Good for Secretary of State Tillerson! My estimation of him has just risen enormously!
He hasn’t fallen for the propaganda campaign that the Muslim Rohingya have no blame and that the Buddhist government of Burma (aka Myanmar) is made up of evil killer Islamophobes.
Secretary of State Tillerson is greeted by famous human rights activist and leader Aung San Suu Kyi. CNN parrots the Rohingya are victims meme here too! http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/15/asia/tillerson-myanmar-rohingya/index.html
Unlike VP Pence who immediately jumped to the international ‘humanitarians’ tune here in September, Tillerson wants more facts!
When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made his first official trip to Myanmar on Wednesday, he did not describe the country’s brutal military crackdown on Rohingya Muslims as ethnic cleansing, as other diplomats have done.
Now read this next paragraph, so typical of the Leftwing media. NO mention of how some atrocities were perpetrated by Rohingya against their Buddhist neighbors!
Security forces have conducted or allowed what critics call systematic rape and murder against the Rohingya minority, leading more than half a million to flee to squalid camps in neighboring Bangladesh since August.
But speaking in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, Tillerson declined to call for sanctions or other censure, saying more investigation is needed.
“If we have credible information that we believe to be very reliable that certain individuals were responsible for certain acts that we find unacceptable,” Tillerson said, “then targeted sanctions on individuals very well may be appropriate.”
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have already documented atrocities against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority country. In September, the United Nations’ top human rights official accused Myanmar of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Whether Tillerson was ill-informed or following administration policy wasn’t clear. [It is almost laughable how they write the ‘news’!—ed]
Obama failed to sufficiently charm Suu Kyi!
This is what really has the Human Rights Industrial Complex (HRIC) steamed. Their hero won’t come to an unqualified defense of the Rohingya:
In Myanmar, human rights groups have been dismayed at the failure of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to speak out on the plight of the Rohingya, especially now that she is state counselor, a position akin to prime minister.
“What people mean is what I say is not interesting enough,” she said of her critics during Tillerson’s visit. “What I say is not meant to be exciting. It’s meant to be accurate, not set people against each other.”
John Sifton, who is following the conflict in Myanmar for Human Rights Watch, said it was “naive” for Tillerson to call for another investigation.
Continue reading herewhere the reporter gives another opportunity for Republican Senators Corker and McCain to badmouth Trump and the changes being made at the US State Department.
You should know that, in my opinion, Trump and Tillerson are making a huge mistake with this staff cut-back by leaving in place career bureaucrats to run the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), the agency within the State Department that hires the contractors that place refugees in your towns.
But, for the moment, I am thrilled that Tillerson has enough sense to not buy the HRIC line that will soon be followed by demands that we admit even more Rohingya to your towns and cities than we have already (nearly 20,000 in the last decade).
See my Rohingya Reports category herewhere for nearly ten years I’ve reported on the build-up of this propaganda campaign—that the Rohingya are the sole victims here.
Do you remember the program the Obama State Department created out of whole cloth in 2014 when it took it upon itself to write refugee law without the Congress?
It was called CAM for short and was supposed to help the minors escaping poverty and gangs in Central America get into the US as refugees so they wouldn’t get hurt sneaking across the border as they had been doing by the tens of thousands.
Obama’s State Department created the program so that the invading “children” wouldn’t get hurt or exploited trying to get to America on the “Beast Train” or on foot.
The program had a couple of major flaws—first is that the kids were hard-pressed to show they were legitimate refugees fearing persecution and secondly, the parent filing the application in the US had to prove they were here legally (oopsy!).
The good news is that CAM has been canned at the Dept. of State as of last night!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department will stop accepting new applications at midnight on Thursday for a program that allowed children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to apply for refugee status in the United States before leaving home.
President Donald Trump’s administration told Congress in September it would phase out the Central American Minors (CAM) program during fiscal year 2018, which began on Oct. 1.
