Tag: Somali refugees

Hawaii-bound teen stowaway wanted to get back to Somalia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update May 8:  Kid to be interviewed by police, Mom on the way? here.

Update May 5:  Teen released into care of California family service agency, here.

Update May 1: The latest episode of the Somali stowaway family soap opera, here.

Update April 29:  The story is turning into a soap opera!  CAIR involved too! Click here.  Voice of America story contradicts CAIR, here.

Update April 26:  Mom found in Ethiopia, wants to come to US, here.

Update April 23:  Father: Allah protected son.  Still no word on why father never called authorities about his missing son, here.

Of course you’ve seen the news.  Authorities are stunned that a teenage boy who stowed himself away in the wheel well of a plane that crossed the Pacific Ocean to Maui actually survived the ordeal.

He does not want to go back to California; he wants to go home to Somalia

CNN is now reporting that the boy is from Somalia and wanted to get home to his biological mother in Africa.  It reminds us (rather dramatically) that not all refugees are happy to be in America.

From CNN:

(CNN) — A 15-year-old boy who survived a flight from California to Hawaii by hitching a ride in the plane’s wheel well said he was trying to get to Somalia to see his mother, a law enforcement official told CNN on Tuesday.

The teen, who has not yet been identified, spent more than six hours on the ground before the Maui-bound jet took off, another government official says.

The boy jumped an airport fence in San Jose, California, shortly after 1 a.m. on Sunday, hours before Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 took off at 7:55 a.m., the official said.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, didn’t know when the teen climbed into the wheel well, but said the plane already was at the airport at 1 a.m.

Investigators say they don’t think the teen knew where the plane was heading and just went to the nearest aircraft.

There are a bunch of reports on the case, thanks to ‘pungentpeppers’ for sending them.

The general consensus of the stories is that the teen was unhappy living under crowded conditions in a house with his biological father, a stepmother and a huge batch of siblings.  He had also recently been in some trouble in school.   The reports vary on how long he has been in the US.

Here are a few:  UK Daily Mail,  NBC Bay Area, and NBC News.   ***Update***  More stories:  Sky News, ABC San Francisco, and more from CNN.

Why not cut the kid a break and have the humanitarians at the State Department find his biological mother and send him home to Somalia?

US State Department should provide airfare to unhappy refugees!

Which reminds me of a reform that is critically needed—any refugee who comes to America, is unhappy and wishes to return to his or her home country or to a camp should be given airfare to go home.  We don’t hear of the cases often (they are hushed up!), but some unhappy refugees do scrape together the needed airfare and do return to Africa or the Middle East.  We have heard from Iraqis from time to time looking to go back to Iraq.

Maybe take the airfare funds from the resettlement contractor’s cash.

If Sayyid Qutb could see Greeley now!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that one of the founders of Al-Qaeda spent six months in Greeley, CO in the late 1940’s early 50’s and his view of decadent Americans gyrating with men and women’s bodies touching at a protestant church dance inspired his hatred for America and his subsequent work in designing a  manifesto of sorts which became the seminal work and inspiration behind militant Islam which to this day is terrorizing the world?

Here is a thoroughly informative article by Daniel Brogan which gives us the background.

Fifty-four years ago [now 65 years ago–ed], an Egyptian scholar arrived at the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley. He stayed for six months, sat in on a few classes, and did his best to sample day-to-day life in post-war America. When he left, he was quickly forgotten by the tiny community.

But Sayyid Qutb didn’t forget Greeley.

Time passed and the world changed. Colorado State College became the University of Northern Colorado and Greeley grew like the rest of the state. Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) returned to Egypt, where he became the foremost Islamic thinker of his time.

His articles and books were scholarly but passionate examinations of history, politics, and religion. He immersed himself in the Koran, compared it to the world around him, and came to a grave conclusion. Though the modern, liberal societies of the West preached freedom of religion, in truth, they undermined it. Religion and modernity, he concluded, could not coexist.

