Tag: Where is Congress

Jewish groups disagree about Muslim migration to US; internal pact revealed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It seems that the fifty or so Jewish groups operating in the US have a secret pact to not speak ill of each other. However, that agreement seems to be coming apart as complaints involving the more conservative Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) have been filed.
One of those complaints appears (no one is revealing complete details) to involve a possible complaint by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) which is not happy with ZOA pointing out HIAS’s financial incentive to admit and resettle more Muslim ‘refugees’ to America.
 

Hetfield in DC synagogue
Mark Hetfield, CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society speaking at one of many anti-Trump events he was involved in. See more on the schism among American Jews here:   http://jewishexponent.com/2017/11/08/groups-see-surge-activism-since-2016-election/

 
(HIAS, for new readers, is one of the nine major federal resettlement contractors*** placing refugees as secretively as they can into your towns and cities. HIAS played a major role in filing lawsuits against the Trump Administration’s so-called Muslim ban.)
First here is information from Forward in a story entitled:

Presidents Conference’s Secret Rules Bar Jewish Groups From Attacking Each Other

(President refers to the Presidents of each of the Jewish advocacy groups.)

Top American Jewish organizations agreed last year to adhere to rules that ban them from attacking each other, the Forward has learned.

The rules, which regulate the discourse of American Jewish leaders, have never been publicized, and are unknown to the vast majority of the constituents of the organizations that have agreed to abide by them. First written in 1995, they were quietly revamped in early 2017.

All of the fifty-odd Jewish groups that belong to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are subject to the rules, which now ban “insults, ad hominem attacks, and name calling” against the Presidents Conference or its member organizations, and statements that are “false, inaccurate or unfairly exaggerated.”

Alleged violations of the rules are referred to a committee that has the power to recommend that organizations guilty of serial violations be expelled from the Presidents Conference. The membership and procedures of that committee, which also were updated last year, have never been made public.

At least four alleged infractions of the rules are currently pending before the committee, the Forward has learned. Those four all involve the Zionist Organization of America, a hawkish pro-Israel group, which is the subject of two of the complaints and has filed two more.

“I criticize other organizations all the time,” said Mort Klein, the ZOA’s president. “You just can’t lie, and you can’t say don’t support them. You can’t call names.”

[….]

The Presidents Conference did not respond to a request for its current governing documents. It also did not respond to questions about what complaints are currently pending before the tribunal, and whether the tribunal had ever acted against a member organization.

[….]

According to one person active in the Presidents Conference, both the Jewish refugee aid organization HIAS and the Anti-Defamation League currently have complaints that have long been pending against the ZOA. The ZOA’s Klein told the Forward that his group has brought its own complaints against the ADL and Ameinu, a progressive Zionist organization.

None of the organizations would describe the content of their complaints. But that they relate to the ZOA is not surprising, given the organization’s willingness to publicly attack its colleagues. In a letter to the editor published in the Forward in 2017, Klein suggested that there was a “profit motive” behind the HIAS’s opposition to President Trump’s Muslim ban.

“Some refugee resettlement groups, such as HIAS, which have invoked ‘morality’ arguments….have been receiving millions of dollars of government grants to resettle refugees,” Klein wrote.

HIAS would not say whether the January 2017 letter, or some other public statement by the ZOA, was the subject of its complaint to the committee.

“I do not want to prejudice the proceedings in any way by commenting before the process has run its course, which I hope will be soon,” said Mark Hetfield, HIAS’s president and CEO.

More here.
The letter and the allegations against HIAS:

hetfield-at-wh
Here is Hetfield again protesting against the President. Hetfield pulls down an annual salary of over $350,000.  Where is Congress? Cut their federal funding!   https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/03/05/dear-donald-give-bibi-a-gift-today-cut-federal-funding-to-hias/

This is a portion of the 2017 ‘Letter to the Editor’ by Morton Klein (supporting President Trump) that seems to have Hetfield steamed:

…. under Jewish law, someone with a potential “profit motive” to favor a particular position is in no position to judge. Some refugee resettlement groups, such as HIAS, which have invoked “morality” arguments to promote admitting poorly vetted refugees have been receiving millions of dollars of government grants to resettle refugees.

