Mormons helping Catholic Bishops change America with Muslim refugees, go figure?

09/10/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me why Mormons want to change Utah and America. Don’t ask me if the Mormons have run out of poor Americans to help. Don’t ask me if the Mormons know that almost all Syrians coming to the US are Muslims. Don’t ask me if they know that Syrians and Somalis can’t be properly vetted. Don’t ask me why the Catholic bishops don’t insist on resettling persecuted Christians. It is all a great mystery.

What isn’t a great mystery is that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration and Refugee Services is 97% taxpayer funded.

Does it need the Mormon money too? (I guess you can never have enough money.)
Here is the good news for the Bishops from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

WASHINGTON (CNS) — The U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services is receiving a $1.25 million grant from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to aid in its refugee resettlement efforts once the newcomers arrive in the United States.

bill-canny — Bill Canny heads the USCCB Washington office. http://www.usccb.org/news/2015/15-078.cfm

The Mormons, as the denomination’s adherents are popularly known, have refugee processing capabilities overseas, said MRS executive director Bill Canny, but do not offer domestic resettlement services.

Canny told Catholic News Service that this is the first time in memory that the Mormons have made such a gift to an agency within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, although Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas aid and development organization, has received grants from the Mormons dating to the Ethiopian famine more than 30 years ago.

Grants of this nature, of this size, Canny added, don’t often happen, “not often enough.”

Canny said the Mormons had conducted a successful fundraising drive to aid Syrian refugees. Afterward, “they then approached nine resettlement agencies***, offering each of them a gift to help with resettling refugees currently. So they got in touch with us as one of the resettlement agencies. We began to discuss how to distribute the money and the in-kind goods, and we wrote a small project for them, and they agreed to it and gave us the go-ahead.”

Of the $1.25 million, $425,000 is in cash while the remaining $800,000 is an in-kind contribution from the Mormons, according to Canny.

Continue reading here.
You can thank the Bishops for the thousands of Rohingya coming to a town near you! See here. See especially Esar Met, convicted of murder in Salt Lake City, UTAH.
***Since I’ve been writing about the taxpayer funding that the resettlement contractors received in 2014, here is what the US Bishops got. Screenshot of page 10 from their Annual Report for 2014 (maybe they have a Form 990, but I can’t readily find one).

screenshot-16

If you are checking my math, you need to add the federal grants line to the travel loan collection fees because those fees are really your money too. The contractors collect the airfare loan money (that you loaned the refugees) and keep a cut of it for themselves. The loan money does not all return to the US Treasury.
By the way, individual Catholic Charities may be getting additional federal/state or local grants. I suggest you visit USA Spending.gov and look up your local Catholic diocese or Catholic Charities. Click here. You will be amazed at what you find.
Previously I reported that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is 95% funded by you, and USCRI, another of the nine federal contractors, is 97% funded by you.
Cut off their federal funding and they would be out of business!

Congolese refugees are going to Ogden, UT, volunteers needed, but whites should not apply

05/22/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Catholic Charities in Utah is recruiting volunteers who look like the Congolese!
Many people believe that Utah is resettling refugees through the Mormon church. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints encourages the resettlement of refugees, including Muslim refugees, it is actually the Catholic Church in charge here.
An aside: every time I see something from Utah I wonder who had the bright idea to place a Burmese Muslim refugee in an apartment complex filled with Burmese Christians. The end result was the brutal murder of a little Christian girl and now the taxpayers of Utah get to pay for Esar Met’s life in prison.

Former Somali refugee Aden Batar runs Catholic Community Service’s program in Utah. http://m.deseretnews.com/photo/865590204?nm=1

We have been writing about new resettlement sites lately (Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Ithaca, NY) as the federal government and its refugee contractors are scrambling for new places in which to seed third world diversity. Now it is Ogden Utah’s turn.
From the Standard Examiner:

OGDEN — Diverse populations of Ogden: You are wanted.

The community is invited to a meeting for future volunteers to gear up to welcome refugees from the Congo beginning sometime this summer.

A refugee resettlement conversation is planned for 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 23, at the Marshall White Center, 222 28th Street in Ogden.

“We want to involve Ogden’s diverse communities with this initiative,” said Jenny Gnagey, community awareness building specialist for Catholic Community Services and also an assistant professor of economics at Weber State University. “We want to be able to connect these refugees with people that look like them.”

