Michael Patrick Leahy is writing (again) about Twin Falls, Idaho and how Washington, DC insiders are deciding the future of small cities in the American west. Leahy:
Thousands of Muslim refugees are flowing into the small Idaho town of Twin Falls because of closed-door decisions made by a group of self-serving advocates in and around Washington D.C.
One key player is Lavinia Limón, CEO of the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). That’s a government-backed group that is paid to place migrants in Americans’ towns. Her group is also called a “voluntary agency,” or ‘VOLAG.’ The group’s local affiliate, the College of Southern Idaho, has already placed 1,000 Iraqi refugees in Twin Falls.
Continue reading here about the life and times of Lavinia Limon formerly Bill Clinton’s Director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. Click here and see if USCRI is working in your town. We know they are the major contractor working in Rutland, VT and they are planning an office for Reno, NVas well.
If you missed it this morning, be sure to see the latest news on the rape of a little girl in Twin Falls, here.
Michael Patrick Leahy writing at Breitbarthas put pen to paper and pulled together some of the facts about how the refugee resettlement industry is in an incestuous arrangement between agencies that dole out your tax dollars and the contractors that receive them. If this isn’t illegal it should be! She is looking to open offices in Rutland VT and Reno NV next! See our Limon archive here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon
The arrangement is unethical at minimum and I fault Congress for its lax review of the expanding UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for the practice Leahy exposes.
Disallowing the present arrangement is the least Congress could do to begin to reform and rein-in the program that will bring 85,000 refugees to the US this year, including 10,000 Syrian Muslims. Here is Leahy:
A revolving door in the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has sent millions of dollars in federal funding to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants [USCRI], which is led by two former directors of the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR], the federal office that selects the voluntary agencies [VOLAGs] who get lucrative federal contracts to resettle refugees.
President Bill Clinton appointed Lavinia Limon as director of ORR in 1993, a position she held until the end of his administration. After a brief interlude at the Center for New American Communities, a project of the left-leaning National Immigration Forum, Limon was named executive director of USCRI in August 2001, a position she still holds.
In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Eskinder Negash, an Eritrean refugee on Limon’s USCRI staff, as director of ORR. When Negash resigned abruptly in December 2014, he went back to USCRI, where he now serves as Vice President of Global Development.
All of you concerned with the arrival of refugees in your towns, or the expansion of existing resettlement sites must read this report! Click here to continue!
USCRI wants Rutland and Reno next!
I have to head out early today (I’ll pass the 4,000 mile mark on my road trip) and can’t elaborate, but I want to make two additional points.
Lavinia Limon’s USCRI has two (maybe more) new sites they are targeting: Rutland, VT and Reno, NV!
And, although the focus here was on the Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS, don’t forget that Anne C. Richard, the Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration has also revolved into the door at the US State Department from a contractor—the International Rescue Committee. See her bio here.
She had an earlier stint at the State Department and see her connection to the International Crisis Group (a Soros project). Richard says in her bio that she helped create this group!
Michael Patrick Leahy’s latest expose’ on where ACTIVE Tuberculosis is found in America reveals that the Akron, Ohio area has it too. As Executive Director of the International Institute of Akron, Elaine Woloshyn is in charge of the refugees arriving in the city. The IIA is a subcontractor of USCRI the same federal contractor working to expand to Rutland VT and Reno NV. It is also the major federal contractor in Twin Falls, Idaho. http://iiakron.org/our-team/
We have a few posts on Akron here at RRW. I’d like to direct you to one in particular because it is an example of what I am learning on my road trip through the heartland. There is money involved in refugee resettlement and local elected officials and their cronies are figuring out how to tap it! It is your money as developers look to the taxpayer-funded gravy train coming from Washington! (In addition to the foreign money that is buying up real estate!)
I digress. Along with the money (for special people) comes other problems, including frightening health risks for all of us.
Leahy at Breitbart:
CLEVELAND, Ohio–Eleven refugees have been diagnosed with active tuberculosis in Summit County, Ohio, over the past six years, Dr. Margo Erme, medical director of the Summit County Public Health Department tells Breitbart News.
The case of active and communicable tuberculosis were in the county that holds Akron, with a population of 199,000. It is the largest city in Summit County, population 541,000.
The county lies immediately to the south of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. Many of the delegates and members of the media attending the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland this week are staying at hotels in Summit County and are shuttled on buses thirty plus miles each way.
“From 1/1/2010 through 12/31/2015, 37 cases of tuberculosis (both pulmonary and extrapulmonary) were reported in Summit County,” Dr. Margo Erme, medical director of Summit County Public Health, tells Breitbart News in an email.
Of those, “16 were US-born” and “21 were foreign-born.” Of the 21 foreign-born, “10 did not come into the US on refugee status, 11 came into the US on refugee status,” Erme says.
Of the “US-born” I would like to know how many live in households with the “foreign-born?”
No time to write more, but check out this fluffy puffy piece on the growing Arab population of Toledo—a city I just visited! A “model city” for Syrian refugees they say! Ahhhh! More when I have time.
Have a look at this article from Arab American Newsfrom last week. Not enough housing in Dearborn where all the refugees want to live to be with their own kind of people reports the Arab American News.
It starts out with the usual heartwarming stories about refugees finding new lives in Michigan (the state getting the most Syrian Muslims) but then read down 11 paragraphs where we hear about the trouble the new arrivals are having after basically being left in the lurch by resettlement contractors and in one case NO agency is helping them.
