Tag: Vermont

City Mayors shirking responsibility regarding Refugee Admissions Program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday it was St. Cloud, MN and today it is Rutland, VT!

Getting the monkey off their backs!

Mayors and Councils across America, when confronted by citizens with questions and concerns about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, brush off citizens with the usual garbage line—it is a federal program and they have no role in it.

monkey-on-your-back
Mayor attempting to get the citizen ‘monkey’ off his back by saying he has no power. This is a federal program!  

Yes, they do! The Refugee Act of 1980 did give local governments a role.

And, repeatedly the State Department has said they don’t send refugees to places where they are not wanted. Mayors and councils could go on record with their opinions, but at minimum they should be attending QUARTERLY STAKEHOLDER MEETINGS. And, they should be involved in preparing the annual R & P ABSTRACT (see post yesterday).

Here we have news from Rutland, VT where the previous mayor was ousted by voters for working secretly with a refugee contractor and the new mayor depends on getting his news from a state bureaucrat.  Does he attend their meetings? I bet he is not even aware of the plan the contractor in Vermont sent to the US State Department not too long ago, let alone have seen it.

Shame on any mayors who are not intimately involved in preparing the plans submitted to the State Department each year for the city or town he/she is responsible for!

From the Vermont Digger

RUTLAND – Rutland has recently received word that the number of refugees an agency plans to resettle in the city in this fiscal year has been reduced from 100 to 75.

[….]

Rutland Mayor David Allaire said Thursday that litigation and court action nationally associated with the president’s immigration orders raises uncertainty over just how many refugees will actually be resettled in the city this year.

In the prior fiscal year, three families, totaling 14 refugees, resettled in Rutland. The plan had called for up to 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to resettle in the city by Sept. 30, about a year after the city had been designated a resettlement site by the U.S. Department of State.

Why weren’t the mayor and aldermen in on the planning process? Do they even have a copy of the final R & P Abstract? Denise should give it to them! Or, do they have it and aren’t sharing it with the public.  Either way it is not good!

Rutland first signs
Signs like this helped defeat previous mayor!

Denise Lamoureux, state refugee coordinator, recently sent an email Monday to leaders of community organizations in Rutland discussing the change.

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration “has approved a preliminary revised plan with an objective of 75 rather than 100 refugees for Rutland for federal fiscal year 2018 (10/1/17 to 9/30/18),” the email stated.

[….]

The issue of refugee resettlement had been a hot-button topic in Rutland during the mayoral election in March that saw Allaire win the job over longtime incumbent Christopher Louras.

 

The former mayor had been a strong supporter of the refugee resettlement program, while Allaire, then a veteran member of the city’s Board of Aldermen, had opposed it, citing a lack of transparency in the process.  [Where is the transparency now?—ed]

For the past several months there has been little, if any, debate or discussion about refugee resettlement at city meetings.

“My feeling about this right along has been if indeed there are more families that are coming into Rutland, refugee resettlement families, I would welcome them as I would anyone else,” Allaire said Thursday. “This is a federal program, the Rutland government has no control over the numbers or anything else.”

See my Rutland archive, here.  The major federal contractor operating in Vermont is USCRI. You will see a lot about them when you visit previous Rutland posts. Of all the arrogant contractors, they are near the top of my list!

And, don’t miss: Swamp not being drained so local citizen action required!

Winooski, Vermont: Somali boy drowns, police criticized for poor communication with family

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The refugee family had been in the US for a  year, but apparently still had poor English language skills.

I’m posting this story just so readers in present and future ‘welcoming’ towns in America know what they have to get ready for—the cost of interpretation services.

And, I think this is being set up as a possible lawsuit against a police department for failing to provide proper language translation in an emergency.

I’ve heard about these costly services that local taxpayers must pay for, but hadn’t seen any discussion on how the system works.

A Clinton-era Executive Order requires interpretation services be supplied by local and state governments in all sorts of situations—legal, medical, criminal—involving, as they call them in this story, New Americans. I wonder for how many years are taxpayers on the hook for such services for individual refugees (forever?).

From the Burlington Free Press:

When rescuers converged on the banks of the Winooski River on July 11 to search for Ali Muhina, they faced darkness, racing waters and a language barrier in their efforts to find the missing boy, believed to have fallen into the river.