Qutb saw salvation in Islam, a religion that he believed offered true freedom. But for Islam to survive, a jihad would have to be fought to rid society of the West’s secular ways. Qutb envisioned an Islamic society ruled by Islamic law.

This was subversive stuff, even in the Middle East, and it wasn’t long before Qutb was thrown into prison, where he would stay for more than 10 years. Not surprisingly, prison only hardened his views. Qutb rewrote many of his earlier books and produced new ones at an astonishing pace, including a 30-volume masterwork entitled In the Shade of the Qur’an.

And through it all – right up until the day in 1966 when he was executed – Qutb remembered Greeley. What he had seen in those few months stayed with him through the decades and filled him with fear, disgust, and contempt. What he saw in Greeley made him hate America.

The story doesn’t end on the Egyptian gallows. In death, Qutb’s work became even more influential. Milestones, his best-known book, has been published in nearly 2,000 editions, and though many of his books have been banned in Egypt and other moderate Arab states, millions continue to illicitly circulate throughout the Middle East and over the Internet.

His writings have become both the inspiration and the blueprint for the fundamentalist jihad that now engulfs the world. Qutb’s work is to militant Islam what Das Kapital was to communism or Mein Kampf was to the Nazis. In American terms, he is Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, all rolled into one. His disciples include Anwar Sadat’s assassins, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up several New York landmarks. They include militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And they include a Saudi militant named Osama bin Laden.

Read it all—it is fascinating!  And, I doubt many Greeley residents or students at the University of Northern Colorado have a clue about the role their quiet American town played in world history.

Asad Abdi, the founder and co-executive director of the Global Refugee Center, instructs refugee role-playing.

Skip to April 2014 and we have Somali Muslim refugees instructing refugee role-playing. A propaganda stunt?

Greeley, CO became a US State Department “preferred” resettlement site a few years ago when Somali refugees were needed as laborers at local meatpacking plants.

We have an extensive archive on the controversy that erupted over demands regarding prayer times in the workplace, here (Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy) which is one way Muslims have begun to successfully change America (Al-Hijra!).  Qutb would be proud!

Last week, the Global Refugee Center, which was born out of the 2008 protests by Somali refugees in Greeley, participated in this propaganda stunt to continue to soften-up (welcoming!) Greeley for more refugees that are on the way.

From the Greeley Tribune (Hat tip: Joanne):

Nearly 40 people from around Weld County experienced the loss of family, limbs and property on Tuesday morning.

The experience was part of “A Walk in Their Shoes,” a refugee experience simulation hosted by United Way of Weld County at the Greeley-Evans School District 6 administrative building.

Qutb would be so pleased.  Changing America one refugee, one city, one state at a time!

I’m wondering, do they have a statue of Sayyid Qutb at the University of Northern Colorado?  Not yet?

 

Another US media propaganda campaign: no more detention for asylum seekers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

While Australia and New Zealand increase the number of detainees—migrants who have arrived illegally on their shores and asked for asylum, in the US the Open Borders lobbyists, including federal refugee contractors at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, if it were up to them, want no one detained.

Is there (more) money in it for the contractors? That is what I want to know!

Keegan Hamilton (a freelance reporter from NYC who writes for the Village Voice) has picked the wrong poster boy for his detention sob story published at the Houston Press!

Reporter Keegan Hamilton really lays it on thick in this propaganda piece.

Hussein Mohamed, the Somali star of the story, had a legal pathway to America (see yesterday’s post, 3,708 Somalis came to the US legally in the first six months of this fiscal year).  He was living safely in Kenya (not Somalia) when he launched his trek to America.  And, it strains credulity that he had a life savings large enough to pay traffickers the cash needed for his half way around the world travels to the Mexican border.