[….]

“Each year, Catholic Community Services resettles 600 refugees from all around the world in the state of Utah,” Gnagey said. “This summer we are expanding our resettlement efforts to the Ogden community. In the coming year, we expect that Ogden will receive approximately 20 primarily Congolese refugee families.”

They must have problems in Utah with landlords fearful of renting to refugees or they wouldn’t be saying this:

Catholic Community Services also is looking for landlords who will rent to these families.

The rental agreement comes with supervision of Catholic Community Services to assure that the families fulfill their obligations.

“If you rent to a refugee and they have any issue, we will be there to support them,” Batar said. “We want to assure landlords that they don’t have to worry.”

Batar wants future landlords to know that the refugees coming to Ogden are legally documented new American citizens. [To be accurate, they aren’t US citizens until they go through the citizenship process—ed]

For more, continue reading here.
Most of the Congolese refugees entering the US right now are from the DR Congo. We committed to taking 50,000 of them, here in 2013.
Below is a map (source: US State Department Refugee Processing Center) of where 20,967 of them have been placed in the last 4 years. (Over 29,000 yet to be placed by the State Dept. target date of 2019!)
Please note that only a small number (846) are Muslims, but many Christian faiths are represented. I wanted to mention that here because there are some misunderstandings flying around that all of our refugees are Muslims, they aren’t!
However, remember as we learned here, many from the DR Congo are women with (costly) mental health needs, and they likely won’t be supporting their families anytime soon.

Wall Street Journal's immigration writer ticks me off with fluff on "welcoming" Utah

03/28/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got other things I’m working on this morning, but have put them on hold so I can blow off steam! A reader just sent me this story….grrrrr!
Wall Street Journal reporter Miriam Jordan writes ‘authoritatively’ on Muslim refugees going to”welcoming” Utah and fails to mention the horrific murder case that dragged on for years in Salt Lake City.

Esar Met evil face — Major news publications never reported on Burmese Muslim murderer Esar Met. Why? He doesn’t fit the refugee propaganda story they want to tell!

Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on refugees in my over 8 years of following the issue was done by Julia Lyon a reporter at the time for the Salt Lake Tribune.
Surely, Ms. Jordan was aware of the case, but mentioning it might mess up her goal in reporting on how everything is just wonderful with Muslim refugees in Utah (and so what is wrong with you in your not-so-welcoming state).
In 2008 a Burmese Muslim refugee raped and murdered a little Christian refugee girl. The medical examiner testified that she died in “excruciating pain” and first responders said the apartment where her body was found “looked like a horror scene.”
Met was ultimately found guilty in 2014.

Perhaps one of the greatest shames, besides some naive refugee resettlement agency placing Muslim refugees in the same apartment complex as Christians (who had hated each other in Burma!***), is that no major US media outlet ever picked up the story. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the ‘story’ they want to tell about refugee resettlement in America.
In Ms. Jordan’s case her title tells us everything we need to know: ‘With Welcoming Stance, Conservative Utah Charts Its Own Course on Refugees.’ The implication of course is that if “conservative” Utah can welcome Muslims, why can’t you!
She reports that there are no organized pockets of resistance in Utah.
And, her article (here if you can even open it) confirms once again the reason I started writing this blog in 2007. Now there are many many good writers and bloggers ‘balancing’ the news on refugees, but back in 2007, I was so sick of the fluffy stories that it drove me to bring some balance to the news. Guess I’ll just have to keep on balancing the news!
And, you can be sure that if someone writes about Utah and doesn’t mention Muslim murderer Met, I will be pointing it out. Met is most likely a Burmese Rohingya Muslim (very devout Muslims) and we are admitting thousands to the US right now.
***Btw, reporter Julia Lyon went to the camp in Thailand and found out that these two groups (Christians and Muslims) were housed in separate sections of the camp for good reason!

Salt Lake City: Violent Somali teen shot by police

02/29/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update March 2: No surprise! Protesters come out in rage against police, here.
Update March 1: Mohamed was resettled in Utah by Catholic agency, here.
You watch, this will turn into another story about overzealous police. There will be no mention of the refugee resettlement program bringing Somalis and other Muslim refugees to colonize Utah and no mention of the huge problem with many refugees not assimilating. Or, maybe they are assimilating—-to American black gang violence.