There is also no moral equivalence between Trump’s executive order and Franklin Delano Roosevelt slamming the doors on Jews trying to escape from Nazi Europe. The 1930s Jews posed no terror threat to the U.S., were in imminent danger of annihilation, and had nowhere else to go. By contrast, immigrants from the seven countries of concern are infiltrated by terrorists, are often already in Turkey or Jordan where there is no imminent danger, and have 50 other Muslim nations that can be pressured to accept them. (ZOA also favors safe zones in the Middle East.)

The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes survey (2009) found that over 90% of Muslims in surveyed majority Muslim nations held strongly unfavorable (anti-Semitic) attitudes towards Jews. Bringing more Jew-haters into the U.S., who will join surging vicious anti-Semitic activities on college campuses and the anti-Israel Congressional lobby, is dangerous and immoral.

More here.
Our complete Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society archive is here.  HIAS is very close to the SPLC, by the way.
 
*** These (below) are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors and I say all of them have a profit motive (including Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, etc) to resettle more refugees including Muslim refugees.
And, I think one of the greatest insults to taxpayers is that these same groups, which are paid by us to take care of refugees, have become super-sized Leftwing community organizing and agitating groups.  HIAS is the leader in attacking Trump!
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of the nine VOLAGs’ income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees, line them up with jobs, and get them signed up for their services!  From most recent accounting, here.

 

ORR: two federal grants available to benefit refugees and their resettlement contractors

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This post falls in my ‘Special deals for special (non-citizen) people’ archive!

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Where is Congress?

I see that although Congress is debating the budget for the remainder of the year, there are still millions of taxpayer funds sloshing around HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and those have been offered up for grabs starting this week.
We’ve been reporting on the fact that the nine federal refugee contractors,*** which monopolize all resettlement in the US, are paid by the head to place refugees in your towns and that they are hurting financially as the Trump Administration slows the flow of new paying clients.

However, know that those per head payments are not the only federal funding available to them. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has myriad other grants, like these two announced a few days ago.

The first is one of the most outrageous ones we have ever discussed.  It is the ‘Refugee Individual Development Accounts (IDA) Program.’
In a nutshell, to be eligible, refugees must save some money toward a house, a car, a business or education and their savings are MATCHED by you up to a limited amount.  For example, if a family saves $4,000, you, dear taxpayer, will match them another $4,000.
The match-money is managed (and doled out) by middlemen NGOs awarded the grant—the contractors or their subcontractors usually.  Don’t believe me, see here.
Incidentally, one of the side benefits of the Leftwing government contractors/community organizers as middlemen is that it endears the refugees to that local non-profit. I’m sure the refugees think the non-profit group is giving them money!

The Trump Administration is not starving the beast!

This is the grant availability for the coming year for refugee savings accounts….
 
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And, here I went back to look at previous grants for the IDA and it sure looks like Idaho’s Mountain States/Janus Inc. (they are one and the same) have figured out the racket as the organization got a couple of big dips into the federal trough.
 
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Feds help refugees set up licensed childcare facilities for their kids!

The second grant announcement from ORR is the ‘Refugee Family Child Care Microenterprise Development Program.’  See here.
Besides the fact that here we have the middlemen contractors and subcontractors getting paid to help refugees set up businesses that of course will compete with American businesses where the American citizen worked hard to establish her daycare service, we reported here in 2013 that the ORR program touted the fact that the children cared for by refugee day care workers would get “culturally appropriate” care.
So much for assimilating the kids!
And, this will surely steam you—-the money is only available to those not yet US citizens.
ORR, here.

All low income refugees who are not citizens are eligible for services under this program.

Here is the grant announcement:
 
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This post is filed in my ‘where to find information’ category.
***You can bet the nine contractors (below) and their subcontractors will be scrambling for these millions of dollars made available a few days ago.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees, line them up with jobs, and get them signed up for their services!  From most recent accounting, here.

Refugee industry unhappy with new hire at State Department

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Unhappy is probably a mild description of the mood of refugee activists inside and outside the government with the posting of Andrew Veprek, described as an aide to the White House’s resident monster, Stephen Miller, to a post as Deputy Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM).

Politico says that inside the agency, other staff might resign in protest.

(They obviously are convinced Veprek is on the side of slowing the refugee flow to America. And, for the record, I don’t know him, so I couldn’t say.)
Here is Politico reporting the latest discouraging news for the once prosperous refugee industry:

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Since I couldn’t find a pic of Stephen Miller’s right hand man Veprek, this is my image of how the refugee industry is viewing the appointment.

A White House aide close to senior policy adviser Stephen Miller who has advocated strict limits on immigration into the U.S. has been selected for a top State Department post overseeing refugee admissions, according to current and former officials.

Andrew Veprek’s appointment as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) is alarming pro-immigration activists who fear that President Donald Trump is trying to effectively end the U.S. refugee resettlement program.

Current and former officials also describe Veprek’s appointment as a blow to an already-embattled refugee bureau.

The Deep State blabs to Politico:

Veprek is a Foreign Service officer detailed to the White House, which listed him as an “immigration adviser” in a 2017 staff document. He has worked closely there with Miller and the Domestic Policy Council, according to a current State official and a former one in touch with people still serving in the department. A former U.S. official also confirmed the appointment.

In interagency debates, some administration officials have viewed Veprek as representing Miller’s hard-line views about limiting entry into the U.S. for refugees and other immigrants.

Veprek played an influential role in Trump administration’s December withdrawal from international talks on a nonbinding global pact on migration issues. He also argued in favor of dramatically lowering the nation’s annual cap on refugee admissions, the current and former officials said.

Resignations coming???

Politico continues….

“He was Stephen Miller’s vehicle,” the former State official said. The current official predicted that some PRM officials could resign in protest over Veprek’s appointment.

“My experience is that he strongly believes that fewer refugees should admitted into the United States and that international migration is something to be stopped, not managed,” the former U.S. official said, adding that Veprek’s views about refugees and migrants were impassioned to the point of seeming “vindictive.”

Veprek’s appointment as a deputy assistant secretary is unusual given his relatively low Foreign Service rank, the former and current State officials said, and raises questions about his qualifications. Such a position typically does not require Senate confirmation. [It is significant that Trump has still not chosen an Asst. Secretary for PRM because that job does require Senate confirmation—a hellstorm they are apparently avoiding.—ed]

tillerson foia
Politico tells us that Sec. of State Tillerson has given up on the idea of scrapping PRM.  If I understand it, he was considering moving the refugee program to Homeland Security, a proposal that had some merit in my opinion.

[….]

The White House referred questions to the State Department. A State Department spokesperson confirmed Veprek’s new role and, while not describing his rank, stressed that Veprek comes to PRM “with more than 16 years in the Foreign Service and experience working on refugee and migration issues.”

[….]

The PRM bureau, like several other bureaus at the State Department, does not yet have an assistant secretary to lead it. People familiar with the bureau say the morale among its employees has sunk to unusually low levels as top officials have left or been reassigned and amid the anti-refugee messages emanating from the White House. But initial worries that Tillerson would scrap the bureau completely have faded, at least for now, as the secretary has scaled back plans to restructure the department.

More here.
In another report on the “refugee hard-liner”, The Hill says this of Trump’s reduction in the number of refugees to be admitted to the US:

The move signaled that there would no longer be a need for all of the 324 resettlement offices that were operating in 2017.

As we reported extensively in the waning years of the Obama Administration, the State Department was on a high identifying as many as 40 prospective NEW resettlement sites.
Elections have consequences after all.
But the consequences come with a time stamp and if there is no move to reform the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program by Congress, by changing the law, during the Trump Administration, the program will simply pick up where it left off when a new President (without Trump’s guts) comes in, bumps the numbers up, opens those offices and away they will go!
Where is Congress?

Trump's "secretive" policies for slowing refugee flow to US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is really a nothingburger story at a college newspaper, but I was drawn by the headline, and, since I hadn’t mentioned Colorado much lately, am posting it.
 

Colorado springs welcome
I will bet that none of these protesters for more refugees ever gave any serious monetary donations to the local program because they have come to expect their Christian ‘charity’ comes from the government.

 
Reporter ‘s  provocative title at The Catalyst is:

Trump’s Secretive Changes to the Process of Reviewing Refugees

The story then goes on to explain how the vetting process is being tightened and that the local Lutheran contractor’s office is shrinking.  It is the same sob story we are hearing from sea to shining sea.
And, I continue to contend that the whole Ponzi-scheme system of paying ‘religious’ charities like the Lutherans with federal dollars to place refugees on a per head basis is crashing and a major part of the blame (for staff reductions and refugees left in the lurch) rests with the agencies like this one in Colorado (a subcontractor of the ‘mothership’—Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services in turmoil at the moment) that never raised enough private money to tide them over in downturn times like this.

LOL! A good friend recently coined the phrase: “Live by the government, die by the government.”

So here is some of what reporter Aleryan says about Colorado Springs.
By the way, no mention anywhere about how the refugees were pouring in to Colorado to supply meatpackers with cheap labor (LIRS even has a contract with Brazilian-owned slaughterhouse—JBS—headquartered in Greeley!).

President Trump’s executive order to ban refugees from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from coming into the United States, known as “The Muslim Ban,” is what we often talk about and see on news regarding any refugee status or immigration policy. However, is the Muslim Ban what really affects the arrival of refugees in American cities such as Colorado Springs?

Laura Liibbe is the community programs coordinator at Lutheran Family Services, Colorado’s local organization that is responsible for refugee settlement, among other affairs. Liibbe studied international development and teaches English as a second language, which was what inspired her to get involved with the organization. Her work primarily entails connecting refugees to the resources they need in Colorado Springs. [Connecting to resources=signing them up for welfare—ed] She has been working with LFS for six years.

[….]

When the refugee ban was finally lifted, people believed that refugees could again enter the U.S.. However, Trump had already implemented secretive policies that were not at the forefront of the news, so refugees were still not granted access to the country.

The security processes that Trump altered made it impossible for some cases to be processed. The security screening process usually entails refugees providing medical documents, background checking, verification of their refugee status, and their employment history for 10 years. That process is already difficult for some refugees to fulfill, especially if they fled their country and do not have access to their official documents. This process was made more difficult by mandating a 15 or 20 year verification of employment and other documents.

Trump also took resources from refugee reviewing processes that were reallocated to U.S. asylum cases. Liibbe emphasized that this move was not necessarily bad, but she criticizes the shift of resources instead of investing in new and increased resources. The refugee reviewing process is now significantly slower due to the loss of financial support and expertise. Each year, the President chooses a number of refugees to accept. This year, Trump’s administration decided on 45,000, but due to the slowed nature of the process, only 18,000 are expected to be approved and able to enter this year.

[….]

Liibbe emphasized that the city of Colorado Springs has the resources, the capacity, and the capabilities to receive refugees. In the past, they have settled 150 refugees a year with ease. Now, Liibbe insists that we will see a major decrease in that number. This decrease will deeply affect the LFS partnerships because their government funding is dependent on how many refugees they settle.

Can you say Ponzi-scheme!  For regular readers this per refugee head payment business is old news, but believe me, ten years ago when I began writing about the program, no media ever mentioned that critical fact!
Come on Congress, time to get off your butts and either dump or reform the Refugee Act of 1980!
Endnote to Ms. Aleryan:  You might be interested in writing about the contracts LIRS has with meatpackers especially since this agency—Lutheran Family Services, Rocky Mountains—helped secure the contracts.  Humanitarianism is not the primary driving force behind the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program!  Big business and the Chamber of Commerce is! (Dems get voters of course!)

Trump Administration wrongly blamed for closure of refugee offices

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

unemployed
I told you about it here yesterday, but I’ve noticed over the last 24 hours that the story about Trump’s refugee policies being blamed for closure of NON-PROFIT GROUP offices is all over the media.
Let me be clear!
The blame rests squarely on the design of the US Refugee Admissions Program (and Congress) which has shoveled so much federal money to NON-PROFITS that they long ago gave up any idea of seriously attempting to raise private money to TAKE CARE OF THE REFUGEES THEY CLAIM THEY WANTED!
The program has essentially become a ponzi-scheme built on US Treasury payments to NON-PROFIT groups on a refugee per head basis.  Refugee (paying client) numbers decline, and thus so does the NON-PROFIT groups’ taxpayer support.
For ten years I have been hammering this point—nothing has stopped NON-PROFIT refugee agencies from raising PRIVATE money in the old fashioned way! They could have held more fundraisers, sought out grants from businesses AND from religious groups to tide them over through the ups and downs of the refugee admissions flow.
(If, at this point, they say there isn’t enough private money for this, then that means the public doesn’t want it!)
So instead they got lazy on the federal dole.  It isn’t the Trump State Department’s fault if refugees brought in previous months and years are now left without local support. The State Department can’t legally shutter NON-PROFIT groups.
It is the management at the top of the nine federal contractors (below) who were careless and lazy (all the while collecting exorbitant salaries themselves!) who are to blame if refugees are left in the lurch now, or staff at the lowest levels is dismissed.

Where the h*** is Congress! It is way past time to either dump or completely reform the Refugee Act of 1980!

The nine contractors….
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!  From most recent accounting, here.