New applications will not be accepted after 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday (0459 GMT on Friday), the State Department said in a statement on Wednesday night.
The CAM program started at the end of 2014 under former President Barack Obama as a response to tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and families from Central America who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum in the United States.
Continue here where Reuters says that 1,500 kids got in out of 13,000 applications (imagine what that must have cost taxpayers to process 13,000 applications!).
For more, search RRW for ‘Unaccompanied minors’ or ‘Unaccompanied alien children.’
“When you put in additional security checks you can basically halt the system.”
Bob Carey
When I say “rumored” in my headline, it is because there are bureaucrat blabbermouths obviously reporting to former Obama Administration officials who are then taking the news to the likes of Reuters, here.
We learn that the bureaucrat(s) can’t speak on the record, but….
We have Bob Carey speaking on the record, former director of Obama’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Not mentioned here is the fact that he was also (and may be again) a senior Vice President of the International Rescue Committee (the revolving door between contractor and government is alive and well!) one of nine major federal resettlement contractors.***
From Dutch citizen(?) Hans Van de Weerd‘s facebook page. He wears two hats. In addition to his job at the IRC, he is Chairman of the DC lobbying arm of the refugee industry that recently joined CAIR in their protest of the Trump Admin. See his bio here: http://www.rcusa.org/staff/
Then we have Hans Van de Weerd weighing in who works for the IRC now.
So bureaucrats blab to Bob and Bob gets Hans to talk to Reuters.
But, frankly Trump is at fault for still not placing his own people in the State Department and DHS thus letting the blabbermouths run free. Here is yet another storyon that subject which I don’t have time to write about today.
Back to Reuters and the latest round of leaks and wailing from the refugee industry (in and out of government) about what could happen this week as the 120-day refugee ‘moratorium’ ends.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Trump’s administration has drafted a plan to pause a program that allows family members join refugees already settled in the United States until they can undergo increased security checks, two sources with knowledge of the situation told Reuters.
The measure is one of several being considered for refugees, the sources said.
The administration also may expand the use of intensive security checks by multiple federal agencies, called “security advisory opinions” (SAO) to apply to women from countries designated as high-risk by the U.S. government. Currently there are usually only mandatory SAOs, as they are called, for men from those countries, the sources said.
The administration is also considering expanding the categories of refugees required to be fingerprinted, the sources said.
The proposals, if implemented, could significantly slow down refugee admissionsand leave refugees who thought they were headed to the United States in perilous situations abroad, say refugee advocates and former officials.
[….]
A 120-day temporary ban on refugees, put in place to study current procedures, expires on Oct. 24.
The sources, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the plans before they are announced, said the new measures could be announced at the end of the temporary ban.
[….]
“Reports on the type of vetting measures being considered for our refugee resettlement program are disturbing,” said Hans Van de Weerd, the Vice President of U.S. Programs at the International Rescue Committee. [I previously did some research on ol’ Hans here and he earlier was reporting he was a Dutch citizen. Seems that little nugget is missing from his bio now.—-ed]
[….]
“When you put in additional security checks you can basically halt the system,” said Robert Carey, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under former President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
“Every check is only good for a finite period of time and they expire and the whole process has to start all over again,” he said, adding that the level of scrutiny is higher for refugees than most any other visa applicant to the United States.
If every one of the thousands of you who read this post took 2 minutes to write to the White House and tell the President to tighten security screening for all refugees, you might actually succeed in hitting a nerve at the White House.
Update! I did not find that link above to work! Try here.
***For new readers, these are the nine federal refugee contractors that monopolize all refugee resettlement in the US. Go hereand see my latest financial report on all of them. The more refugees admitted to the US, the more funding they get from you!
The IRC is the largest financially (the Catholic Bishops place the largest number of refugees in your towns) and pays out some whopping big salaries. David Miliband, CEO of the IRC, is not a US citizen and he is raking in annually just short of $600,000 partially supplied by you—US taxpayers! Doing well by doing good! And, changing America to boot!
