Kevin Dinnin (lower left), CEO of probably the largest federal contractor resettling the Central American teens to your towns at the Dallas meeting with Obama and Perry.
Update July 21st: Judy points us to Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker picking up the story about “faith-based” contractors making out like bandits on the backs of taxpayers. What a relief to know that more and more Americans are getting the message.
Readers, please read this incredibly thorough post by ‘sundance’ at The Last Refuge about Obama’s meeting in Dallas with “faith-based” groups. Especially learn more about Kevin Dinnin (we told you about himhere and here), CEO of Baptist Children and Family Services. Hat tip: Judy. LOL! I think we are on the same track (see my post just a few minutes ago, here).
And, then be sure to see NumbersUSA’s fantastic interactive map on where “the children” are being sent. If you learn of a new grant and new destination for the ‘unaccompanied minors’ be sure to tell Numbers!
See all of our posts, extending back several years, on the ‘unaccompanied minors’ invasion of America and the resettlement contractors getting their piece of the pie. I admit that when I heard the Office of Refugee Resettlement representative talking about the coming “children’s” migration in June 2013 at a meeting in Pennsylvania, here, I had no idea it was going to be this big (but I think they knew!).
Also, I think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops may have fueled the fire (that was already smoldering) when they visited Central America in 2013, here. Other than on issues of marriage and abortion, the Bishops are as far Left as Obama!
Decades ago ‘great minds’ in the leadership of the hard Left (ensconced in private foundations) kicked off their “greening of the churches” propaganda campaign. It’s a long story, but I saw it up close and personal. The concept was that the way to reach Americans and change their minds, bringing them around to the Leftist view of the world on the environment (social issues too!), was to reach them in their churches. Of course, good people, church-going Americans, would be concerned about saving the Earth—right!
I expect at the same time they also began infiltrating the churches and synagogues with the concept of a borderless world to save the poor and downtrodden. What Christian or Jew wouldn’t be moved by the idea of helping the poor?
Unfortunately, they (Communists, Socialists, Leftwingers, whatever you want to call them) have now gone a step further, past the point of simple education and propaganda, and have figured out how to fund their Leftist political worldview with your tax dollars through your own churches and religious institutions—supposedly to save the CHILDREN!
Additionally, some naive and unprincipled Republicans don’t even see a problem with giving your money to their “cause.” In fact, George Bush lit the fire on the run on the US Treasury with his 2001 Faith-based neighborhood initiative.
Your money goes to “community organizers!” Remember ACORN! This is the same as funding ACORN whose job it was/is to get the “poor” signed up for every welfare program they can find and at the same time register them to vote! The only difference is that the “refugee” contractors work with immigrants but do the exact same thing!
The “Religious” federal contractors!
We have written non-stop at RRW for years about the “religious Left” represented by the major federal refugee resettlement contractors. We try to name them as often as we can! Here are all the contractors (3 are secular, so we will leave them out for now, but know that they too are getting big bucks for ‘the children.’)
The Presbyterianshave a statement, here, in support of the border invasion and advising church members what to do. Methodists in Baltimore got a cool $2.4 million here to house ‘unaccompanied minors.’
And then there is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, here, which wants money, money, money, and any critics of robbing the Treasury investigated by the Southern Poverty Law Center!
Action Alert!
It is impossible for me to keep up with all the money the contractors are getting from the US Treasury and it is even more difficult to track all of the money going to subcontractors and individual churches, so I recommend that you look carefully at what your own church is up to in helping destroy American sovereignty and our way of life and spread the word in your own faith community!
Editors note: From time to time we post good comments from our readers. This is another excellent piece by reader ‘pungentpeppers’ with an entirely new and problematic angle on the ‘unaccompanied minors’ crisis that few are aware of! See our category “comments worth noting” for more reader commentary. Our extensive coverage of the ‘unaccompanied minors’ border surge is here.
Certain members of Congress want a law requiring taxpayer-funded legal representation for underage Central American migrants. I’ll ignore for now that there are not enough immigration attorneys, or room in our courts, to handle tens of thousands of long, drawn-out, and often dubious, cases. Instead, let’s focus on the big interpretation wall we’re going to hit because, as usual, nobody remembers the Mayans!
Attempting to learn English, 15-year-old Hugo speaks Q’anjob’al an indigenous Mayan language. http://wvpublic.org/post/language-barriers-pose-challenges-mayan-migrant-children
Not everybody in Central America speaks Spanish. This fact is slowly dawning on our politicians. San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee in an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian said: “I’m trying to wrap my arms around the fact that many of these kids don’t speak Spanish. They speak Mayan and different languages.”
Mayan is not one language but a native language family that includes many mutually unintelligible tongues. About 40 percent of Guatemalans are Mayan, and they speak around two dozen native languages, including M’am, Q’anjob’al, K’itche and Ixil.