The dead boy’s father (right) talks to the media. See video: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/2017/07/25/interpretation-challenge-small-city/475206001/

Later that night, after the search had been halted until morning, Police Chief Rick Hebert would tell reporters that the language barrier had caused some issues. The next morning, friends and relatives of Ali told reporters that the family had struggled to understand police procedures and ask questions. A relative told reporters the family speaks Swahili.

Ali’s family originated from Somalia, though the boy was born in a refugee camp in Kenya. They had lived in the United States for a year when tragedy struck.

A police translator during the initial hours of the search did not speak Swahili, but instead spoke an African language which Ali’s father could understand but not speak himself, according to Mohamed Noor, who identified himself as a relative of the Muhinas.

The Winooski Police Department has the use of “Enabling Language Services Anywhere” devices. The device is a small box that can be worn on an officer’s body. When an officer pushes the button, he’s automatically connected to an interpretation center open 24 hours a day seven days a week.

The officer is connected with a translator in one of over 180 languages, who can interpret remotely. If the officer doesn’t know the language being spoken, a linguist can come on the line to help identify it, according to RLL Mobile Interpretation’s website.

[….]

When the search resumed on July 12, representatives from organizations like the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program were at the riverbank to support the family. [The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program is a subcontractor to primary contractor*** USCRI and is the organization behind all the controversy about starting a program in Rutland.—ed]

The day after Ali’s body had been recovered, Hebert acknowledged that “it has been a real challenge to engage our new Americans in meaningful relationship building,” and he said he would welcome any ideas on how to improve.

More here.

Are you paying attention Rutland!

Someone with some time should look into this group ‘Africans Living in Vermont‘ (see here where one of their employees was accused of embezzling).

For new readers, type the name of your state in my search window.  Here you can see all of our previous posts on Vermont.

***Federal contractors/middlemen/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities.  Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors like this one in Vermont.

Their income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US. Here they will act as advocates for justice for the refugees they placed in your towns while you pay their salaries.

The only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the contractors/propagandists from the process.

 

 

Rutland, VT mayor defeated over his plan to seed city with Syrian refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“[W]hat happened here in Rutland….should be used as a template for the rest of country!”

Don Cioffi (Rutland First!)

It wasn’t only the plan—there are lots of mayors pushing for refugees to be placed in their towns—but it was the way he went about it that riled citizens there in VERMONT, of all places!
Thanks to all who sent me one of the many many stories written in the last 24 hours about his defeat at the ballot box.  We mentioned the upcoming election on Sunday, here.  Leo Hohmann writing at World Net Daily quoted that post.

Representatives of the federal resettlement contractor, USCRI, field questions from standing room only crowd in Rutland last year. Photo: http://news4security.com/posts/2016/09/rutland-first-vermonts-homegrown-opposition-to-syrian-resettlement/

(Just as I am writing this post this morning, Fox & Friends is reporting on the mayor’s election loss due to his support of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.)
Update: Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart weighs in here.
Mayor Christopher Louras’ defeat should be a wake-up call to mayors around the country that pushing the refugee program in collusion with a paid refugee contractor and the US State Department, while trying to keep the plan secret from the public, is not a good model for success.
Not only did Mayor Louras lose his reelection bid, but the federal resettlement contractor, USCRI in this case opened an office there for 2 families that they will now surely have to close, and their friends in the liberal media—see the New York Times hyping the Rutland resettlement—who were working to make Donald Trump look bad in advance of his inauguration, show how weak they have become.
For our many posts on Rutland going back to (I think) last May, click here.
The Rutland, Vermont model for all of you!
From Leo Hohmann at WND:

The people of Rutland, Vermont, have gained a measure of revenge against former President Obama’s forced influx of Syrian refugees, voting out the five-term mayor who helped negotiate the controversial resettlements with a federal contractor.

Rutland is Vermont’s third-largest city but still very small, with a population of 16,500.

The candidacy of Mayor Christopher Louras went down in flames in Tuesday’s election as he was defeated by the refugee program’s most ardent opponent on the board of aldermen. David Allaire won with 52 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Louras.

“That’s not just a win, that’s a drubbing,” said Don Chioffi, an activist who supported the upstart candidate Allaire.

