This is from two weeks ago, but it just came to my attention. From Heritage Action Sentinel (hat tip: Joanne):
Refugee Memorandum: President Obama recently issued an executive memorandum that will allow for a limited number of children in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to apply for refugee status if they have relatives legally residing in the U.S. This policy is problematic in that it requires officials to justify the refugee status by loosening criteria. Although this proposal may currently be limited in scope, there is concern the administration would then use this justification to offer asylum to thousands of children here illegally, amounting to a massive loophole for administrative amnesty.
The U.S. is already the number one country of resettlement in the world, accepting 66,200 *** refugees in 2013. Our refugee and asylum policy does not need a politically motivated expansion that would trample current law while inviting another surge of illegal crossings. Congress should respond to any new avenue granting executive amnesty with legislation that stops the Obama Administration from continuing to break the law.
The flood of Unaccompanied Alien Children that came across the US southern border this summer is now having an impact on local school systems as school boards and administrators have to figure out how to educate them, some of whom speak rare dialects and have had little formal schooling. All of this is, of course, going to cost local taxpayers and disrupt learning for many American kids.
Someone has to pay to educate the “children.” Last I heard Georgia got 1,709 of them. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/programs/ucs/about
Here in the Gainesville Times, we see that officials are already referring to the illegal aliens as refugees.
They are not refugees,but that is what the Obama Administration and the United Nations (which calls the shots!) wants you to believe.
Indeed, it is my view that the whole invasion mess represents the big push to change the internationally understood definition of what constitutes a ‘refugee’—someone who is escaping persecution for reasons of religion, race or political persuasion.
Once they succeed in redefining refugees (asylum seekers) as people escaping crime, the entire system crashes and anyone in the world can claim asylum in America simply alleging that they fear criminals where they live.
As children from Central America have fled to the U.S. as refugees, some have wound up in Gainesville schools, but officials said they don’t keep track of how many. [Kind of hard to budget then don’t you think!—ed]
“That’s not a question that we ask,” said Laura Herrington, the district’s director of Title III, a federal program that includes English language learning.
Still, Herrington said the students are there even if there isn’t an exact count.
“I know that we have some who speak dialect, and the dialects that they speak are indicative of some countries in Central America,” she said. “We haven’t asked our students to tell us their stories yet.”
The refugees, she said, are educated in the same program as other students who learn English as a foreign language.
Herrington estimated 30 of about 200 high school students learning English are newly arrived from Central America this year. There likely are more in middle and elementary school, but she doesn’t have a number.
7,000 – 8,000? Where is that number coming from when HHS’s own website says a whole heck of a lot more (see graph!)?
According the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, an average of 7,000 to 8,000 children enter the Unaccompanied Alien Children program each year, and 93 percent of them from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. The children often come to the United States to escape violence, abuse or persecution, to seek family members or to find work. They sometimes are brought into the country by human trafficking rings, according to the department.
Obama and the UN—they are REFUGEES
The United Nations has pushed the U.S. to treat children from those three countries as refugees displaced by armed conflict, as drug traffickers and street gangs have made the three-country region one of the world’s most violent.
Last month, the Obama administration began a program to give refugee status to some children from those countries in response to the influx of unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally. Under the program, legal immigrants from those countries can request that children related to them be resettled in the U.S. as refugees. [And, thus be eligible for all the welfare goodies official refugees receive!—ed]
I love it! Crony Christianity! It’s like crony capitalism when government and big business work hand in hand (benefiting each other) to the detriment of those paying the bills—you—but this time it’s religious charities feeding on the taxpayer teat while directing government policy.
And, I am overjoyed to see that so many people, writers like Lee Cary, are starting to understand the depth of this evil perpetrated on the American citizen by ‘religious’ behemoths in the name of Christian charity.
Kevin Appleby, USCCB lobbyist and author of the 2013 report predicting the invasion from Central America. Did the Bishops “mission” help make it happen?
Lee Cary, a retired United Methodist Pastor, has coined the perfect phrase to describe what we have been talking about for years. Here is his description at American Thinker this morning (hat tip: Judy). Emphasis below is mine:
Crony Christianity challenges the separation of Church and State.
Crony Christianity is the collaborative arrangement between government and Christian faith-based organizations whereby government funds Christian organizations to deliver goods and services that advance the political agenda of the government. Any government.
The crisis surrounding the flood of unaccompanied alien children into the U.S. has promoted crony Christianity.
It is a variation of the spider’s web of similar arrangements, spun between businesses and government, that we call crony capitalism.
The Players
The five players in crony Christianity are: (1) the bureaucrats who run ecclesiastically-related organizations; (2) the church laity aligned with the various denominations that underwrite those organizations, in-part or in-full; (3) officials within government agencies that grant money; (4) tax-payers who fund government grants; and (5) the clients who receive aid from the faith-based organizations that operate with government funding.