Readers this is very common, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the years and instead of taking fewer refugees that could be taken care of properly, the federal contractors are overloaded (there are never enough volunteers backing up the paid staff!) and the refugees complain. And, you can’t blame them, they have been sold a bill of goods about life in America and their expectations are very high. Get this….how is it that a whole family is basically wandering around loose in Michigan with no one responsible for them but another refugee.
The Kabati family now enjoys a new, seemingly peaceful life, but anticipated the challenges that lay ahead as soon as they arrived at the airport.
Kabati said while other refugees were greeted at the airport by representatives of refugee aid groups and taken to their homes, they were greeted by a friend, who offered to provide any further assistance the family needed. Kabati added because they had no family in Michigan, the IOM inadvertently held his friend, also a recent Syrian immigrant, fully responsible for their aid.
The family friend gave them shelter for two days, until he secured them an apartment.
As of Saturday, Kabati and his family have not received paperwork and needed assistance to initiate their resettlement, like Social Security numbers, insurance and food stamps.
Kabati said he and his family are eager to start learning English, so they are able to get around and communicate with others. A tough language barrier prevents them from integrating into American society.
So far, no aid group has offered to place them in ESL courses, unlike the cases with other refugees.
Yikes! How many other Syrians have simply been flown in to a city and dropped? You might not have a lot of sympathy for them, but you should. The refugees are just pawns. Again, we see evidence that this program is being run with incompetent leadership and is not about caring for the the world’s downtrodden as its first priority. This is an example of gross incompetence on the part of the US State Department and some contractor which dropped the ball in Michigan!
Why? Because instead of slowing the flow to a level that could be accommodated and assimilated, the UN and the US State Department are sending them into communities at unsustainable levels hurting both the refugees and the citizens of the town or city unlucky enough to be a target site. Continue reading the storyfor the litany of other complaints the new Michigan Americans have.
The primary contractors operating in the state are the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LSS Michigan), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and get this, in Dearborn, it is USCRI—the same agency that isn’t doing a very good job in Lowell, Mass.
The lack of transparency that surrounds the resettlement of third world refugees through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is likely the single-most important factor in why I have been writing about it for nine years. Almost nothing makes me so angry as the arrogant treatment of citizens in towns across the country as refugees are placed in communities with no advance warning in most cases and certainly no thoughtful discussion and planning. Lavinia Limon is the woman making the decisions about which refugees go to Lowell. USCRI is also in charge of Twin Falls, Idaho and is opening new offices in Rutland, VT and Reno, NV. Go to our extensive archive on Limon (formerly Bill Clinton’s director of the ORR) to learn more: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon
For decades the only way citizens learned of the program was when it was already up and running and problems had occurred and here we learn from the Lowell, Massachusetts city manager that they have had the same experience.
BTW, controversies like the one on-going in Rutland, VTactually started the same way—a mayor secretively worked with the federal government to ‘welcome’ Syrians to town, and when the residents found out all hell broke loose directed mostly at the mayor for acting secretively.
Here is the latest news from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily who tells us about some excellent reporting from the Lowell Sun on that case from last week where a Syrian man was arrested for allegedly making advances at a 13-year-old at a public swimming pool.
The secrecy of the federal refugee-resettlement program has once again been highlighted by a local official who has seen the dark side of the program play out in living color.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, a 13-year-old girl was twice groped at a public pool last week by a 22-year-old man freshly imported into the community from Syria as a “refugee.”
The city manager of Lowell told his local newspaper Tuesday that he was not even notified by the U.S. State Department or its resettlement contractor that Syrians were being delivered to his community.
Emad Hasso, 22, of Syria pleaded not guilty Friday to inappropriately touching the girl at the state-run Raymond Lord Memorial Pool in Lowell, according to the Lowell Sun.
This marks the second high-profile sexual assault on an American girl in the past month by a refugee. On June 2, a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, was reportedly raped by an Iraqi refugee boy while an older refugee from Sudan filmed and coached him during the assault.
Hasso is one of 18 Syrians, all of them most likely Sunni Muslims, who have been secretly planted in the Lowell community since May, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center online database.
City Manager Kevin Murphy said he’d like to receive regular numbers from the federal contractor that resettles refugees in the city. The International Institute subcontracts with the main federal contractor, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI, to deliver refugees to Lowell.
The city does not know when or from where refugees come to Lowell, Murphy said, and is only made aware of them in instances like this one where a refugee gets arrested or otherwise singled out for bad behavior.
“I think we’ll reach out to the International Institute to see if they could cooperate with us in the future by letting us know when they relocate individuals to Lowell,” Murphy said.
Good luck with that!
There is much more here, including a list of the cities where large numbers of Syrian Muslims (yes, they are 99% Muslim and mostly Sunnis) have been placed this year, continue here.
By the way USCRI is the primary federal contractor and the International Institute is a sub-contractor. Be sure to see this older postwhen USCRI’s office was ultimately closed in Waterbury, CT (they weren’t caring properly for the refugees they had placed). See why I referred to Limon for years as ‘whoop-de-do.’ One more thing that will interest you folks in Idaho. Click here to view a copyrighted photo of Lavinia Limon with the CEO of Chobani Yogurt at the Clinton Global Initiative last September. They are all in this together—MONEY!
Michael Patrick Leahy is writing (again) about Twin Falls, Idaho and how Washington, DC insiders are deciding the future of small cities in the American west.