The first story I read this morning has got my blood boiling! Not because it is one more blast at Trump, or at Stephen Miller (he can take care of himself).
And, although I have now learned more about the secretive process thanks to the leakers (the blabbermouths!), what has me steamed is that the Trump Administration clearly still has many people throughout government (the State Department!) and in the White House who are not loyal to him and are so willing to dish the dirt on his Presidency.
Whose fault is that?
It is Trump’s fault for not placing enough of his own people in leadership slots—people who would be loyal and keep the bureacrats in check.
Was he even paying attention?
Indeed the US Refugee Admissions Program in the State Department is still being run by career bureaucrats who saw Obama’s fantasy 110,000 refugee ceiling last year as the holy grail!
For new readers, know that I have maintained that there is nothing heroic about this 45,000 (split the baby) ceiling.
Trump had the perfect opportunity to suspend the program entirely, to put off setting the ceiling. He could have done it for 6 months and told Congress to investigate the entire program with an eye to reforming it or setting up an entirely new system to admit only the most desperate people. (There is likely zero chance any reform will be initiated in election year 2018!)
So, as you read through New Yorker reporter Jonathan Blitzer‘s story, meant to paint Stephen Miller as the boogeyman (written thanks to so many blabbermouths), know that I believe Trump flubbed this one and took an easy way out.
(You should read the whole thing. I couldn’t snip it all! So, I picked out what interested me most and the emphasis below is mine.)
Late last month, the White House announced that next year’s cap would be forty-five thousand, a record low. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Vice-President, and the Office of Management and Budget had wanted the number to be higher.
But they had all been forced to compete with one influential White House official: Stephen Miller, the thirty-two-year-old former aide to Jeff Sessions who has become Trump’s top immigration adviser.
I’m still laughing! They are all angry because Miller knows how the “sausage is made.”
I recently spoke to four Administration officials [come on chickens, who are you? put your names out there!—ed] involved in the refugee-cap process to try to understand how Miller was able to outmaneuver an array of powerful factions in the federal bureaucracy. Each official described Miller as a savvy operator who understands how to insert himself into the policy-creation process. They also described him as the beneficiary of a dysfunctional and understaffed Administration. Miller hadn’t completely gotten his way on the refugee cap, they told me; he wanted it to be lower. The forty-five-thousand figure—which past Administrations would have considered impractically low—amounted to a kind of compromise.
Miller, who has gone from the political fringe to the White House on the strength of his reputation as an anti-immigration ideas man, joined the Trump campaign early.
So the process begins in June. We will remember that for next year!
Blitzer continues…
The chain of events that led to the announcement of the new refugee cap began on June 5th, when Miller met with officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and a policy group called the Homeland Security Council. Every summer, the State Department and the N.S.C. lead a series of discussions to decide the next year’s cap. Officials weigh dozens of different considerations, solicit input from the various stakeholder agencies, and ultimately bring a number to the President for his approval. [Could the stakeholder agencies be the federal contractors?—ed]
[….]
Miller introduced the officials to Gene Hamilton, another former aide to Sessions, whom the Administration had installed at D.H.S. This year, Miller and Hamilton explained, D.H.S.—not the State Department—would present the refugee-cap number to the President.Hamilton would be Miller’s key ally in the process. “They were in direct and constant contact,” the second White House official told me. “If there was ever a question you had for Hamilton, he’d say, ‘Hold on,’ and call Miller.” According to the first White House official, “It was clear that there was some precooked plan here.”
On this issue of asylum (in the next snip)…
….know that there are an estimated 270,000 asylum seekers presently in the country waiting for their day before a judge to make a pitch for asylum. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, once granted asylum, they are REFUGEES in every sense of the word and are on track to citizenship. The only difference is that they were not screened abroad at all and did not have their airfare to the US paidby the US taxpayer. So, Miller is making a very important point on numbers.