The Pathway to Crisis
For reasons that remain unclear and widely debated, the Obama Administration has choreographed the influx of tens of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children”(this term typed into TAGGS – Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System – accesses the list of grant recipients) into the U.S. from several Central American countries. [Could the choreographing have been a mutual arrangement between the Bishops and the Obama Administration?—ed]
The federal government began to prepare for the flood of children before the tide arrived, and before the legacy media amped-up its coverage of the story. Both knew what was coming before most of the rest of us did.
Those Christian social service organizations that already had an established funding relationship with the federal government stood near the front of the line to help resettle the children, along with secular organizations already knowledgeable of, and dependent upon, federal grants.
Cary then gives us an extensive (but not complete by any means!) list of grants both secular and religious (religious Leftists!) government cronies received to care for the “children.”
It is worse than Cary thinks!
It would seem that Cary is not aware of the fact that virtually the entire budget of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration program (Appleby’s salary too most likely) is funded by US taxpayers. And, it’s my contention that the Bishops and lobbyist Appleby actually may have started the border stampede in late 2013 with their trip to Central America and subsequent report, here.
Here is Cary on the USCCB:
The Times [NYT] quoted Kevin Appleby, Director of Migration Policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said, “We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country. We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.”
Appleby presumes to speak for the American tax-payers when he refers to “our money” His title suggests that he should only speak for the money contributed by Roman Catholic laity, and the Roman Catholic Bishops.
Appleby is speaking for the American taxpayer whether we like it or not (98% of the USCCB’s budget is federal money, your money!), so he can’t speak for private Catholic donors because there aren’t enough of them paying his salary and footing the bill for the Bishops ‘good works.’
I have a theory too, that since the refugee contractors (the USCCB is the largest) didn’t get amnesty through Congress (S. 744, the Gang of Eight bill would have given them more clients for their federally-funded services) that they needed a new client base and the “children” fit the bill.
They were probably already staffing-up in anticipation of amnesty and thus in need of more of Caesar’s money. When amnesty failed to get through the House they had to find another reason to tap the federal treasury—yup! the “children.”
Read Cary’s entire American Thinker piece by clicking here.
All of our coverage of the ‘Unaccompanied minors’ scam ishere.
While some of the “children” have been housed in federally funded facilities like the Catholic Maryville Academy from which two of the vulnerable youths escaped and went on a carjacking spree, here yesterday, others have been spread around the country in homes of “sponsors” some of whom are also in the country illegally.
Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William Counties are suburbs of Washington DC. http://www.northernva.com/map.html
Now the Washington Postreports that three deluged counties are financially strapped to educate them especially as most don’t speak English and a large number don’t even speak Spanish but tribal dialects instead.
Unfunded mandates?
Officials in three Northern Virginia counties are scrutinizing the costs of educating the nearly 2,000 unaccompanied immigrant children living there with an eye toward recouping expenses from the federal government for keeping the young migrants — who crossed the U.S. border without their parents — in local public schools.
The children, most of whom entered the country in a wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America, have been released to sponsors in various jurisdictions. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement says there are 1,775 such children in the three counties: 1,131 in Fairfax, 417 in Prince William and 227 in Loudoun.
The issue is filled with political tension, as the Obama administration has sought refuge for the immigrant children amid a long-standing debate about how best to secure the U.S. border and how to treat those who cross illegally. There has been special attention to children who enter the country unsupervised as there was an increase this year that has just begun to ebb.
With some of those children landing locally, the boards of supervisors in Fairfax and Loudoun have in recent weeks approved studying the cost of educating the minors. U.S. public school systems generally have a mandate to educate all children in their district regardless of their legal status.
Prince William Supervisor Peter Candland (R-Gainesville) posted an online petition this week asking the federal government to pay the per-pupil cost of educating refugee children who have enrolled in the county’s schools.
The press release from Senators Grassley, Hatch and Coburn just released today reads as follows (hat tip: Rosemary).
WASHINGTON – Senators Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch and Tom Coburn are asking the Government Accountability Office to review policies of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency charged with caring for unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border.
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and others want answers from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Good luck!
The senators questioned the ability of the Office of Refugee and Resettlement (ORR) to accommodate the recent influx and how the office has prepared to deal with another surge which the administration suggests could include up to 145,000 more unaccompanied minors.
“The increase in the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has strained the capacity of ORR and its grantees to provide them with appropriate accommodations and has raised questions about ORR’s management and oversight of the program,” Grassley, Hatch and Coburn wrote.
The senators also raised concerns about the sponsors to whom these unaccompanied minors are being released.
“In addition, concerns have been raised about children who are subsequently released to relatives or other sponsors throughout the country, including how sponsors are screened and monitored while they have custody of the children. The agency is responsible for the well-being of these children, yet there’s question about whether custodians and grantees are adequately being overseen once a child leaves federal custody,” the senators wrote.