Louras came out last April and “announced,” much to the surprise of his residents, that the city would be taking in up to 100 Syrian refugees [98.5% of the Syrians entering the US are Muslims—ed] in fiscal 2017 along with others from Iraq.

The announcement divided the city among those who wanted to welcome the refugees – no questions asked – and those who thought the refugee program was being dictated without any local input and with very little information. Protests and counter-protests were organized, attracting national media attention.

Unfazed by the division it caused in Rutland, a State Department contractor opened an office and started placing Syrians into the community.

The Leftist media doesn’t give you a fair shake, so go around them!

Hohmann continued:

Local activist Don Chioffi, an ACT for America chapter leader in Rutland, said Allaire got no help from the local media. But supporters bypassed the newspapers and TV stations by using social media, meetings and a conservative radio host to get their message out.

“The people we talk to always react positively, but you would never know that from the media coverage we get,” Chioffi told WND.

“In their sacrilegious and diabolical effort to squelch the truth, they won’t put it out there, so it’s hard to emphasize how important this victory is because the leftist media just doesn’t give you a fair shake, and we went into it expecting that. We knew we wouldn’t get a fair shake.”

[….]

“What won this race in Rutland is we concentrated on principles of democracies and how far we’ve strayed from those principles when a private, nonprofit agency is taking people’s rights away from them, using secrecy, getting government funding, all of the things about this refugee program that have been taken away from the people.”

Chioffi said his group’s requests for public-record documents were rejected by USCRI, which claimed the information was proprietary, even though it was doing the government’s work as a contractor.

Amila Merdzanovic, Director for USCRI of the Vermont Refugee Program: If we go public too soon “…all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork.”

“We said we have questions and we want answers,” he said.

The group’s big break came when the USCRI director of the state resettlement program stumbled in trying to answer a question about why the refugee plan for Rutland was so secretive.

In an April 14 email to Mayor Louras, USCRI Director Amila Merdzanovic wrote in an email “if we open it up to anybody and everybody, all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork, anti-immigrant … anti-anything.”

“When they came out and said they don’t’ think this should be made public because ‘too many people would come out of the woodwork,’ we just pummeled her and branded her,” Chioffi said.

Chioffi said Rutland is a microcosm for what happened nationally on Nov. 8 with the election of Donald Trump.

“We the people spoke, and we were sick and tired of being dictated to and people making decisions on our behalf. And we’re certainly sick of being dictated to by a private, nonprofit agency,” he said. “Since when do you turn over your local government to a 501c3 private contractor, which then denies you public information? So the lack of transparency was the focus of our campaign against this mayor.”

 There is much, much more including quotes from our friend James Simpson, continue reading here.
***Update 2*** See my latest on USCRI here.

Rutland, VT mayoral contest focuses on candidates who could best heal rift over refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

One of the things I came to see in my travels around America last summer is that mayors in many cities with refugees, or about to get refugees, seemed to be quietly (so as not to tip off citizen critics) working behind the scenes for the federal pro-refugee resettlement contractors, and/or the businesses looking for cheap migrant labor. I often referred to those mayors as having been “captured.”

screenshot-400
Mayor Louras, who quietly worked with federal refugee contractor USCRI to begin resettlement of 100 Syrians to Rutland, caused a firestorm of public controversy. Photo: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/08/05/shrinking-small-towns-see-hope-in-refugees

Rutland, VT represents one such city.
It got so heated in Rutland, that the subject of refugees is the key issue that will determine if city voters return Mayor Christopher Louras to his seat at city hall.
From Burlington Free Press (hat tip: Joanne):

MONTPELIER – The mayor of Rutland, seeking his sixth two-year term Tuesday on Town Meeting Day, would like to focus his race against three challengers on his response to the issues facing the city, including drug use and joblessness, but his plan to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the city overshadows everything.

I’ve always wondered, why Syrians? Why not any of the usual refugee ethnic groups that the US State Department brings in. Did someone or some group specifically want Syrian Muslims (almost 99% of the Syrians we admit are Muslims) in Rutland?  The same is happening in Charleston, WV, they want just Syrians. Why?
I digress!  Back to the story…

Louras is being challenged on Town Meeting Day by City Councilor David Allaire, who ran against Louras in the last two elections; Michael Coppinger, the executive director of the Downtown Rutland Partnership, which promotes the community; and resident Kam Johnston, who is also running for the Board of Aldermen, school board and city assessor.