Blitzer continues:
When officials pushed back against these kinds of changes, Miller would point to the backlog of asylum cases at D.H.S. and argue that the refugee program was unsustainable. All four officials believed this argument was disingenuous. “This was a manipulation to get the result he wanted,” one White House official told me. “He basically just had a political agenda: to limit the number of foreign nationals who come into our country.”
This next bit made me laugh!The bureaucrats who basically run the State Department were angry that Miller knows how the “sausage” is made in Washington!
Simon Henshaw is a career bureaucrat running the Refugee Program under Tillerson. https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/213334.htm
You can bet the biggest blabbermouths Blitzer talked to came from the branch of the State Department called ‘Population, Refugees and Migration.’
I asked the officials how Miller, with his limited experience in the executive branch, had become such a formidable bureaucrat so quickly. “Look at who the senior advisers to the President were and are—Bannon, Kushner—Miller’s the only one with prior government experience,”the State Department official told me. “He knows something about government, and it turns out to be useful. He saw how the sausage was made. And he’s smart enough to make his own sausage.”The chaos of the Trump Administration helped. “The White House remains in utter disarray,” the official said. “If you don’t have an established set of procedures in place, it’s very easy to create your own process.”
[….]
In early September, officials at the State Department and N.S.C. were told that the Department of Homeland Security was ready to propose to the President that next year’s refugee cap be between fifteen thousand and twenty-six thousand people.
OPTICS! OPTICS! WHAT THE HELL! TO SATISFY SOME FOREIGN POLICY OPTICS! WHAT ABOUT AMERICAN COMMUNITIES SADDLED WITH THE COSTS AND THE CULTURAL UPHEAVAL?
Duke: No number below 40,000 was permissible.
Officials at the other government agencies involved in the process balked. “If we go below fifty thousand, we won’t satisfy the optics that the program was designed to generate, and that functionally hurts national security,” one White House official told me. “We look scared.” Miller and Hamilton weren’t swayed by the arguments, but when Elaine Duke, the interim Secretary of Homeland Security and Hamilton’s boss, insisted that the number couldn’t be lower than forty thousand, they were forced to retreat. (The White House disputed this account.)
Putting up a modest resistance, the State Department proposed a cap of fifty thousand. “People felt beleaguered and betrayed,” the official there told me.
[….]
“By the time we talked about splitting the difference, we were already two-thirds lower than where we were previously,” the State Department official told me. “We’d gone from a hundred and ten thousand”—which President Obama had set for the current year—“to around forty thousand, with no evidence to support the decision. It was purely political. The process has never been this corrupt.”
In mid-September, Tillerson lowered the State Department’s desired number from fifty thousand to forty-five thousand. The State Department official said the Secretary’s staff was surprised. “He undercut his deputy,” the official said. “He undercut the recommendation of the staff. He broke with every other federal agency except D.H.S.” The other agencies had all previously said they would back the State Department, so forty-five thousand was the only number that went to the President.
“The President would never know that almost all of his Cabinet wanted a higher number,” one of the White House officials told me.
If you are looking for something to do, contact the White House and tell the President to put his LOYAL supporters in key positions in order to begin reining-in the blabbermouths!
….transparency, transparency, transparency should be your mantra!
The ‘quarterly consultation’ is required by law and the US State Department has confirmed that the general public is permitted to attend.
One of the most important elements of the consultation is the discussion that should be held in public about how many refugees could be placed in your town in the coming year.
As I said here the other day, since the President has flubbed his great opportunity to push reform of the entire UN/US Refugee Admissions Program in late September, citizen efforts must necessarily now return to local action.