Grassley, Hatch and Coburn are Ranking Members of the Judiciary, Finance and Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees respectively.
Below is the text of the Senators’ letter, including questions they would like GAO to investigate.
As long-time readers here know these studies can take months to complete (remember the Lugar study?), and having watched the ORR in action you know they will stall and drag this out for years! So, don’t hold your breath!
The Honorable Gene L. Dodaro
Comptroller General of the United States
U.S. Government Accountability Office
441 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20548
Dear Comptroller General Dodaro:
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, more than 57,000 children under the age of 18 traveling without an adult were apprehended at the United States’ southwest border between October 1, 2013 and June 30, 2014. This was nearly twice the number apprehended during the same 9-month period a year earlier, and since that time, thousands more have entered through the southern border.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 gave the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responsibility for the care and custody of unaccompanied minors without legal immigration status as they await immigration proceedings, and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 expanded HHS’s role in this area. Within HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is responsible for providing shelter and care to these children through cooperative agreements with non-profit organizations that ORR refers to as grantees. Grantees house children in a safe and appropriate environment pending either placement with sponsors in the U.S. or return to their home country.
The increase in the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has strained the capacity of ORR and its grantees to provide them with appropriate accommodations and has raised questions about ORR’s management and oversight of the program. Taxpayer funding has been reprogrammed for the increase in unaccompanied alien minors, and additional funding for fiscal year 2015 has been requested by the administration. Yet, it’s unclear if a strategy has been formulated to deal with the impending surge in the next fiscal year, which the administration suggests could include up to 145,000 more unaccompanied alien minors.
In addition, concerns have been raised about children who are subsequently released to relatives or other sponsors throughout the country, including how sponsors are screened and monitored while they have custody of the children. The agency is responsible for the well-being of these children, yet there’s question about whether custodians and grantees are adequately being overseen once a child leaves federal custody.
In light of these issues, we would like to request that GAO examine the following questions:
(1) What steps has ORR taken to increase its capacity to accommodate unaccompanied alien children, including developing systems to efficiently place children in approved facilities, identifying additional appropriate facilities, and expanding the use of foster care placements?
(2) How is ORR screening potential sponsors for unaccompanied alien children and ensuring that the agreements sponsors enter into with ORR are complied with?
(3) How is ORR overseeing and monitoring the placement and care of unaccompanied alien children? Does ORR collaborate with state childcare licensing entities to determine the safety and well-being of children served from their perspective?
(4) To what extent is ORR collaborating and sharing information with other government entities, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about the whereabouts and well being of children?
(5) What practices and planning mechanisms does ORR have in place to deal with seasonal migration issues, including predicting spikes and patterns, and planning for emergency situations? Does ORR have written plans in place? What bed capacity does ORR feel is adequate to meet the needs of unaccompanied alien minors protected to migrate to the United States in 2015 and 2016?
(6) How does ORR vet and then oversee grantees? What role does cost play in the analysis of applications by grantees? Would there be any advantages or cost savings if ORR used government contracts rather than grants to fund facilities for unaccompanied alien children? How much is ORR paying per unaccompanied alien children in both temporary and permanent shelter and has this amount changed in the past five years? Are grantees abiding by all government requirements? We believe these questions, along with a detailed breakdown of how ORR grantees are spending this money, would be beneficial.
(7) What policies – both written and unwritten – does ORR or its grantees have in place that govern access to facilities that house or care for unaccompanied minors? Are there policies or practices in place that restrict access by the public or by members of Congress, and to what extent are they followed?
(8) To what extent is ORR or its grantees collaborating with communities where children are being placed to ensure that communities can prepare for placements and children have access to appropriate supports?
Thank you for your attention to this request. If you have any additional questions, please contact our staff: Kathy Nuebel (Senator Grassley), Becky Shipp (Senator Hatch) or Dan Lips (Senator Coburn).
Sincerely,
Charles E. Grassley
Ranking Member
Senate Judiciary Committee
Orrin Hatch
Ranking Member
Senate Finance Committee
Tom Coburn
Ranking Member
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee
For new readers, former Senator Richard Lugar asked for (and got) a GAO study on the refugee program a few years ago.
From start to finish the report took two years to complete! It was requested in July 2010 and was published July 2012 and sits on a shelf somewhere.
His big concern then was the impact on communities that were being loaded up with refugees with little or no warning or consultation with Washington. You can review the study here, but I never saw it have any impact (other than some negative press for the program). It never resulted in any Congressional action or reform—no hearings, no review of the law, no nothing.
Meanwhile the “children” are escaping, stealing cars and scaring senior citizens, here.
All of our coverage of ‘unaccompanied minors’ is here.
