Rutland, VT mayoral contest focuses on candidates who could best heal rift over refugees

One of the things I came to see in my travels around America last summer is that mayors in many cities with refugees, or about to get refugees, seemed to be quietly (so as not to tip off citizen critics) working behind the scenes for the federal pro-refugee resettlement contractors, and/or the businesses looking for cheap migrant labor. I often referred to those mayors as having been “captured.”

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Mayor Louras, who quietly worked with federal refugee contractor USCRI to begin resettlement of 100 Syrians to Rutland, caused a firestorm of public controversy. Photo: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/08/05/shrinking-small-towns-see-hope-in-refugees

Rutland, VT represents one such city.
It got so heated in Rutland, that the subject of refugees is the key issue that will determine if city voters return Mayor Christopher Louras to his seat at city hall.
From Burlington Free Press (hat tip: Joanne):

MONTPELIER – The mayor of Rutland, seeking his sixth two-year term Tuesday on Town Meeting Day, would like to focus his race against three challengers on his response to the issues facing the city, including drug use and joblessness, but his plan to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the city overshadows everything.

I’ve always wondered, why Syrians? Why not any of the usual refugee ethnic groups that the US State Department brings in. Did someone or some group specifically want Syrian Muslims (almost 99% of the Syrians we admit are Muslims) in Rutland?  The same is happening in Charleston, WV, they want just Syrians. Why?
I digress!  Back to the story…

Louras is being challenged on Town Meeting Day by City Councilor David Allaire, who ran against Louras in the last two elections; Michael Coppinger, the executive director of the Downtown Rutland Partnership, which promotes the community; and resident Kam Johnston, who is also running for the Board of Aldermen, school board and city assessor.

[….]

Both Allaire and Coppinger say a change in leadership is needed to heal a city that has been divided by Louras’ plans to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the community this year, and possibly more in years to come. They say it wasn’t the plan for the refugees, but the way Louras rolled out the program, announcing it last April without having sought input from the public and city officials.

When he announced his candidacy in December, Allaire said the issue was not with the city taking in refugees, but the secrecy of the program .

Continue reading here.  See our Rutland archive here.
One of the many reforms the Trump team must make is to get the secrecy out of the discussions by the US State Department, in collusion with federal refugee contractors, to target certain towns and cities as new resettlement sites.

Germany attempting to root out refugee jihadists, watching 570

The clincher to this story is in the last sentence.  570 “dangerous” refugees are being watched.  Surely they could get rid of them before they commit a terrorist act!
And, how many more are still unknown to them?
Invasion of Europe news….
From Newsline:

German police arrested two migrants from Syria and one from Bosnia on Thursday in Dusseldorf. The arrest was for alleged war crimes in war-torn Syria, including the mass murder of three dozen civilians back in 2013.

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I’m guessing that Mama Merkel is trying to look tough in the lead-up to German elections this year.

Federal prosecutors said that 35-year-old Syrian refugee, Abdalfatah H. A., a suspected member of the Al-Qaida linked Al-Nusra Front is accused of 36 counts of war crimes for executing 36 Syrian government employees in 2013.

Another Syrian refugee, 26-year-old Abdulrahman A. A., also a member of the Al-Nusra Front is accused of handling the funds, vehicles and weapons for one of the combat units of the jihadist group.

[….]

On a separate arrest, the southern state of Bavaria said that authorities have arrested a 33-year-old Bosnian, who was suspected of suppling vehicles to the Sunni militia, Janud al-Sham.

German Federal prosecutors have launched about a dozen investigations on war crimes committed in Syria and Iraq, as well as multiple cases of refugees being suspected of membership to jihadist groups.

Germany’s population of Islamic extremists has risen from 100 individuals in 2013, it had swell to 1,600 in a span of four years. The German security and intelligence agency (BfV) said that they are keeping close tabs on about 570 individuals who they consider as ‘dangerous’ and are capable of orchestrating terror attacks.

