We have no other details at this time, but the hearing will be at 2:30 p.m. in the Dirksen Senate Office Building room 226. Visit the Immigration and the National Interest Subcommittee (of the Judiciary Committee) for more information early next week, by clicking here.
See our post of last year about the hearing that is a requirement under the Refugee Act of 1980.
Go here to see if your Senator is on this all-important subcommittee.
Sessions counterpart in the House, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, is Rep. Trey Gowdy. We will be looking for a hearing to follow there before the new fiscal year begins on October 1.
See (click here) if your Member of Congress is on Gowdy’s subcommittee. If he is then be sure to contact him and tell him how you feel about the Refugee Admissions Program.
Remember, it will be the Republicans in Congress who determine in the end how many refugees will be placed in your towns beginning in two weeks from tomorrow (NOT Obama!). No money=no refugees!
Tag: Senator Jeff Sessions
Obama makes it official! Wants 110,000 refugees admitted to US in FY17, starts in 18 days!
Update September 14th: Do we want to be Europe? This should be the theme of Election 2016! Here.
Update: Many more details here. Apparently it was Secretary of State Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who delivered the (bad) news. The report has been printed, so look for it tomorrow. It is very useful. This is not the end of it. The Republican Congress must still fund it. Will they???
Senator Jeff Sessions, an advisor to the Trump campaign and a long time leader for immigration sanity on the Hill has just released this press release (here and below). Apparently the US State Department (Kerry? Richard?) delivered the Presidential determination and held a consultation with at least the Senate Judiciary Committee (we assume the House Judiciary Committee was present).
The number is well short of what the contractors have been demanding, but not a surprise. Frankly, the money isn’t there in the budget for even 110,000. (Remember too, this is only the resettled refugees, not the other so-called humanitarian arrivals, like the unaccompanied alien children, the asylees etc.).
Obama had previously said he wants $2.2 billion for ORR alone (not including costs to the US State Department and Homeland Security) and his determination delivered today must have put the amount at $1.5 billion for everything (the numbers just don’t make sense).
Throughout the Obama Administration the ceiling for resettled refugees was set at 70,000 each year with 85,000 arriving in FY16 ending Sept. 30th. The contractors in the refugee industry were pushing for 200,000, here.
This is what Sessions said today:
Sessions: Obama Administration Endangers Americans With Reckless Plans To Admit 110,000 Refugees in FY 2017—A 57% Increase Over FY 2015
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest made the following statement regarding the Obama Administration’s plans to admit 110,000 refugees to the United States in Fiscal Year 2017:
“Despite opposition by the American people, a documented link between terrorism and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees, and over $19 trillion in debt, the Obama Administration has committed the United States to admitting 110,000 refugees during Fiscal Year 2017—a roughly 57 percent increase in the number of refugees the United States admitted as recently as FY 2015, and a roughly 29 percent increase from the Administration’s target for FY 2016.
The common sense concerns of the American people are simply ignored as the Administration expands its reckless and extreme policies.
Terrorists have announced that they will infiltrate the refugee population and have successfully done so multiple times in Europe over the last year. These asylum-seekers are overwhelmingly male who make the journey from hotbeds of terrorism to countries throughout Europe. Earlier this year, General Philip Breedlove, who served as NATO’s top commander, said that ISIS was ‘spreading like cancer’ among the refugee population. And unsurprisingly, there have been numerous terror attacks in Europe this year linked to the refugee crisis. Indeed, just this past weekend, Germany’s Interior Minister said that there are more than 500 terrorists inside Germany alone who are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks. It is all but certain that many of those potential terrorists exploited the refugee crisis to get to Germany, and that there are likely thousands more all across Europe today.
Here in the United States, we face the same risks. The Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have acknowledged that terrorists could infiltrate the refugee population. And for good reason—as it is clear that terrorists have done so successfully in the past. The Director of the FBI has testified that he cannot certify that every refugee admitted to the United States is not a security threat, and recently compared the FBI’s anti-terrorism mission to ‘looking for needles in a nationwide haystack’ while also figuring out ‘which pieces of hay might someday become needles.’ Regardless, President Obama and his Administration are now pushing their extreme policies even further by stubbornly placing the requests of the United Nations above the safety of the American people by surging refugee admissions to 110,000.
The Administration’s claim that the program costs roughly $1.5 billion drastically understates the true costs of initial resettlement—as it does not include costs for programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, or Supplemental Security Income, among others.