From the  Houston Press  ‘For Many Refugees, the Journey to America Ends in a Cold Jail Cell’ (wahhhhhh!):

Hussein Mohamed took a hard road to America. Born into a minority clan in a nation rife with ethnic conflict, the boyish 24-year-old with gangly limbs and intense brown eyes describes fleeing his village in Somalia in 2012 after gunmen threatened to kill him. Mohamed says he was forced to quit his jobs as an English teacher and taxi driver and escape to neighboring ­Kenya. After making his way to South Africa, he forked over his life savings to human smugglers, who shipped him across the Atlantic to Brazil and guided him north through the jungles of South and Central America into Mexico.  [I bet if you gave this one paragraph to the average American and asked if he should be detained while his asylum claim is adjudicated, 90% of those asked would say ‘incarcerate him.’—ed]

When he finally arrived at a border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, this past summer, Mohamed thought he’d safely reached the end of a harrowing ten-month journey. He had no inkling of the ordeal awaiting him on the other side of the Rio Grande.

Mohamed approached a U.S. Border Patrol agent and recounted his story. He explained that he wanted to seek asylum, a classification of refugee status granted to people who arrive in the United States having fled persecution in their homeland. He was immediately handcuffed and placed in immigration detention: a cold, cramped cell in a privately owned and operated prison facility. Soon after, along with hundreds of other detainees, he was herded onto a cargo plane and transferred without explanation to a jail in Newark, New Jersey.   [Newark—eeek!—ed]

Then we are told about his dreams of a job and a family in California—blah! blah! blah!

Instead, he will likely be deported, shipped back to the war-torn country on the Horn of Africa he worked so hard to escape. Mohamed’s request for asylum was denied because he lacks a passport or other documents to confirm his identity. [He could be al-Shabaab—ed] He has filed an appeal, and his detention ticks on indefinitely.  [He is safe and is fed, right!—ed]

There are no statutory limits to the amount of time a non-citizen like Mohamed may be held in immigration detention. When the process goes smoothly, asylum seekers tend to be released in a matter of weeks. Many end up imprisoned for much longer.  [Obviously for a reason!—ed]

So how many ‘poor souls’ like Mohamed are in detention?  A measly 6,000 (in the last three years) out of the tens of thousands who arrive each year asking for asylum.

Approximately 6,000 survivors of torture — exiles from Iran, Myanmar, Syria and other nations with brutal regimes — were detained in immigration jails while seeking asylum over the past three years, according to a 2013 report by the Center for Victims of Torture.

Now, are you ready for it!  Below is the most revealing paragraph in this whole pathetic propaganda story!    The Lutherans have a contract to get asylum seekers out of detention and house them in your neighborhoods.

The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIARS oops! LIRS) is a federal refugee contractor (96% of their income comes from you!) and they seem now to have parlayed that role into one where they are the guardians of people like Hussein Mohamed in several US cities.   Recently they lobbied the administration for a relaxation of detention for illegal aliens, are they looking for future ‘clients’ for their ‘services’?

Thirty two detainees have been released into the care of LIRS (and signed up  for welfare) in the last 20 days in the trial project! They say they aren’t being paid yet for this effort (although remember 96% of their funds already comes from taxpayers, did Keegan know that? Did he ask how they would pay for this pilot project?), they want to convince Congress that this is what should be done—halfway houses you might call them—for thousands eventually.  LOL! Like any good business they are expanding their client base!

Though the political climate looks bleak for advocates of asylum reform, an ongoing pilot project offers a glimmer of hope. The project allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at facilities in New York City, Newark, San Antonio, Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul to release select detainees seeking asylum into a program coordinated by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. As of March 31, the program has helped secure temporary housing and social services for 32 people, including survivors of torture, victims of domestic abuse and LGBT individuals, all of whom would otherwise have remained jailed indefinitely.

Read it all, Keegan does eventually discuss the frauds in the asylum racket, but having chosen Hussein Mohamed (if that is his name because he came with no papers), he obviously thinks Mohamed (with the gangly limbs and intense brown eyes) can’t possibly be a fraud.

