Tag: US State Department

Sec. of State Tillerson attempting to clear huge FOIA backlog at State Department

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The State Department is notorious for either delaying answering ‘Freedom of Information Act’ requests, or never answering them at all.
In fact, although I used FOIA a number of years ago with another federal agency, I never bothered with it on the refugee issue knowing of the State Department’s horrible reputation for stonewalling the public.

tillerson foia
Sec. of State Tillerson orders FOIA backlog cleaned up!  Transparency here we come! (I hope!)

This story at CNN from several days ago, got my attention because a former bigwig in the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration was recently assigned to Tillerson’s admirable project of clearing the backlog of FOIA requests —-Laurence Bartlett (here).
CNN says disgruntled State Dept. employees sent to the FOIA office are hiring lawyers because they feel such work is beneath them.  (The article does not list Bartlett as one of those seeking a legal remedy to what is described as a demotion.)
Frankly, it makes enormous sense to me to place experienced people in that office because how would someone with no history with certain departments at the State Department know where to find the information requested.
Here is CNN’s “exclusive” story from nearly a week ago:

Washington (CNN) A growing number of State Department employees are charging they are being put in career purgatory because of their previous work on policy priorities associated with President Barack Obama and in offices the Trump administration is interested in closing.

The situation has got so serious that several officials tell CNN they have retained attorneys after repeatedly trying unsuccessfully to raise concerns about being assigned to low-level jobs in Foggy Bottom such as answering Freedom of Information Act requests.

The issue has also come to the attention of senior Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has made clearing a backlog of FOIA requests a priority and reassigned staff to what State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert has called “an all-hands on deck” effort to clear the backlog. Significant progress has been made, and the number of outstanding requests — which stood at 22,000 in January 2017 — has been reduced to about 13,000, Tillerson said in November, adding that he hopes the backlog will be cleared by the end of 2018.

The backlog grew over the last several years in part due to numerous requests from journalists and conservative groups, including Judicial Watch and Citizens United, for records relating to Hillary Clinton’s emails. [LOL! Leave it to CNN to blame the backlog on rightwingers!—ed]

bartlett at Heritage
When Lawrence Bartlett was the lead panelist at a Heritage Foundation event last fall, along with other inside the beltway types, I knew Heritage had no clue about what was really happening with refugees in your towns and cities.   https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/09/14/is-the-heritage-foundation-selling-you-out-on-unus-refugee-admissions-policy/

“Those helping with FOIA requests have a range of skills and backgrounds, from interns to deputy assistant secretaries,” Nauert told CNN. “The assignments are temporary — some staffing the office are simply between assignments as they determine their next step.”

But many of those assigned to the “FOIA Surge” effort resemble a band of misfit toys, including several ambassadors returning from overseas and senior career and civil service members who were detailed to other agencies. Others worked in offices created by Obama as policy priorities, which the Trump administration has announced it intends to close.

[….]

Nauert said that employees are being asked to serve in the FOIA office due to need, “without regard to politics.”

“There is a job that needs to be done,” Nauert said. “It may not be a glamorous job, but it’s an important one.”

Lawrence Bartlett, the head of refugee admissions in the State Department’s bureau of Population Refugees and Migration was recently benched and assigned as a “senior adviser” to the FOIA office. His case was first reported by Reuters.

The State Department said Bartlett’s assignment was temporary but has not said whether he would return to the post or whether someone would cover his position in his absence.

Several current and former officials fear the decision to reassign Bartlett, a leading advocate for refugees in the State Department, is part of the Trump administration’s wider effort to limit refugee resettlement in the US.

Much more here.

Mastercard and US State Department leaders in enhancing digital communication for refugees around the world

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is something to watch.  The cynic in me says this is about creating more political pressure from refugees on world governments as the flow of migrants will increase in coming years.
Kind of like those detainees with their digital agitation from inside the camps to keep up political pressure on Australia, see earlier post.
And, it is about Mastercard getting in on the ground level for the redistribution of wealth from the first world to the third world.  Already there are plans to send money directly to refugees (maybe more than plans) and how handy would it be to do it through a credit card.
Forget the humanitarian mumbo-jumbo….