In addition to the very serious national security implications and the initial resettlement costs, admitting 110,000 refugees will result in an enormous long-term financial burden on the taxpayers. Robert Rector, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has estimated that the total lifetime cost of admitting 10,000 refugees —which includes all costs at the federal, state, and local level—is $6.5 billion. Using Mr. Rector’s numbers as a baseline, admitting the 110,000 refugees that the Obama Administration proposes to admit beginning on October 1 will result in a total lifetime cost to the taxpayers of $71.5 billion. This would be added every year that these levels are continued.
The simple fact is that it would be safer and more cost-effective to establish safe zones for refugees as close to their homes as possible—particularly for those from the Middle East. One estimate found that resettling one refugee in the United States was nearly 12 times more expensive than providing care for that refugee abroad. With the prospect for a cease-fire in the region, there is even more reason to focus on providing temporary support for displaced persons in the region.
The American people do not support these radical plans, which amount to a complete betrayal from their leaders in Washington.”
Keep a lookout for the State Department report to Congress that accompanies the official consultation. It is a treasure trove of information you need in your ‘pockets of resistance’.
And, this doesn’t change a thing—keep hounding your Washington representatives this week and next to cut the budget for the whole darn program. Let’s have a moratorium on bringing in tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who have not been properly vetted until the Refugee Admissions Program is overhauled!
Final thought….. Since the level set each year is a ceiling, it seems like it would be perfectly legal for a new President to come in in January and halt the whole program at whatever level they had reached by late January 2017 and still be perfectly legal. In the year following 9/11 we admitted only about 20,000 (don’t remember the exact number), so it is possible to stop this train in mid-year!
Alabama county eyed for federal camp to house unaccompanied alien children
According to reports from very angry elected officials in Baldwin County, Alabama, there is nothing on the federal land but airstrips for practice landings and takeoffs and a hayfield at the moment. Construction of housing, including sewer and water, will be very costly.
But apparently the Obama Administration is in the process of determining if the Dept. of Defense sites in Alabama would be good ones to “temporarily” house some of the tens of thousands of so-called ‘unaccompanied alien children’ streaming across the US border at the moment.
I suspect that considering a site in Alabama is probably because the Obama Administration wants to take a whack at Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the most important Senator in America questioning Obama’s opening our doors to illegals of all sorts (this article uses the word “refugee” in the title, these are not refugees!), and the fact that Sessions is a chief adviser to the Donald Trump campaign.
Forget Alabama for a minute and consider the import of this story—they are anticipating another summer invasion of the US border, perhaps larger than the invasion of 2014 as a Trump Presidency looms on the horizon.
And, could this involve the creation of a ‘refugee camp’ for future use?
Keep your eyes pealed on your county!
From the Lagniappe Weekly:
A plan from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to assess the feasibility of housing unaccompanied illegal immigrant children at two airfields in Baldwin County is being met with hostility by elected officials at the federal and local levels because of concerns about the lack of infrastructure at the sites and the plan’s potential impact on the county.
ORR, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, notified officials of the assessments in a letter last week. In the letter Rose Hacking, an HHS representative, said ORR is trying to identify locations to provide shelter for potential increases in unaccompanied children apprehended at the Mexican border.
The letter notified officials HHS would soon schedule site assessments at the Naval Outlying Fields in Silverhill and Josephine to determine the feasibility of using the sites as semipermanent shelters if HHS exceeds its current shelter capacity.
[….]
According to Hacking’s letter HHS currently has 8,700 beds in its “shelter network” and an additional 2,000 beds on reserve if needed. Some reserve beds are already available at the Homestead Job Corps Center in Homestead, Florida, and the semipermanent structures would be used only if the department were to experience a “substantial” increase in unaccompanied children.
Andrea Helling, ORR chief of staff, said the temporary shelters are typically used for roughly 30 days while the unaccompanied children are evaluated in the court system. She stressed none of the children who may come to Baldwin County sites would impact the county school system or the local health care system.
[….]
According to Helling, the assessors will inspect the sites to determine the ease of installing temporary infrastructure and buildings. They also consider each sites’ proximity to airports and the amount of land available for construction.
Baldwin County Commission President Tucker Dorsey said county officials have not been told how many children may be moved to the site in the event it is used.
“Forget the fact that these would be children who are in the country illegally and the federal government doesn’t properly enforce immigration law,” Dorsey said. “Apart from that, this would be a logistical nightmare for us and them.”