Lawrence Bartlett is still running things at the US State Department because Trump has failed to put his people in place to supervise the career bureacrats. Here Bartlett told Senator Jeff Sessions that there are community consultations open to the public. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/10/02/senate-oversight-hearing-on-refugee-program-very-revealing-senator-sessions-did-a-masterful-job/
Shortly, I will tell you the latest about how citizens in St. Cloud, MN are doing just that, but because others of you are reporting a lack of cooperation from resettlement contractors to your requests to be notified to attend QUARTERLY consultations, we will walk down memory lane.
I wrote this post on October 12, 2015(this is just a portion of it). Disregard the portion about contacting Trey Gowdy, he is no longer the chairman of the subcommittee responsible.
(LOL! I urge serious students to open the links and read related stories, so that I don’t go nuts having to repeat things!)
It has only been in the last year or so [2015] that we have been made aware that QUARTERLY CONSULTATIONS with community “stakeholders” were being held quietly, out of public view. In fact, I wondered why I hadn’t heard about them and now I know why!
The citizens of St. Cloud, MN, here and here, brought the issue of exclusion of taxpaying citizens from the meetings where the ‘non-profit’ refugee resettlement agency meets with local elected officials, fire/police, education, health departments etc. to assess how things are going with the refugees, and they discuss how many to bring in the upcoming year. [Open both of those links at the beginning of this paragraph, please!—ed]
According to a State Department spokesman (unnamed!) doing a press briefing for reporterson September 11th, we learn that they have only been doing these QUARTERLY CONSULTATIONS since 2013! WTH! [Press briefing is no longer available so its a good thing I copied this bit of it.—ed]
And, they are lying! “Private citizens” have not been welcome.
These agencies (‘non-profit’ resettlement subcontractors) work very hard to hold these meetings secretly and out of the view of local concerned citizens—the ultimate stakeholder, the taxpayer! Yet, we have a State Department official (why no name?) telling the mainstream media that private citizens can attend!
Why is the spokesman unnamed?
We are pleased to have [name and title withheld] with us today.Moving forward, [State Department Official] will be called State Department official for the purposes of this call. Again, this call is on background.
So much for Obama’s much ballyhooed transparency! Now here is what ‘name and title withheld’ told a special group of reporters:
In addition, starting about two years ago, I believe it was FY13, we required that all of our resettlement agencies conduct quarterly consultations with stakeholders in their communities. So that means that not just once a year when they’re preparing a proposal, but every quarter they have to reach out to a wide variety of stakeholders. And that would include other community organizations. That could include the police department, the school, the mayor’s office, the fire department, other agencies that have a stake in refugee resettlement, and private citizens can be invited as well. And they hold those quarterly conversations and that is taken into account when we are making placement plans for the entire year and throughout the year.
You know Larry Bartlett told Senator Sessions this basic untruthhere in the Senate hearing the week before last as well.
It gets worse!
We need lawyers on our team! Have they been breaking the law for 33 of 35 years? Or, have the states, which are supposed to prepare a plan every year and hold the meetings, not done their required duty to hold the quarterly meetings with communities?
Provide that the State will, unless exempted from this requirement by the Director, assure that meetings are convened, not less often than quarterly, whereby representatives of local resettlement agencies, local community service agencies, and other agencies that serve refugees meet with representatives of State and local governments to plan and coordinate the appropriate placement of refugees in advance of the refugees’ arrival.
What should you do now?
So, for all of you working in ‘Pockets of Resistance’(and others too!). Go here, and call the closest refugee resettlement office near you and tell them you want a schedule for the upcoming quarterly consultation! Ask them as well for the FY2016 [now FY18—ed] R & P Abstract which will tell you their plans for your town/city this year.
If you get a runaround, find a local lawyer willing to send the resettlement agency a letter on behalf of you—taxpaying citizens (stakeholders!). And, also make all the noise you can through whatever media you have available—tell the public that the program is being run secretively between a refugee contractor and Washington.
To all of you who have gotten this far, please send this to your fellow citizen activists. I don’t want to sound too cranky, but, if year after year, we reinvent the wheel, we will get nowhere!