The refugee industry is a big (global) business!

Refugee camps will become digital communities says FinExtra.

Chobani at Davos
Globalist Hamdi Ulukaya, Mr. Chobani Yogurt, is cooking up the redistribution schemes at Davos through his Tent Foundation.     https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/11/18/the-tent-foundation-hires-lutheran-refugee-contractor-to-write-refugee-hiring-guide/

Mastercard and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) today announced the launch of a public-private coalition that will bring together technology, solutions and experience from multiple sectors to transform refugee settlements into digitally-connected communities. This commitment delivers on a vision laid out in research conducted last year by Mastercard to better understand the critical needs of the over seven million refugees living in camps or settlements today.

The coalition, led by Mastercard and USAID’s Power Africa initiative, will launch pilot programs during the first half of 2018 to address some of the biggest barriers to development. For example, mobile phone and internet access is as critical to refugees’ safety and security as food, shelter and water. The organizations will work together to introduce internet and mobile connectivity, access to clean, efficient energy, and digital financial tools for communities in Kenya and Uganda, with plans to scale to other refugee-hosting countries around the world.

In addition to Mastercard and Power Africa, organizations participating in the coalition include: Accenture, Acumen, BRCK, Danish Refugee Council, Energy Peace Partners, Fenix International, GSMA, The Innovation Village, Lutheran World Federation, Mercy Corps, Microsoft, Moving Energy Initiative, NetHope, Norwegian Refugee Council, Off-Grid Electric, Pawame, PowerGen Renewable Energy, SolarKiosk, Tent Foundation, USAID Global Development Lab, U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Vecna Cares Charitable Trusts, and World Vision.

Much more here.
It is brilliant actually. The globalists all get to make money (cheap labor, etc.), destroy national sovereignty around the world, and wear the white hat of humanitarianism while they do it!

Vermont machete attacker was the son of a Somali refugee (chain migration!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is what the Daily Caller has learned from the Dept. of Homeland Security, but I still have questions.
See my previous posts here and here about the violent attack on a Vermont woman at a hotel for the homeless.
 

machete
Photo:  http://www.wcax.com/content/news/Police-respond-to-Shelburne-standoff–468162783.html

 
But, first, in every community where a person commits a crime, all of you should be demanding that your local authorities and local media answer this question:   

What is the immigration status of the alleged perp? 

Citizens have a right to know if a violent “man” like this one is here legally or illegally, and, if legally, through which legal program he slipped in.  As I enter my 11th year of writing about the refugee program, it is getting better and we are learning when the alleged criminal is a refugee, but it still is mostly a guessing game.
Here are a few snips about what reporters at the Daily Caller have learned about Abukar Ibrahim:

A man accused of violently assaulting an elderly volunteer worker with a machete outside a homeless shelter in Vermont earlier this month is the son of a Somali refugee, the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Abukar Ibrahim, a 32-year-old immigrant, assaulted 73-year-old Meals on Wheels volunteer Johanne LaGrange with a machete outside Harbor Place in Burlington, Vt., in early January after vandalizing vehicles and threatening other individuals nearby. Ibrahim “willfully, deliberately and with premeditation, and with intent to kill” assaulted his victim, Shelburne News reported, citing charges detailed in the court records.

He then barricaded himself in a room for hours, reportedly threatening to slit the throats of the responding police officers. Ibrahim, who ultimately surrendered to authorities, has pleaded not guilty to the charge of attempted first-degree murder, which carries a life sentence. A local court judge has ordered that Ibrahim’s sanity be evaluated.

The violent incident in Vermont was widely reported by many different media outlets, but the attacker’s country of origin and immigration status were not included in the initial reports. Working with DHS, TheDCNF was able to obtain this information.

