 2015 Annual Report should be available, but they are behind in producing it.
So what else is new! At one point a few years ago, they were three years behind!
For new readers we have a category entitled ‘where to find information,’ and you might want to have a look at it from time to time.
P.S.  I just spent a few minutes examining Table 1 (of the Appendix) in the FY2009 Annual Report where it cataloged how many refugees and from what countries were resettled in each state between 1983 and 2009. Wow! Amazing!
***This is not to be confused with another report to Congress that accompanies the President’s proposal for the upcoming fiscal year.  That report also has much useful data but is not as comprehensive as the reports found here.
 

North Dakota update: seems that very few elected officials have a clue about what ol' Teddy and Joe created

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Back in 1980 when Jimmy Carter signed the monster into law (after it was pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden) everyone jumped on board (every state but Wyoming!) and figured this was just one of those warm and fuzzy feel-good plans from Washington.

Ted and Joe
Thank Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden for being the ‘brains’ behind the bill that became the Refugee Act of 1980

It was put on auto-pilot (no serious review by Congress has happened in 35 years) until now when the once seemingly innocuous program has grown so large, so costly and fraught with security risks that the public is finally paying attention.
Here is the latest on North Dakota, a state with one of the highest per capita rates of refugee placement, and where elected officials are now trying to figure out what rights they have to slow it or get out altogether.
The story is here at Breitbart where reporter Michael Patrick Leahy tells us how the North Dakota Senator and former governor doesn’t understand how the program works.
Read the story.  Learn how much your state is on the hook for!
Now this…

Every “humanitarian arrival” costs the US taxpayer a bare minimum of $10,000 per person. Do our Washington elected officials even have a clue?

I want to use this opportunity of the Breitbart story to highlight a brief mention of the cost of the program reporter Leahy mentions near the end.  Here is what Leahy said:

Hoeven is not the only member of Congress who does not seem to understand how the federal refugee resettlement program works. In fact, hardly any members of Congress seem to have such an understanding. That may be the most obvious reason to explain why Congress continues to fund the VOLAGS who operate it to the tune of $1 billion a year.

Since a reader asked just this morning about the cost of the program (in light of the upcoming opportunity to testify), the best I can do is send you here to Obama’s proposed FY 2016 Report to Congress (from Sept. of 2015) on what the Administration said the program would cost the feds in this year (2016).  Go to Table VII and see that they estimated $1.19 billion total.  That includes $652 million for the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
However, when you go here to the Dept. of Health and Human Services FY2017 Budget Justification (begin on p. 244) you will see a very different story. Either the budget has dramatically increased (from 2016 to 2017) or Obama was downplaying the costs only 6 months ago.
Get this! Obama’s FY2017 budget includes (rounded number) $2.2 BILLION just for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) where they say they will care for 213,000 “humanitarian arrivals” including Obama’s 100,000 refugees he has been touting for next year.

The FY 2017 budget of $2,184,860,000 for this account represents the cost of maintaining current law and service requirements for additional refugees and other Entrants and unaccompanied children and for expanding assistance to domestic victms of trafficking. The funding levels for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account in FY 2017, particularly with regard to Transitional and Medical Services, Social Services, Preventative Health, and Survivors of Torture programs.

The President’ Budget request would support a total of 213,000 humanitarian arrivals in FY 2017, including 100,000 refugees, consistent with the Administration’s commitment to admit at least this number of refugees in FY 2017. The FY 2017 base funding level for unaccompanied children represents an increase of $278,000,000, which is flat from the base resources available in FY 2016, including carryover.

I’m rotten at math, but doesn’t that amount to over $10,000 per refugee just for the ORR share.
That over $2 billion figure does not include the costs of the US State Department which pays contractors their per head fee and it doesn’t include the enormous security screening costs for the Dept. of Homeland Security for the large numbers arriving from Muslim countries.
And, it most certainly does not include the (surely!) billions in welfare payments, medical care and education for the children refugees receive.
 

Judge releases Somali 'asylum seeker' even though ORR said he was an adult, not a teen

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Wow! Check out this story from Seattle—first, because it gives us a few clues about Unaccompanied Alien Minors, not all from Central America and Mexico, who know how to game the system, and secondly because here we see that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is trying to ferret out frauds among the ‘children’ only to be thwarted by a judge.

Judge Pechman
The lower court judge ruled and Judge Pechman affirmed that a scientific bone density scan couldn’t be used to show that the illegal alien Somali was a teen or not. Photo: https://vimeo.com/77379343

Gosh, does this mean the Somali, who could be an adult, will be sent back to hang out in high school?
Sure looks like he was returned to foster care (and presumably high school) according to another article at The Seattle Times.

Message to all young men from around the world who want to break into America, get rid of your passports and any other identification before you arrive at the border and then lie, lie, lie!

From the Seattle Globalist:

A judge affirmed a ruling this week that federal immigration officials unlawfully used a dental exam to determine that a teenaged Somali asylum seeker was an adult, and wrongly detained him in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

The teenager, identified in court documents by his initials B.I.C., had entered the United States in August 2015 and applied for asylum as a minor. He was issued a special immigrant juvenile visa and sent to live with a foster mother in Portland. However, in December the Office of Refugee Resettlement said that based on a dental bone scan, they no longer believed that he was a minor.

The teenager had traveled through South and Central America in order to reach the United States, and had destroyed his identification documents so he would not get sent back to Somalia, according to the court filings, so he had no documentation for his age. [So, he committed fraud by destroying his ID papers!—ed]

With the dental bone scan as the only piece of evidence that he was an adult, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested the teenager from his high school near Portland and took him to the Northwest Detention Center in December.

He was released after two months, after the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project filed a suit seeking the teenager’s release. Chief Magistrate Judge James Donahue ruled that using a bone density scan as the sole piece of evidence of someone’s age violates federal law and that the teenager should be freed.

Donahue’s recommendation was adopted this week by U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman, who also threw out ORR’s determination that he was an adult when he was first taken into custody.

According to The Seattle Times story he will be released from foster care when he turns 18 (whenever that is, or was), but what next? Does he just disappear into the American Somali community? Or, will the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project take responsibility for him? (surely not!)  Or, better still, maybe the good judge will take him in!