Utah shooting — **17-year-old Abdi Mohamed (a Somali refugee) was shot when he wouldn’t put down his “metal object” weapon**

Here is the news. Wish I had the energy to tell you more about what is happening in Utah where, although the Mormon Church doesn’t directly resettle refugees, they encourage their Catholic brethren to do so.
From Fox 13 Salt Lake City (hat tip: Utah reader):

SALT LAKE CITY — The day after an officer-involved shooting sparked unrest on the streets of Salt Lake City, the police department has issued an official statement on the incident and family members say they’ve learned the teen has awoken from a coma.

Family of 17-year-old Abdi Mohamed tell FOX 13 News detectives have told them the teen is now awake and speaking in a hospital room Sunday evening, but they have not yet been able to see him. He was reportedly in a coma after being shot three times by police.

According to a press release from the Salt Lake City Police Department issued Sunday afternoon, officers witnessed two males with metal objects attacking a male victim around 8 p.m. in the area of 300 South Rio Grande Street.

The release states, “Officers confronted the two suspects and ordered them to drop the weapons. One of the males complied and dropped the weapon, the other continued to advance on the victim and was shot by officers.”

[….]

The teen was taken to a hospital in critical condition, and Sunday his family identified him as 17-year-old Abdi Mohamed. Mohamed reportedly lived in West Valley City with his girlfriend and their son. He reportedly moved to the U.S. from Kenya about 10 years ago. [Gee, so who pays for the care of the girlfriend and the son—I’ll wager you do, the taxpayers of Utah and America!—ed]

We get a large number of our Somali refugees from Kenya. Note that in the line above the police weren’t willing to identify the ‘man’ but his family did. Then this is no surprise:

The press release from police states that immediately after the shooting, a crowd gathered and became hostile, with some people throwing rocks or bottles at police. Officers asked the crowd to disperse to allow police and medical personnel to respond to the scene, but many in the crowd did not comply.

More here.
See our previous posts on Utah by clicking here. Just yesterday I was telling a reader (who was looking for refugee crime stories) about that dreadful case of Burmese Muslim Esar Met raping and murdering a Christian girl in Salt Lake City, here. Oh, and by the way, we have 1,931 refugee crime stories categorized from all over the world, here. Feel free to mine that archive if you are working on a report, legislation or letter to the editor.
And, for more information on who resettles refugees in Utah, our Utah reader sent this story. Here come the Syrians!

Obama Administration tried to assure nervous governors that Syrian refugees would be screened

02/25/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Very interesting. While we were all distracted by the funeral for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday the White House was meeting with members of the National Governors Association (winter meeting) to assure them that it was perfectly safe for them to ‘welcome’ Syrian refugees to their states.
As far as I can tell, this Washington Times story is the only report on this intriguing bit of news.

Obama administration officials tried to reassure dozens of wary governors in a closed-door meeting that President Obama’s proposal to relocate Middle Eastern refugees in their states is safe, two governors said Monday.

Utah-Governor-Gary-Herbert — Utah Governor Gary Herbert was apparently not satisfied by Administration answers.

The briefing by senior administration officials last weekend was an effort to “find solutions to some misunderstandings and apprehensions that are out there,” said Gov. Gary Herbert, Utah Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association.

Asked whether the meeting eased states’ concerns about accepting refugees from crisis areas such as Syria and Iraq, Mr. Herbert replied, “We still have work to do.”

After Mr. Obama announced his plan last fall to admit up to 10,000 refugees into the U.S. this year, governors of 30 states from Maine to Wyoming publicly asked for the resettlement of Syrian refugees to stop until security concerns and procedures could be addressed. New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan was the lone Democrat in the group.

The resistance to refugees intensified after Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, which raised fears of Islamic State fighters sneaking into the U.S. as refugees.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe speaks during a debate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) — Governor McAuliffe declared himself “confused by the process.”

Terry McAuliffe is confused! He is not alone! The UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program suffers every day from confusion as a result of the secrecy it has operated under for 35 years.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, conceded that some states “are confused about the process to go through.”

“A lot of issues were raised. We’re continuing to have the dialogue, and [Obama administration officials] promised they would get back to us with additional information as we go forward,” Mr. McAuliffe said.

Good luck getting more information.
Hmmm? I wonder if Tennessee Gov. Haslam was at the meeting?
Was your governor there? You should try to find out!
So far Syrian (mostly Sunni Muslims) are only trickling in, see here.