“DHS can confirm that Abukar Ibrahim is a foreign-born naturalized United States citizen who initially entered the United States as the derivative child of a Somali refugee,” a DHS spokesperson told TheDCNF….

The DHS spokesperson goes on to say this is why we need better screening. Mental health screening too we presume!
Continue reading for more details on Ibrahim’s rampage that day and mentions of Ibrahim’s previous run-in with law enforcement.
And, inquiring minds want to know if he shouted Allahu Akbar when he was shouting at police during the stand-off.
Here are my additional questions and comments:
If he came as a “derivative” child then he would have been under 21 (and has been here a minimum of 11 years), so tell me why he still needs a costly court interpreter which we learned in previous reports?

US State Department (2008) closes all family reunification for Somalis!

But more importantly, I want to know if he was among the 20,000-30,000 ‘family reunification’ Somalis who got in to the US when they lied on admission applications for this form of chain migration.
Longtime readers may remember that stunningly in 2008, the US State Department shut down all family reunification for Somalis when they did some random DNA testing and found that literally tens of thousands of Somalis, both here and abroad were lying about their family connections.  The program was subsequently closed for years.
And, I remember very well hearing from an anonymous State Department employee who told me how stunned they were to find the fraud so widespread.
Here is one of many reports at RRW about the family reunification fraud involving Somalis. The program was closed for 4 years and reopened with DNA testing.  In 2010 the Open Borders Left opposed DNA testing.
As far as I know, none of the tens of thousands of liars were rounded up and removed when the fraud was discovered.

Makes me wonder:  Where is the ‘Dad’ or ‘Mom’ who helped the machete attacker get in? Maybe a little DNA testing is now in order!

After all, last November we learned that the Dept. of Justice was planning to deport some other Somali liars, see here.  More cases to follow???

US Refugee admissions plummet even further

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

On the first of January we reported the facts about the extremely low refugee arrival numbers so far in this fiscal year (FY18 began on October 1, 2017) and now Michael Leahy (Breitbart) has a summary of where we stand during the first two weeks of January.
201 is the number for the first two weeks and the fact that it is low is the reason you are seeing so many articles popping up in local papers quoting resettlement agency employees wailing about Trump-the-meany. 
For the umpteenth time, these ‘non-profit’ groups’ federal funding is tied to the number of refugees arriving, so budgets are being wreaked and thus the hissy-fits.
Frankly, if they had raised sufficient private money (in the ways normal charities do), they wouldn’t be so on-the-edge in lean times.
In fact, if they had raised private resources they could keep themselves busy by taking better care of the refugees they previously dropped off in your towns!
But, here is the truth of the matter, they can’t raise enough private money because the general (giving) public isn’t behind what they do!  They need to have their hands in taxpayers’ wallets in order to survive!
Enough of my usual harangue, here is Leahy at Breitbart:

Refugee admissions to the United States fell to a new low during the first two weeks of January.

Between January 1 and January 15, the number of refugees admitted into the country fell to a mere 201, the lowest number admitted during any two week period in more than a decade.

Below is a map of where the 201 went. The numbers are hard to read, but top five ‘welcoming’ states for the first two weeks of January are: Washington, California, New York, Ohio and Minnesota.
 

Screenshot (148)
From Wrapsnet for January 1-15, 2018  http://www.wrapsnet.org/admissions-and-arrivals/

 
Leahy continues….

Seventy-nine percent of these refugees, or 158 out of 201, came from four countries: Ukraine (80), Burma (29), Bhutan (28), and Eritrea (21).

The religious mix of arriving refugees continued the trend seen in the first three months of FY 2018 from September 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017: More Christians and fewer Muslims than under the Obama administration.

Eighty-five percent of these refugees, or 171 out of 201, were Christian, while only four percent, or eight out of 201, were Muslim.

This contrasts dramatically with the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration, FY 2016, when 46 percent of the 84,995 admitted refugees were Muslim and 44 percent were Christian.

[….]