Although young people who arrive here could learn basic English, if such a law were enacted, they would still need help to communicate with their lawyers and the courts. They would need legal interpreters. Here’s where it gets messy.For the Guatemalan Mayan language called “Ixil”, there is ONE legal interpreter in the whole country! Her name is Sheba Velasco and she’s been very busy of late. Hers is a mentally-stressful job. People expect her to help them stay in the U.S., but there’s nothing she can do legally for them except interpret the language. There’s so much work, she told NPR, “I can’t do all of it. It’s hard.”
Sheba Velasco has an important message about the unaccompanied minors currently flooding the country. She doesn’t agree with parents sending their children on the dangerous journeys, she told CBC Canada. For starters, their safety is at risk, but second, she’d prefer they stay in Guatemala where they can practice their cultural traditions and language. She knows many families are poor and struggle but Velasco said coming to America is not necessarily how to get a better life.
“What I would like to share with them is, you can make it where you are,” she said.
She feels badly that families fall for the lies they are told by smugglers. The coyotes, as they’re called, show photos of the U.S. around her village, and tell young people how easy it is to make money there. Parents essentially sign their houses over to the banks to get money to pay the smugglers. Their children get caught at the border, are sent home and everything is lost, Velasco explained. In the worst-case scenario, their children don’t even make it back.
“I would not send my children,” she said. “Their life is more important to me.”
The situation of these rural Mayan young people belies the current media gospel that everyone from Central America is fleeing from gangs. They don’t live in cities and they don’t speak Spanish – they can’t even communicate with gangs! As economic migrants, under our laws, there’s no chance they will obtain legal asylum in our country. We should not foolhardily rush into shackling ourselves into providing legal representation, when there are not enough interpreters and their chances of winning such cases are practically nil.
I can’t take it! We are paying for their public relations campaign! 97% of their funding comes from taxpayers while they pretend that what they do is out of the goodness of their Christian hearts!
The nerve of these people sending out press releases with all this garbage about how much they love the migrants without mentioning that they are BEING PAID FOR THEIR POLITICAL ACTIVISM ON BEHALF OF ILLEGAL ALIENS AND REFUGEES, and how they are working with the government. THEY ARE WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT AND THAT MEANS YOU AS TAXPAYERS!
I would love just once for them to admit that they are federal contractors*** in one of these deceptive PR pieces that are gobbled up by gullible (or worse, complicit) media outlets. And, by the way, where the hell is the ACLU?
LIRS CEO Hartke: “God is calling” (and God pays well!).
BALTIMORE, July 18, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — As the humanitarian crisisof unaccompanied migrant children and families fleeing Central America and crossing the border into the U.S. continues, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is working closely with government leaders, faith-based organizations and community partners to scale up its support and response efforts. “These children and families are leaving perilous circumstances in their home countries. They deserve safety, due process, and compassion,” says Linda Hartke, President and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
While the groundswell of love and support has largely been omitted from the continuing immigration debate, it has been deeply felt and noticed by faith-based and immigrant rights organizations across America in the form of people offering housing, wanting to deliver material goods, praying and advocating on behalf of children and families.
“The outpouring of support from Americans for the children and families at the center of the refugee crisis on our southern bordercontinues to increase,” says Hartke. “In the past several months as the crisis has worsened, we have seen a surge in the number of calls from people who are volunteering to become foster parents to children in need. Many have told us that they ‘feel like God is calling’ them to take care of these children.”
Network of “heroic service partners” are all PAID subcontractors!
“We feel a special responsibility towards children,” adds Hartke. “They should be kept safe and be with a loving family. Our network of heroic service partners all across the country support children and new foster families with excellence and compassion, but more foster families are urgently needed.”
They are bragging about how many (hundreds!) of calls they receive from loving people, called by God, wishing to sponsor the ‘unaccompanied alien teens,’ so then why send out this new appeal?
See their “heroic service partners” (aka federal subcontractors) here. And, take a look at their posh headquarters building at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor while you are there!
LIRS and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops had been the largest contractors taking care of the illegal alien children, but have since been eclipsed by this Baptist gang out of Texas. It is dog-eat-dog out there in the world of “Christian” federal contractor competition! And the new Baptist big dogs seem to be getting more than their fair share of the chow.
If you want to let LIRS (really LIARS) know how you feel, especially if you are of the Lutheran faith, about the “refugee” crisis at the border, this is their lobbyist/PR persons contact info:
They had a total revenue of $41,757,518 and $40,417,752 came from government grants (you!).
97% of their funds comes from government.
Let’ talk about salaries for these quasi-government agencies (aka religious charities)!
They have 5 employees in the 6-figure salary range including CEO Hartke who made $214,237 in salary and benefits that year for her Godly good works. And, for the record, Hartke is not the highest paid of the head-honchos of the federal contractors.***
Hartke makes more per year than a Member of Congress and about the same as a Supreme Court Justice, but no one can scrutinize their budget because they are supposed to be a private non-profit!
I guess these Lutherans missed the message about Caesar’s money!
