Tag: Senator Rand Paul

Libertarian/Muslim groups urge private sponsorship of Syrian refugees in US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Before I give you this latest turn of events reported by the Huffington Post’s Elise Foley*** let me say that we have advocated that if US citizens want to welcome impoverished third worlders that the refugees should be privately sponsored by churches, synagogues or other civic organizations or wealthy individuals—and I mean completely sponsored for a year or two until they found employment and were not a “public charge”  (completely self-sufficient with no food stamps, no subsidized housing, no free medical care, no cash assistance).

David Bier
David Bier (drafted letter to Obama) is director of immigration policy at the Niskanen Center. He is an expert on visa reform, border security, and interior enforcement. From 2013 to 2015, he drafted immigration legislation as senior policy advisor for Congressman Raúl Labrador, a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. Previously, Mr. Bier was an immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. https://niskanencenter.org/about/

The whole concept of immigrants being welcomed into America at one time in our history centered around those who would not be dependent on the US taxpayer for anything—now refugees are dependent on us for virtually every aspect of their lives.
If individual sponsorship was required, the number we admitted to the US would then be determined by the willingness of Americans to shell out their own personal money for their charitable desires.
In other words, the availability of private charity would naturally limit the number of refugees admitted (it goes without saying that security screening would still be of paramount concern).

Private sponsorship on top of the existing Refugee Admissions Program!

This proposal drafted by a Libertarian think tank (!) and supported by a whole host of mostly Muslim organizations is not that—it is NOT complete private sponsorship.
They see this plan to be in addition to the billion dollar federal program that now funds nine contractors which monopolize all refugee resettlement in America.
It is about getting even more Syrian Muslims into the US!
It does not recommend throwing out the system now that revolves around the money-grubbing contractors and thus it must be opposed.
Here is the story at the Huffington Post (be sure to read through and see the excuses a representative from Church World Service gives—clearly not wanting any program that might interfere with the stream of your money to their coffers).

When did these LIBERTARIANS start working with the likes of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Society of North America?

WASHINGTON — Some opponents to taking in more Syrian refugees argue it’s simply too expensive. Refugees need significant help with housing, food, transportation, education and more when they get here, and they contend that the United States can’t afford to help more people.

But what if outside groups — community or religious organizations, cities, companies or even individuals — foot the costs instead?

A coalition led by the Syrian American Council plans to send a letter to President Barack Obama on Wednesday asking him to consider creating a program for private sponsorship of Syrian refugees, the involved groups told The Huffington Post.

[….]

The fact that these calls are coming from Americans could make it more politically viable, said David Bier, director of immigration policy for Niskanen Center, the nonprofit libertarian think tank that helped draft the letter.

“It seems like an idea that’s politically a no-brainer — it’s a lot easier to sell to the American people refugee resettlement if they know, hey, my neighbor is the one who wants these people who were brought over and it’s not just something Washington cooked up,” he said.

Who the hell cares what your neighbor wants, is the neighbor paying all the bills and taking full responsibility (including LEGAL responsibility if the refugee breaks the law)?
Then this…. Ahhhhhhh!

Along with the Syrian American Council, the letter was signed by Syrian American Medical Society, Syria Relief and Development, Arab American Institute, Turkish Heritage Organization, Muslim Public Affairs Council, Islamic Society of North America, Karam Foundation and Watan USA.

Read it all.
***You know what is very funny?  I wrote about Elise Foley here in 2013 she was blasting Libertarian Senator Rand Paul who was brave back then (before he was running for President) and she reported this (in snide tones):

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on Wednesday that the U.S. should be skeptical of accepting refugees, from Iraq in particular, because they take welfare and could plan attacks on American soil.

Endnote:  If you missed yesterday’s post about Rep. Raul Labrador and Rep. Paul Ryan, go here.  Libertarians want more immigration!

More news on Islamic “charity” helping Syrians get planted in Kentucky

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

More seeding going on in Louisville, KY as Syrian families are resettled by a ‘Christian’ charitable group (aka federal contractor) with funds from a controversial Islamic organization.

When I saw Senator Rand Paul’s sullen face and tepid clapping at the Netanyahu speech this past week, my reaction was immediate—he is not Presidential material if he can’t even keep a neutral face. He can disagree about how to handle Iran, he just shouldn’t look childish in his disagreement. But more importantly he can’t even see what is happening to his own state, so how will he keep America safe? http://rare.us/story/rand-paul-found-guilty-of-not-clapping-hard-enough-for-bibi-netanyahu/

In a story otherwise meant to be warm and fuzzy about a collection being taken up by Kentucky Refugee Ministries for its new Syrians, we learn a little bit more about the role of Islamic Relief USA.   Just a reminder, as I said here, I have never previously seen funding coming from a Muslim group directly to a federal refugee contractor.

From the Courier-Journal:

As Kentucky Refugee Ministries begins to resettle its first Syrian refugees in Louisville, members of the local Muslim community are banding together to collect items to help.