 

Columbus, OH: Somali sentenced in ‘No Child Left Behind’ scam

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Apparently this is one of several cases of this particular scam being investigated in Columbus, Ohio because we posted on another one, here, back in February.

From the Norwalk Reflector (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’).  Emphasis is mine:

A Somali man who ran a scam tutoring company for needy Franklin County students was sentenced to 13 months in prison Thursday on federal charges of falsifying invoices and stealing students’ identities.

Ashkir Ali, 46, of Balsam Lake Drive on the East Side, pleaded guilty in November to the charges. He faced as many as seven years in prison.

Ashkir Ali could be deported, and he might actually do Somalia more good than he does the US. But, don’t hold your breath!

“I’m not coming back here,” Ali told U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

Sargus ordered Ali to pay $115,916 in restitution and to serve 13 months in a federal prison and five months in a half-way house. He said a mandatory two-year prison sentence for identity theft was reduced because of Ali’s “substantial assistance” in investigating tutoring fraud.

Ali was indicted more than a year ago after a two-year investigation of his company, WAISS Network Technologies, by the Ohio auditor’s office.

The probe revealed that WAISS made $100,000 from Columbus and $20,000 from South-Western city schools as part of the federal “supplemental educational services” tutoring program, mandated by the No Child Left Behind law.

The other day I mentioned that there is beginning to be some reporting by the mainstream media about the refugee program in negative news about refugees.  A few years ago there would not have been a line like the next one in a crime report, while fluffy puffy feel-good stories would always mention the ‘r’ word.

Ali came to the United States in 1997 as a political refugee and is a permanent U.S. resident, Sargus said. He could be deported to Somalia after his prison term because he has been convicted of an aggravated felony, according to his plea agreement.

He won’t be deported, not the way things are going now with ICE (see Senator Sessions).

By the way, Columbus is right behind Minneapolis with its rapidly expanding Somali population.

Kenya orders all Somalis to return to refugee camps immediately…

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..expects “human rights” groups (like Human Rights Watch) to wail and moan!

Kenyan Interior Minister Joseph ole Lenku: All Somalis must return to camps! http://news.yahoo.com/photos/kenyas-interior-minister-lenku-speaks-during-news-conference-photo-192315831.html

The latest demand from the Kenyan government comes in the wake of an attack by Somalis in Mombasa which killed six Christian worshipers on Sunday (Bibles lying in pools of blood).

From Mareeg:

Kenya has ordered all Somali refugees living in urban areas to return to their camps in a bid to end attacks by armed groups carried out in retaliation for Kenya’s intervention in neighbouring Somalia.

Kenyans were asked to report any refugees or illegal immigrants outside the overcrowded camps – Dadaab in the east and Kakuma in the northwest – to the police, according to the AFP news agency.

All refugees residing outside the designated refugee camps of Kakuma and Dadaab are hereby directed to return to their respective camps with immediate effect.

Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku:

“Any refugee found flouting this directive will be dealt with in accordance with the law,” Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku said in a statement.

Sunday’s attack, in the Likoni district near Mombasa, came amid heightened warnings of a threat of violence, especially from the Somali al-Shabab armed group, in Kenya despite boosted security in major cities.

Lenku issued the order citing ”emergency security challenges” in Kenyan towns, but the move is likely to be criticised by rights groups which have discouraged similar actions in the past.

Refugee registration centers to be closed as well.

Lenku also said all refugee registration centres in Nairobi, Mombasa, Isiolo to the north and Nakuru in the northwest would be closed. He urged Kenyans to report refugees or illegal immigrants found outside the camps.

Al-Shabaab (aka al-Shabab) strikes again:

The Somali group al-Shabab and its sympathisers have carried out several attacks in Kenya, including at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi last year in which at least 67 people were killed.

On Sunday, gunmen killed six worshippers in a church near the coastal city of Mombasa. Last week, police said they had arrested two men found to have two large bombs in a car which they intended to use in Mombasa.

At least one African country is trying to save itself and stand up to the bullies (both Somali bullies and “human rights” bullies).