I apologize to long-time readers who know all this, but we are getting so many new readers every day who have never heard this before that it bears repeating.
See all of our coverage of ‘unaccompanied minors’ invading America here. And be sure to see one major publication that has the guts to reporton the massive amount of taxpayer dollars flowing to phony non-profits.
What about America’s needy, elderly, and disabled people?
Editors note: That is the question I hear all the time at the local level!
For some reason that I can’t explain, this post continues to be our top post—Tennesseans urging US Senators to block possible border surge to Tennessee—every day since it was published a week ago today. On July 16th we reported on an attackby Progressive Open Borders activists on the Tennessee citizens (and RRW) calling those who are concerned about Tennessee’s own needy people their favorite pejorative—“nativists.”
A Tennessee citizen responds (emphasis is mine):
Elder refugees on a Catholic Charities field trip to a tourist site, an historic farm. CC of TN is worried about losing government funding for such projects.
It’s exactly what you expect out of these groups. Just as soon as you try to have a rational dialogue about fiscal impact, funding priorities and program sustainability, they resort to name-calling.
Despite their caterwauling of anti-this and anti-that, the truth is that the conflict in Tennessee started with simple questions of “what is the state cost for the voluntary federal refugee resettlement program?” and “what if those state dollars were used to pay for services that Tennessee’s disabled citizens are still waiting for?”
The disabled are the more than 7,000 Tennesseans with intellectual disabilities (what used to be known as mental retardation) who are unable to care for themselves.
The federal government has said repeatedly that it has deliberately shifted the costs of the voluntary resettlement program to the states and a 2012 GAO report disclosed that the federal resettlement contractors get paid for each individual person they bring to a state, so they have a built-in incentive to increase those numbers.
Catholic Charities of TN said in their resettlement proposal that TN schools provide “free” English Language Learner services even though in 2012 TN’s state and local governments spent a combined $70 million for English Language Learner services in the public schools.
In 2008 Tennessee opted out of the voluntary federal program. Now the resettlement program is run by a federal contractor who in 2011 said they were going to expand the program in TN – without any input from the state of course. This has resulted in more people, more money for the contractors and higher enrollment in the state’s Medicaid program.
The state passed a bill that simply codified the federal code provisions which require the refugee contractors to coordinate with the state and give advance notice when refugees are due to arrive.
The idea for a local moratorium on resettlement when capacity becomes an issue, came from a federal hearing, and Tennessee’s State Refugee Coordinator (federal contractor) running the program agreed that was okay.
Federal contractor data showed that of the about 4,500 people they brought to Tennessee over a three year period, Medicaid (TennCare) enrollment in this group doubled during that time. During this same period at least one-third of their clients were considered “non-employable” because they were either children or 65 and older.
Contractors enroll eligible seniors into SSI which is also funded in part with state dollars.
Way back when the federal government reimbursed states for the state funded portion of SSI, Medicaid and cash welfare. That stopped in 1991.
This information raised more questions about how state dollars were being spent for a voluntary federal program. In the absence of any state law, the federal contractors believed themselves unaccountable to the state.
The bill to address this would have required the contractors to report for example, how many people they enrolled into TennCare and the cash welfare program. The State Refugee Coordinator initially said the contractors couldn’t provide that information. Then they “remembered” that the Cooperative Agreements signed with the federal government require tracking how many people and into which publicly financed programs they are being enrolled.
The State Refugee Coordinator was also asked to report how many of the students they help enroll into public school also receive ELL services. Again they said there was no way to get this information even though the contractors are receiving school impact grants that they use to hire staff that liaison between the schools and the families.
Isn’t it ironic that while complaining about the possibility of ORR diverting refugee resettlement money to help the illegal immigrants crossing the border, the State Refugee Coordinator was quoted saying that the loss of funds would effect the contractor’s “children in schools” program.
In a more recent article we are told that if the funds get cut because of illegal immigration, the elder refugees (who they define as 55 and older), will lose the “special help” they get that includes bingo games, bowling, and field trips to the art museum and pumpkin patch. These are services which the federal contractors say enhance the “quality of life” for their clients.
What about the “quality of life” issues for Tennesseans with intellectual disabilities?Federal refugee resettlement contractors like to claim that the refugee resettlement program is fully funded by the federal government. They really believe that if they say it enough it will be true. Well, it simply isn’t – even the federal government says this isn’t true.
About the photo: It was published at USA Today(from the Tennessean) in a story about how Catholic Charities, which as a ‘Wilson-Fish’ ***agency calls the shots (along with the federal government) for all refugees going to Tennessee, complains that they might lose funding for their elder refugees if too much money is diverted to care for the ‘unaccompanied minors’ —- all part of a public relations campaign to get Congress to shell out a few more billions for the migrant tide to America.
Most sensible Americans are asking—what about our own needy, elderly, and disabled people?
***Is yours a Wilson-Fish state where Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services or other entities run the program with no state government involvement?