The first Syrian family to be resettled arrived Feb. 13, and another 20 families are expected in the coming months…..

Muslim community is “more organized now!” Indeed!

“Our community is more organized now, and we’re at the stage where we want to be more involved in helping the community,” said Natalia Blagaia, principal of the Nur school. “This is like a wake-up call.”

Churches and the general Christian community traditionally have taken on most of the responsibility for sponsoring KRM refugees and supplying their needs. The drive is “really an effort to engage the Muslim community,” Bailey-Ndiaye said.

The ministries received a grant of about $52,000 from Islamic Relief USA, which has regional offices throughout the country and headquarters in Alexandria, Va., to help enlist the support of the Muslim community and to aid some arriving refugees.

Once again for all those who don’t believe me that the UN is picking our refugees!

KRM assists people who have been identified by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the U.S. Government as needing resettlement.

I’m going to keep asking the same question:   Where are US Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul?  Paul wants to be President of the US, but if he can’t seem to see what is happening in his own state, how can we expect him to keep us safe!  Is it a coincidence that much ‘seeding’ is happening in KY, nope!

By the way, don’t miss ‘US lacks adequate screening for Syrian refugees (FBI)’

Senator Rand Paul has a lot of nerve to question French immigration policy!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

How can a man whose own home town was traumatized by the arrest of Muslim refugee terrorists, and whose home state of Kentucky is a prime US State Department resettlement site for Somali, Iraqi, Burmese and soon-to-arrive Syrian Muslims have the audacity to tell the French that they need to re-think their immigration policy!

Frankly, I had a lot of hope for Senator Paul a few years ago when he raised some hell in Washington over how those two Iraqi (now convicted and in prison) terrorists slipped through Homeland Security’s hands (they lied on refugee applications, big surprise!) when one of them had fingerprints on IED fragments from Iraq.  He is the only Senator I have seen even make a peep about the Refugee Program.

Maybe I’m the only one who remembers Senator Paul’s brief stand!  See posts here,  here, here and here.   After 2013 (what! when 2016 was around the corner?) it sure sounds like Paul himself erased concerns for Kentucky and America right out of his mind!

Grover Norquist and Senator Rand Paul. For your own good Paul, get away from Norquist! Photo: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/norquist-bloomberg-and-rand-paul-team-up-for-dont-call-it-amnesty/

Why doesn’t Senator Rand Paul get it—if he came out strongly right now about American security as it relates to LEGAL and illegal immigration he would have a shot at the Presidency in 2016!

This is the news that got me steamed this morning.  From CNN:

(CNN)Sen. Rand Paul thinks that France needs to rethink its immigration policy in light of the recent terror attacks.

The Kentucky Republican said Thursday that intelligence and surveillance tactics should still be employed to prevent terrorism, but argued “there’s some policy changes, though, that could be better.”

“I think also you got to secure your country. That means maybe that every Muslim immigrant that wishes to come to France shouldn’t have an open door to come,” he said on Sean Hannity’s radio show, referring to Islamic radicalization in Europe.

Paul suggested such policy be considered by France and “many of these other countries that had old colonies in predominantly Muslim areas.”

He does throw in a comment about our border security and student visas (big deal), but more than any other Senator in Washington, maybe even more than Senator Jeff Sessions (who doesn’t say much about refugees), Paul knows about the dangers and the cost of our refugee program.

Paul, a potential presidential contender, argued that “it’s also my concern here,” saying the U.S. border “is a danger to attack” and criticizing what he described as a poorly monitored student visa program.

See our extensive archive on Kentucky and its many problems with refugees, here.  Paul’s home town of Bowling Green was until recently a ‘preferred resettlement site!‘  Sometime after 2009 it was taken off the list, why? because it is so overloaded with refugees that the feds and their resettlement contractors are now focusing on other Kentucky cities like Louisville (where they eat camels!).

About the photo and Senator Paul’s association with Grover Norquist.  In 2007 Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform) was promoting, with his inside-the-beltway Republicans, the idea of bringing in Iraqi refugees.  More recently Norquist and Suhail Kahn ginned-up a letter from a group of RINOs to bring in more refugees generally.

Jeb Bush signed that letter asking that we resettle MORE refugees.

Note to Paul—get away from Grover Norquist!

EEEK! Could there be terrorists in the Iraqi population in the US?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You betcha!   I am continually amazed at how long it takes the mainstream media to catch up with the blogosphere.  I don’t want to brag, but heck we wrote about this now old news way back in June of 2011.

Senator Rand Paul has been asking from day one why are we permitting so many Iraqis into the US. ABC doesn’t mention his name.

And, it cannot go unmentioned—-Senator Rand Paul was, and still is, the only US Senator I’ve seen in the last 6 years to have the guts to ask why the h*** are we doing this?