Dorsey said while both sites are large, the federal government would have to install infrastructure and construct buildings at a great cost because the sites currently amount to nothing more than large fields with landing strips.
There is much more, continue reading here.
Some things you should know!
The Office of Refugee Resettlement is shelling out nearly $1 billion this year (FY2016) to take care of the children.
And, the ‘children’ who arrived in FY2015 are 82% teenagers and 68% of the total are boys. See here.
Some posts at 'American Resistance 2016' that might be of interest
Both yesterday and this morning, I’ve been focusing attention on my other blog. Here are some posts there that relate directly to Refugee Resettlement:
You must pay attention to David Lubell! Learn more about him here.
One of my greatest frustrations over the years has been the silence by the media of the immigration status of obvious immigrant criminals, see here.
Then there are two posts on Donald Trump. In the first one we learn more about why Fox News leans toward the open borders/amnesty agenda, here.
And, don’t miss the news that Trump has hired a key aide to Senator Jeff Sessions.
Senator Sessions wants Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide missing annual report
Shaking my head, where were you guys when I needed you years ago!
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS) is required by law to provide annual reports to Congress and for years and years we squawked about the fact that for years (years!) they were way behind. In fact by the time I testified at a State Department hearing in 2012 they were 3 years behind. My complaints went on for years and for awhile they were starting to catch up. (I did complain to the House immigration subcommittee too!).
I know, I’m grateful that the Congress is finally scrutinizing the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program, but it was lonely there for awhile!
Here is Leo Hohmann at WND yesterday on the latest from Senator Sessions and others:
Several GOP members of Congress led by U.S. Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., have placed the Obama administration on notice that it is in violation of federal law with regard to the program that resettles foreign refugees in 180 U.S. cities and towns.
Sessions, along with Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Lamar Smith, R-Texas, released a letter Thursday that was sent the previous day to Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Burwell.
The Obama administration has said it will resettle 85,000 foreign refugees in the U.S. in the current fiscal year, followed by 100,000 in the next year. It has also asked for a substantial increase in funding for the program.
But the law requires annual reports on how those resettlements are carried out.
“Failure to provide Congress with required information on the resettlement of foreign nationals within the United States violates both the law and the public trust,” Sessions said in a statement. “These are grave matters.”
The letter accuses the administration of violating federal law by failing to submit an annual report to Congress on the activities of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates within Burwell’s department and doles out welfare benefits to refugees.
A trip down memory lane…..
This is what I said in 2012 at a US State Department scoping meeting (Ten Reasons there should be a moratorium on refugee resettlement):
5) The agencies, specifically the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is in complete disarray as regards its legally mandated requirement to report to Congress every year on how refugees are doing and where the millions of tax dollars are going that run the program. The last (and most recent) annual report to be sent to Congress is the 2008 report—so they are out of compliance for fiscal years 2009, 2010 and 2011. A moratorium is necessary in order for the ORR to bring its records entirely up-to-date. Additionally, there needs to be an adequate tracking system designed to gather required data—frankly some of the numbers reported for such measures of dependence on welfare as food stamp usage, cash assistance and employment status are nothing more than guesses. (The lack of reports for recent years signals either bureaucratic incompetence and disregard for the law, or, causes one to wonder if there is something ORR is hiding.)
You might want to visit all of my ten reasons for a moratorium because they are as valid today as they were in 2012!
In 2013…..
I did further analysis of the annual reports and if they were sent to Congress according to law (here in March of 2013) and this is what I found:
My original plan was to start researching at 1990 and move toward the present time to see when they went off track and began breaking the law. It didn’t take long—1993!
So, I went back to 1980 and sure enough through the entire Reagan Presidency and the George HW Bush Presidency from 1980 to 1992 those Annual Reports were right on time—submitted to Congress on January 31st of the following year.
But, you know what the little cheaters did beginning with the 1993 report (and continued to do for the next 20 years)—they stopped putting publication dates on them. Oh, they had FY 1993 on the cover, but no information about when that actually went to Congress—heck it could have been three years late then!
So, who was the Director of the ORR during Bill Clinton’s time in office?
Lavinia Limon who now heads up one of the nine major federal contractors—the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants—was in charge of getting those reports to Congress.
For all of you especially in ‘Pockets of Resistance’ check out the annual reports (the list is here). They are a treasure-trove of information on the program.
Update: Re-posted my Ten reasons, here.