See our ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive here, and dozens of posts on Germany are here.

Why are we permanently resettling refugees who say their real wish is to go HOME?

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Is this Muslim family really in any danger? “Syrian refugee Firas al Ahmad, 30, looks out of the window at his father’s house in Irbid, Jordan, the day before he left for the United States.” © UNHCR/Houssam Hariri http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2017/2/58aeff094/move-offers-bittersweet-hope-struggling-syrian-family.html

That is one of the key questions you should all be asking the Trump Administration as they sort through the millions of refugees to find those they will admit to America. (Trump says his Admin. will admit a whopping 50,000 this year!)
Nayla Rush, writing at the Center for Immigration Studies asks, how is the UNHCR picking the “lucky few?”

98.6% of the Syrians entering the US now are Muslims

In the case of the Syrians, in FY15, FY16, and 5 months in to FY17 we admitted a total of 19,826 Syrians to the US. 19,562 are Muslims, mostly Sunnis.  That means that 98.6% were Syrian Muslims (via Wrapsnet). Why so few Christians?
Here is Rush at CIS:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently shared on its website the story of a Syrian refugee family who was resettled from Jordan to Dallas. The 30-year-old mechanic, Firas al Ahmad, his wife Samira and their three children fled to Jordan at the end of 2013 when the fighting intensified near their home. The family struggled there for over three years due to the “lack of legal work opportunities” and welcomed UNHCR’s offer to resettle in the United States. Once their application approved, they sold their furniture and moved out from their apartment to stay with Firas’ dad in the Jordanian city of Irbid.

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The family is filmed there the day before departure. Firas explained on camera: “I’m leaving because of my kids, for their future. I hope they can get a good education, and have a better life than the one we had … The hardest thing is leaving family members behind. All of them but especially my father.” (Firas’s brothers, aunt, and father left Syria with them.)

Samira too was emotional: “Syria is everything. They say, a nation is like a mother. What’s our worth without our mother?” She then burst in tears. Firas reiterated: “Syria is everything, it is everything to me. The minute the war is over I will go back. Even now I wish it would end today, before we leave, so that we could go home.”

In the text, UNHCR underlined the following: “Resettlement programmes in the United States and other developed countries are designed to offer a lifeline to the most vulnerable refugees, including children at risk, survivors of torture and those with medical needs.”(Emphasis added)

How does this apply to Al-Ahmad’s family? As far as we can tell they do not seem to suffer from any specific vulnerability. By their own admission, they fled Syria because the fighting was getting closer; and they accepted the resettlement offer to give a better life to their children, not because they could not stay in Jordan.

As a reminder, the refugee resettlement program was set up to provide “resettlement to a third country in situations where it is impossible for a person to go back home or remain in the host country.” (Emphasis added.) Also, resettlement is one of UNHCR’s “durable solutions” – resettled refugees in the U.S. are required by law to apply for a green card (permanent residence) in the United States one year after arrival. They can apply for U.S. citizenship five years from entry.

But does the Al-Ahmad family want to stay in the U.S.? Do they wish to become American citizens, or is their loyalty first and foremost to Syria? If their true will is to go back home “the minute the war is over,” why resettle them in the U.S. to begin with?

Rush provides more cases, continue reading here.

It is not about humanitarianism!

I can answer the question about why we are permanently placing Syrian refugees (who would prefer to go home) in to your towns and cities—three reasons (have sympathy for these Syrians being used as pawns!):

~The resettlement contractors are paid by the head to drop off refugees who are essentially paying clients and they want to keep their little federally-funded fiefdoms going.

~The Libs want reliable Democrat voters (especially in red states!).

~The UNHCR is working day and night to erase borders and dilute Christian nations with Muslim migrants.

I don’t think the Syrians are going to make good meatpacking workers (cheap laborers), so I won’t list that as a reason in this case (for Somalis, Burmese yes, for Syrians probably not).
If the Trump Administration is at all serious about reforming the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program they would get the UN out of our immigration decisions and stop funding the so-called ‘religious’  (politically liberal) charities doing the resettling.
Of course, this story makes the argument for the Trump “safe zones” concept!