[….]

Both Allaire and Coppinger say a change in leadership is needed to heal a city that has been divided by Louras’ plans to bring up to 100 Syrian refugees to the community this year, and possibly more in years to come. They say it wasn’t the plan for the refugees, but the way Louras rolled out the program, announcing it last April without having sought input from the public and city officials.

When he announced his candidacy in December, Allaire said the issue was not with the city taking in refugees, but the secrecy of the program .

Continue reading here.  See our Rutland archive here.
One of the many reforms the Trump team must make is to get the secrecy out of the discussions by the US State Department, in collusion with federal refugee contractors, to target certain towns and cities as new resettlement sites.

Refugee contractor may have exaggerated numbers in letter promoting Rutland, VT resettlement

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Every one of you working in your local communities and questioning plans for either expanding the number of refugees in your city or where new sites are planned, pay attention!  Do what this housing authority member did—don’t take the contractors word on the economic benefits that refugees supposedly bring to your town or city.
I’ve been begging for years for someone with an economic/business background to thoroughly debunk (with a focused economic study) this illogical notion that bringing more poor people to a poor and struggling city benefits the city economically!  I’ve suggested Utica, NY as the case study location.

This meme along with the propaganda that no refugees have been involved in Islamic terrorism are the two major talking points the refugee industry advocates peddle.
Here is Vermont Watchdog.  You too can do this!

Gail Johnson, a Rutland resident and Board of Aldermen hopeful, likes to confirm her facts. This practice grew out of necessity when, as a U.S. Navy finance officer, she was in charge of payroll for an entire naval base in Charleston, S.C.

lavinia-limon-96
In 1996 Lavinia Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. After leaving government where she doled out grant money, she took the reins of one of nine major government refugee contractors receiving grant money, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. See Breitbart’s Michael Leahy’s dossier on Limon here last August: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/05/twin-falls-refugee-crisis-clinton-appointee/

Now, a member of the Rutland Housing Authority commission, Johnson continues to fact check. “Whatever I say or do, I have proof. I back it up. I expect others to do that as well,” she said.

Johnson never thought she would find discrepancies in a letter by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) to the Rutland Board of Aldermen, but she did.

[….]

In October, the Board of Aldermen sent a letter to USCRI, asking for justification of Rutland’s selection as a refugee relocation site. The agency still has not released the original grant application, which is supposed to spell out in detail Rutland’s suitability. Instead, USCRI CEO Lavinia Limon responded to the board in December, sending a letter that cited numbers of available jobs and housing.

Limon said that, as of Nov. 28, 2016, The Vermont Housing Data showed “284 housing units available for rent in Rutland City.”

Johnson noted that the 284 figure could be a result of expanded search parameters, to potentially place refugees in rent-to-buy situations, homes or condos. However, USCRI only places refugees in apartment rentals. [However, because the numbers coming in now are so astronomical, we are hearing refugees being placed (against federal regulations) in hotels!—ed]

However, when Watchdog checked the site on Jan. 11, only 23 housing locations are listed in Rutland City. Of those listed, none have availability.

[….]

“I’ve worked with people from many backgrounds. I’ve studied Arabic. Refugee settlement is a wonderful humanitarian effort,” she said.

But she said she becomes concerned when settlement agencies claim refugees will be beneficial to Rutland’s economy.

“They say that bringing in refugees is good for our economic recovery. I don’t know that that’s the solution. What I do know, in a bigger sense, is that the logic behind improving our economic recovery in Rutland by bringing in low-income people to generate business, it’s not a logical economic model,” she said.

Instead, Johnson contends, Rutland’s unemployment and lack of affordable housing makes bringing low-income refugee families into the city counterproductive from an economic standpoint.

Please read the whole story, Ms. Johnson found many more discrepancies in Lavinia Limon’s letter.
See my previous post on Rutland where I said Ms. Limon was setting this up (with the New York Times help) to use as a cudgel against Donald Trump should he stop the flow of Syrians after January 20th.
See our many posts on the Rutland controversy, here. And, learn more about Lavinia Limon and USCRI by clicking here.