See here for just one of many posts about Paul’s demands for answers about how this Kentucky case happened.  Isn’t it interesting that this lengthy ABC News investigation doesn’t even mention his name!

ABC has moved the story to the front pages (nearly 2 and 1/2 years late!) and after we have admitted 90,000 Iraqis in ten years and 19,491 in fiscal year 2013 alone!

Let me repeat!

We have admitted 19,491 Iraqi refugees to the US in 2013 alone!

Thanks to all who sent the story today, including Judy who sent former Rep. Allen West’s post on the story and Brenda Walker at Limits to Growth for her write-up.  Walker has been on top of the story from day one as well!

Good Morning America: Exclusive: US May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees

Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists’ fingerprints.

“We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that,” FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News with Diane Sawyer” and “Nightline”.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more than that,” said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. “And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me.”

As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News ….   [But, of course the refugee agencies and their contractors are making up now for lost time.  Iraqis were the largest group of refugees resettled in 2013.—ed]

The now imprisoned pair were resettled in Kentucky:

In 2009 Alwan applied as a refugee and was allowed to move to Bowling Green, where he quit a job he briefly held and moved into public housing on Gordon Ave., across the street from a school bus stop, and collected public assistance payouts, federal officials told ABC News.

“How do you have somebody that we now know was a known actor in terrorism overseas, how does that person get into the United States? How do they get into our community?” wondered Bowling Green Police Chief Doug Hawkins, whose department assisted the FBI.

One of the saddest parts of this whole story is that these creeps may well have helped themselves to American welfare after killing American soldiers from Pennsylvania:

The FBI secretly taped Alwan bragging to the informant that he’d built a dozen or more bombs in Iraq and used a sniper rifle to kill American soldiers in the Bayji area north of Baghdad.

“He said that he had them ‘for lunch and dinner,'” recalled FBI Louisville Supervisory Special Agent Tim Beam, “meaning that he had killed them.”

Read the whole ABC story for details.  Most regular readers will note that we reported most of this “exclusive” story over the last couple of years.

This is our 596th post on Iraqi refugees, click here for the entire archive.

For first timers, who have no clue what ‘refugee resettlement’ is, go here for our fact sheet on how the program works.   Also, Bowling Green is a preferred resettlement site for the contractors.  Type ‘Bowling Green’ into our search function and learn more about the problems there over the years.

Surprise! Another Iraqi refugee with possible terror ties incarcerated (San Antonio this time)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I missed this story earlier this month, but reader ‘Pungentpeppers’ spotted it and alerted us to it.   The original story appears in the San Antonio Express-News, but it’s not readily available.  Fortunately, the blogger at  ‘Limits to Growth’ posted the entire story.

Social Security Investigator: During his arrest Sept. 6, he admitted lying to get refugee status.

And, when I say another Iraqi, I’m thinking of those two Kentucky refugees doing time for terror connections and then there is the case of the Social Security office bomber in Phoenix.

This story is especially interesting because the accused was first being investigated for fraud associated with his disability payments and lying on his refugee application, but he also works in a convenience store (what a coincidence that is) while supposedly being disabled.  I wonder did authorities check to see if food stamp fraud was going on there along with the employment fraud?

Someone please let Senator Rand Paul know there is another one!  Paul is the only US Senator or Member of Congress willing to ask why we are resettling so many refugees.

From San Antonio Express News via Limits to Growth:

SAN ANTONIO — On the surface, Ahmed Khudhur Tayyeh is a refugee, resettled in San Antonio in 2008 by the United Nations to help him escape persecution in his native Iraq.

The way this region’s Joint Terrorism Task Force tells it, however, the 39-year-old is suspected of having ties to Al-Qaida.

He was arrested earlier this month on an indictment charging him — not with terrorism — but with theft from the government, defrauding the Social Security Administration out of $7,995 in disability benefits and with withholding information that he had been getting a side income.

As one of nearly 200,000 Iraqi refugees approved by the U.S. government for resettlement in America since 2007, Tayyeh was given a green card, despite giving conflicting stories about how he injured his leg. In one story he allegedly said he took a hit from an improvised bomb, in another he said he was kidnapped by Iraqi police and shot in the leg. The government here gave him disability benefits because the injury supposedly prevented him from working.

Read it all.  LOL!  And be sure to see how he was always checking to see if he was being followed—a trained agent? or an avid fan of spy novels?

San Antonio is Catholic Charities territory!

It looks like the accused is one of Catholic Charities clients.  Go here for the resettlement contractors working in Texas.

And, check out the numbers (Arrivals by Destination City by Nationality by FY as of Aug 31, 2013 ).  Texas has resettled a whopping 59,632 refugees since 2001.  San Antonio got 5,009 of those which included 927 Iraqis.

Apology to readers!  Last week we changed our e-mail address and didn’t set it so the mail went to our private e-mail accounts.  Having forgotten that, I then forgot to check the new mail box all week.  If you have sent e-mails and not heard back, I apologize and will get to them over the weekend!