FBI contacting newly arrived Syrian refugees, is the FBI doing this on its own?

I suppose one could argue that this effort to meet Syrian (mostly Muslim) refugees is harmless, but I have to say I think it is politically tone-deaf at the moment.
Is the FBI getting direction from above or are they making this effort completely without direction? Does no one in the FBI leadership see how this would be upsetting, that it adds fuel to a political fire, or is that exactly what they are doing—making the Trump Admin. look heavy-handed?
From NorthJersey.com:

FBI agents have been calling Syrian refugees in New Jersey and asking to meet – alarming advocates who say they fear the visits could be a first step toward surveillance at a time when refugees have been cast as a suspect group.

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“An FBI official said the effort to meet with Syrian refugees in New Jersey was not a Trump administration initiative, but an effort by the Newark division to reach out to the community.”

The FBI’s Newark division has confirmed that calls were made to refugees, but said agents were only trying to “build trust” and “open lines of communication” with the recently arrived immigrants and not for surveillance.

[….]

At least three Syrian refugees received calls last week from an Arabic-speaking agent who requested an in-person meeting, according to advocates who have been helping Syrians adjust to their new lives in the U.S. They were told the meetings were part of a larger outreach effort to check on Syrians and their well-being, the advocates said.

Salim Patel, chairman of the board of the Smile Organization, a Passaic-based nonprofit service group whose clients include many refugees, said the calls were received “with great alarm” because of the political climate, with news of Trump’s immigration ban weighing on people’s minds.

[….]

Mohamed Khairullah, an activist aiding refugees who is also Prospect Park mayor, said he worries that the newcomers, who typically don’t speak English, could be coerced into signing something they don’t understand.

“They’re not aware of their rights, and they’re not aware of the protections provided to them by the law or the Constitution,” he said.

In a Facebook message in Arabic, he encouraged families contacted by the FBI to reach out to a lawyer. At Know Your Rights workshops across the state, staffed by civil rights and legal associations, attorneys are giving the same advice.

More here.
Dumb is all I have to say.

Syrian refugee files federal lawsuit against Trump EO, wants wife and child in America with him

Reminder! Trump can legally lower the ceiling for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program across the board!

Think about this, if this sort of case (challenging the Constitutionality of the Trump EO) prevails, could every legal non-citizen in America file cases with big New York City law firms to bring over every family member?
And, frankly, what I find most troubling about stories like this sob story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is how is it that this MAN left his wife and child behind in a war zone and saved his own skin first! Why does no one in authority ever ask that question!
Big New York City law firm filed the case!
 

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http://www.hsgllp.com/about

 
 

MADISON, Wis. — A Syrian refugee living in Dane County has filed a federal lawsuit alleging President Donald Trump’s executive order halting immigration from seven countries is unconstitutional.

The man filed anonymously Monday to protect his wife and 3-year-old daughter, who are still in Aleppo, from being targeted by military regimes.

He had applied for them to join him in the United States, but his lawsuit filed Monday in Madison says processing was halted Jan. 27 when Trump stopped temporarily stopped immigration from seven predominantly Muslim and indefinitely banned refugees from Syria.

[….]

Attorneys from Holwell Shuster and Goldberg, a New York law firm, are representing the man. More than two dozen cases challenging the executive order have been filed in federal court.

More here.

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Sec. of State Tillerson knows by now what could be done internally!

President Trump can still legally lower the ceiling on all refugee resettlement!

And, in so doing, wipe out these cases!
See our discussion here yesterday.
An important side benefit of placing a complete moratorium on the program now might be to inspire Congress to reform refugee law!

This morning we are at 34,825 refugees admitted this fiscal year—set the cap at 35,000 NOW!

Moratorium would be in effect until September when the President then sets the ceiling for FY18. This is the leverage the White House has to pressure Congress!