Voluntary agencies (VOLAGS)***, who have been paid more than $1 billion a year by the federal government for more than the past decade to resettle refugees, are beginning to feel the financial pressure caused by the reduced revenue associated with fewer refugee arrivals.

[….]

A number of local resettlement agencies operating under the broader umbrella of the VOLAGs around the country are either shutting down their operations or shrinking them dramatically.

“Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Dubuque [Iowa] is preparing to end its refugee resettlement program after 77 years in operation. The primary reason the program is closing down is because the numbers of refugees are down,” Catholic News Service reported last week.

[….]

In September, President Trump set the ceiling of new refugee admissions for FY 2018 at 45,000.

Based on the current rate of admissions, total FY 2018 numbers are likely to be well under that number. If refugee admissions continue at the same pace as they have for the first three and a half months of FY 2018 for the remaining eight and a half months of the fiscal year, total refugee arrivals for the fiscal year will be slightly less than 19,000.

There is much more here.
***VOLAGs is what the nine federal refugee contractors like to call themselves. I call them government contractors. As long as taxpayers pay them by the head to place refugees in your towns and cities while they, at the same time, are permitted to act like political community organizers and agitators, there can be no reform of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

Acting Asst. Secretary of State for PRM, Simon Henshaw, steps down

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

He says it has nothing to do with the fact that under the Donald Trump Administration the number of refugees being admitted to the US has plummeted. (I checked yesterday and in the first 2 weeks of January only around 200 came in.)
For new readers, the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration is normally a political appointment used by a new President to set a tone in the Department of State reflecting his (or her) political view on the controversial issue.

anne richard-and-unhcr
Anne Richard with then UNHCR Antonio Guterres. Richard is a hard core ideologue who has recently been speaking around the country against Trump and his immigration policies. 

President Obama had two hard core Leftwing Open Borders advocates running the program. The first was Eric Schwartz and many of you know of Anne Richard who was selected after Schwartz moved on.
The job is a political appointment that requires Senate approval (both of Obama’s picks were approved).
However, here is the rub:  Donald Trump has put no one forward for this position thus leaving it in the hands of State Department career professionals. 
Perhaps he has a strategy behind that—-one less battle with Senate Dems, and Rs like Flake and Graham, and maybe it is easier to shrink the program without a leading figurehead.  I don’t know the answer.
Anyway here is the latest news at a pro-more-refugees website.
LOL! My first thought when I saw this was: okay where is Hans and his reporter pal at Reuters?
From Refugees Deeply:
Simon henshaw 2
Henshaw is moving on….

The top U.S. diplomat dealing with refugees has resigned his post. Simon Henshaw became the third senior official dealing with refugees to depart or be reassigned in recent weeks.
The acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) said it was a routine professional departure.

“It very honestly had to do with the fact that I’d felt I’d spent enough time,” Henshaw told Reuters. “I’m used to moving on every two or three years.”

The 33-year public service veteran said his move was not a protest at the Trump administration’s refugee policies, which have seen cuts to financial support and resettlement numbers as well as travel bans.

carol_Oconnell_150_1
Carol O’Connell is moving in:  https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/272122.htm

Henshaw, who has been with PRM since 2013, will hand over to Carol O’Connell, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. On January 9 Lawrence Bartlett, previously the head of the refugee admissions office at the State Department, was reassigned to the office handling Freedom of Information Act requests.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has suspended the entire refugee program for four months, slashed resettlement places and funding for refugee programs and withdrawn the U.S. from the negotiations for a global compact on migration.

Earlier in January, Barbara Strack, chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, under the Department of Homeland Security, said she would retire this month.

The White House is also preparing to slash funding to the U.N. agency supporting Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).  [Yippee!—ed]

See our stories on Bartlett, here and Strack, here. (Hans and reporter pal again!).
I bet the head honchos of the nine US State Department refugee contractors are running as fast as they can to meet O’Connell (if they haven’t done so already).  If past is prologue, she will be their information pipeline (and advocate, they hope).
Here are the nine that are largely funded (involuntarily) by you, the taxpayer: