Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

Oh Look, an Illegal Immigrant Summer Camp

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As written on this blog that we must watch Germany when it comes to protests over immigration, it appears that things are spooling that activism here in America is in our future.

Who would imagine summer camp involves teaching activism and we are to accept this as a good thing?

This summer camp just churned out 80 activists

LATimes: Growing up in wealthy Marin County, Yaqueline Rodas didn’t know many people like herself: a young immigrant from Guatemala in the country without legal status. She knew even fewer political activists.

So it was with amazement and a little anxiety that she found herself standing one morning in June in a circle with 82 strangers, each of whom had also been brought to the U.S. illegally as a child, and each of whom was now officially an activist-in-training.

It was the first day of Dream Summer, an annual program that brings young immigrants from across the country to Los Angeles for a 10-week crash course designed to produce the next generation of immigrant rights leaders.

As the students sipped coffee and exchanged shy introductions in a meeting room in the basement of a Koreatown church, Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, which organized the program, explained the objective.

“It is to build a powerful social justice movement that will transform this country,” Wong said. He cracked a smile: “No pressure.”

Dream Summer, which concluded its fifth year Thursday with a graduation ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, has already changed the immigrant rights movement. Its alumni include many leading “Dreamer” advocates, including several who led the push for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (DACA, as it is known, granted temporary deportation protection to more than half a million young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.)

The program includes two weeks of workshops in Los Angeles on topics as varied as public speaking, the immigrant detention system and the history of the NAACP. Participants also spend eight weeks in internships at social justice organizations around the country.

The idea is for them to learn what has worked for other social movements. But the program’s biggest value, those involved say, may be the connections forged by young immigrants from different regions with similar backgrounds, similar frustrations and similar dreams.

“Look around the room,” Wong urged the students that first day in June. “Now you’re a part of a whole network, a whole community.”

Rodas, who applied for the program on a whim after a classmate at UC Santa Barbara recommended it, said the summer had changed her sense of place in the world.

It helped her realize that there were others like her who had experienced discrimination, and who also were bothered by their parents’ struggle to find well-paying work. And it helped her find a purpose.

“Now I know I want to do something to help my community,” said Rodas, who spent the summer helping immigrants without legal status sign up for health insurance.

Chando Kem, 21, spent the first few days of the program commuting from his home in Long Beach. But soon he was spending nights on the floor of the hotel rooms of the out-of-town participants to maximize the time with his new colleagues.

During his internship, at the Filipino Migrant Center in Long Beach, Kem was asked to produce video testimonials featuring immigrants who had experienced wage theft. During the process, he realized that he should interview his own father for the film.

When his family arrived from Cambodia, when Kem was 7, his dad worked at a Chinese restaurant where he was underpaid and denied proper lunch breaks, Kem said. “Before I thought, ‘OK, this is the way things are,'” he said. “Now it’s like no, that’s wrong.”

The organizers of Dream Summer say it was born out of failure and frustration.

They started the program in 2011 after Congress failed to pass the federal Dream Act, which would have given people who came to the United States before the age of 16 a pathway to citizenship. Opponents said it would have rewarded immigrants who broke the law.

That year, several of the program’s young participants were placed with campaigns working on behalf of the California Dream Act. It passed later that year, allowing youth to apply for state financial aid at universities.

Other Dream Summer alumni would go on to lead efforts against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for controversial policies targeting immigrants in the country illegally, and to take on Obama’s deportation record. One graduate, Lorella Praeli, is now Latino outreach director for Democratic hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The program is not only for new activists.

At 33, Paulo Jara-Riveros was one of the oldest participants this summer. Brought to the U.S. from Peru at age 15, he returned to Peru to pursue his studies in 2011.

Two years later, Jara-Riveros was a part of a major protest in which two dozen young people with long ties to the U.S. surrendered to federal authorities at the Texas-Mexico border to protest American immigration policies. Jara-Riveros, a transgender man who says he faced discrimination in Peru, has applied for asylum and is waiting for a ruling in his case.

This summer he worked for a health organization that serves transgender immigrants. The experience was emotionally trying, he said. His takeaway: Activists must also tend to their own needs.

“Sometimes when you’re working in activism you get caught up in the work and you forget to take care of yourselves,” he said.

For Miguel Bibanco, a 20-year-old from Fresno, the program was not just about changing immigration policy. It was also about modeling an ideal society. He pointed to workshops that highlighted the experiences of minorities within the immigrant community, including lesbians, gays and transgender people and immigrants from Asia.

“It’s not just Latinos,” Bibanco said. “If we want a society that is inclusive, we need to start by including them in the activism process.”

On Thursday, he and Rodas snacked on taquitos and quesadillas at the program’s graduation ceremony, held at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

As the participants posed for pictures with their diplomas, they heard from Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Cedillo, who wrote the California Dream Act while he was a state assemblyman.

Cedillo evoked the heated rhetoric nationally around immigration. This summer, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has ratcheted up his crusade against illegal immigration, calling this month for a revocation of the constitutional amendment that guarantees citizenship to those born in the U.S.

“We’re being vilified,” said Cedillo, who called this “one of the most critical times in our country.”

He told the participants in the program that they were model members of the community. They were “hopeful, not hateful,” he said, “optimistic, not pessimistic.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve shown up.”

The Email Ghost Account, Toby Miles at the IRS, AKA Lois Lerner

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It is an epidemic now in the Federal government known as alias accounts with fake names.

Given the patterns of the EPA, the Department of Justice, the State Department and now the IRS, it is a sure bet these email accounts are throughout government and we must add in those still other accounts still unknown that operate on platforms outside of government, where Hillary is a master.

So, how about one of those pesky Barack Obama executive orders, demanding all alias accounts be turned over to the FBI now, all of them and then termination orders on those who violated law? Heh…yeah…for sure, it would likely include POTUS himself and just about everyone at the White House….Yet this is our weapon to use against this administration, you know the most transparent in history.

IRS find yet another Lois Lerner email account

WashingtonTimes: Lois Lerner had yet another personal email account used to conduct some IRS business, the tax agency confirmed in a new court filing late Monday that further complicates the administration’s efforts to be transparent about Ms. Lerner’s actions during the tea party targeting scandal.

The admission came in an open-records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that has sued to get a look at emails Ms. Lerner sent during the targeting.  IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency.  “In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.

It is unclear who Toby Miles is, but Mr. Klimas said the IRS has concluded that was “a personal email account used by Lerner.”

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said it was stunning the agency was just now admitting the existence of the address.  “It is simply astonishing that years after this scandal erupted we are learning about an account Lois Lerner used that evidently hadn’t been searched,” he said, accusing the IRS of hiding Lerner-related information throughout — including the existence of the backup tapes of her official email account, which the agency’s inspector general easily found once it went looking for them.

Mr. Klimas didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Monday evening, and a spokeswoman for the tax agency didn’t respond to an email and phone call.

But in his court filing Mr. Klimas argued that the IRS had previously hinted there may be other personal email accounts, pointing back to a footnote in a letter attached to a June 27, 2014, brief that mentioned “documents located on her personal home computer and email on her personal email account.”

He altered that wording in his filing Monday, saying the database of Lerner emails turned over to Congress included messages from her “‘personal home computer and email on her personal email’ account(s).”

The use of secret or extra email accounts has bedeviled the Obama administration, which is has tried to fend off a slew of lawsuits involving former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her top aides, the White House’s top science adviser, top Environmental Protection Agency officials and the IRS.

Those cases have flooded the federal district court in Washington. Indeed, Judge Sullivan, who is handling the current IRS case, is also presiding over Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Last week, Judge Sullivan ordered the State Department to talk to the FBI about trying to recover messages that Mrs. Clinton may have kept on the email server she ran out of her home in New York.

Mr. Fitton said just as Mrs. Clinton is facing questions over whether she kept classified information on her non-secure email account, Ms. Lerner should face questions about whether she exchanged protected taxpayer information from personal email accounts.

Ms. Lerner’s emails became an issue after she was singled out as a key figure in the IRS’s treatment of tea party and conservative groups who sought tax-exempt status. The IRS improperly delayed hundreds of applications and sent out intrusive questionnaires asking what the agency now says were inappropriate inquiries.  In the wake of the scandal Ms. Lerner retired from the agency. She declined to testify to Congress, citing her right against self-incrimination, but also said she did not break the law.

The Obama administration has declined to pursue the contempt of Congress case that the House brought against her.

The House Ways and Means Committee also approved a criminal referral asking the Justice Department to look into Ms. Lerner’s conduct, but its status is not clear.

Mr. Obama has said the problems at the IRS stemmed from bad laws and lack of funding, not from political bias, and a bipartisan report from the Senate Finance Committee could not reach any firm conclusions about the extent of targeting.

Curiously, the Ways and Means Committee criminal referral mentioned the Toby Miles email address, identified as [email protected]. The address came to light because it was included on an email that also had Ms. Lerner’s official account on the chain of recipients.

An email sent to the msn.com address Monday night went unanswered.

At the time of the referral in April 2014, the committee linked the Toby Miles address to Ms. Lerner’s husband, Michael R. Miles, but said, “The source of the name ‘Toby‘ is not known.”

 

The U.S. Refugee Immigration Costs Back to 1997

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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES REFUGEE AND ENTRANT ASSISTANCE report is full of the budget numbers. You have no concept of what bad law and policy has cost the American taxpayers. Imagine these decades of dollars as well as grants, USAID, the Merida Initiative, State Department programs, military assistance and the Millennium Challenge dollars added in, we effectively own these countries.

 

Unaccompanied Alien Children: An Overview

Summary

In FY2014, the number of unaccompanied alien children (UAC, unaccompanied children) that were apprehended at the Southwest border while attempting to enter the United States without authorization increased sharply, straining the system put in place over the past decade to handle such cases. Prior to FY2014, UAC apprehensions were steadily increasing. For example, in FY2011, the Border Patrol apprehended 16,067 unaccompanied children at the Southwest border whereas in FY2014 more than 68,500 unaccompanied children were apprehended. In the first 8 months of FY2015, UAC apprehensions numbered 22,869, down 49% from the same period in FY2014.

UAC are defined in statute as children who lack lawful immigration status in the United States, who are under the age of 18, and who either are without a parent or legal guardian in the United States or without a parent or legal guardian in the United States who is available to provide care and physical custody. Two statutes and a legal settlement directly affect U.S. policy for the treatment and administrative processing of UAC: the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-457); the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296); and the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997.

Several agencies in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’s) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) share responsibility for the processing, treatment, and placement of UAC. DHS Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehends and detains unaccompanied children arrested at the border while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handles custody transfer and repatriation responsibilities. ICE also apprehends UAC in the interior of the country and represents the government in removal proceedings. HHS coordinates and implements the care and placement of unaccompanied children in appropriate custody.

Foreign nationals from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico accounted for almost all UAC cases in recent years, especially in FY2014. In FY2009, when the number of UAC apprehended at the Southwest border was 19,688, foreign nationals from Mexico accounted for 82% of all UAC apprehensions at the Southwest border and the three Central American countries accounted for 17% of these apprehensions. In FY2014, the proportions had almost reversed, with Mexican UAC comprising only 23% of UAC apprehensions and unaccompanied children from the three Central American countries comprising 77%.

To address the crisis, the Administration developed a working group to coordinate the efforts of federal agencies involved. It also opened additional shelters and holding facilities to accommodate the large number of UAC apprehended at the border. In June 2014, the Administration announced plans to provide funding to the affected Central American countries for a variety of programs and security-related initiatives; and in July, the Administration requested $3.7 billion in supplemental appropriations for FY2014 to address the crisis. Congress debated the supplemental appropriations but did not pass such legislation.

For FY2015, Congress appropriated nearly $1.6 billion for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance Programs in ORR, the majority of which is directed toward the UAC program (P.L. 113-235). For DHS agencies, Congress appropriated $3.4 billion for detection, enforcement, and removal operations, including for the transport of unaccompanied children for CBP. The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, FY2015 (P.L. 114-4) also permits the Secretary of Homeland Security to reprogram funds within CBP and ICE and transfer such funds into the two agencies’ “Salaries and Expenses” accounts for the care and transportation of unaccompanied children. P.L. 114-4 also allows for several DHS grants awarded to states along the Southwest border to be used by recipients for costs or reimbursement of costs related to providing humanitarian relief to unaccompanied children.

Congressional activity on two pieces of legislation in the 114th Congress (H.R. 1153 and H.R. 1149) would make changes to current UAC policy, including amending the definition of UAC, altering current law on the treatment of unaccompanied children from contiguous countries, and amending several asylum provisions that would alter how unaccompanied children who assert an asylum claim are processed, among other things. Several other bills have been introduced without seeing legislative activity (H.R. 191/S. 129, H.R. 1700, H.R. 2491, and S. 44). The full report is here.

 

UN is Whining About Immigration Crimes, So Blame Obama

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The United Nations published a dispatch on the sexual crimes of illegal immigrants while in detention. So….rather than whine about Donald Trump, hey UN, go knock on the doors of the White House and that of Jeh Johnson’s office.

At least Donald Trump deserves real praise for raising the verbal flags on the issue of immigration.

Sheesh, get a load of this.

Violence Against Women is the Dark Underbelly of The USA’s Migrant Detention System

Donald Trump is fond of ascribing violence in American cities to immigrants. He has even gone so far as to propose a Constitutional amendment that would erase the bedrock law of giving citizenship to any baby born on American shores.

But what about violence inflicted on migrants once they crossed the border?  The fact is,  many who come to the USA fleeing violence–particularly women–are subject to abuse upon arrival.

Central American women, detained in Texas last year, alleged sexual abuse in detention. Many were asylum-seekers. Some had suffered sexual violence back home. But the nightmare was not over. Guards took them from their cells for sex, women said. They groped mothers in front of their children. Playing on detainees’ desperation, guards told women they would help them once released – but in exchange for sex.

The horror stories hardly stop there. Transgendered women especially are at risk. Despite identifying as female, they are often placed in all-male units. Nicoll Hernández-Polanco, one transgendered woman detained in Arizona, fled Guatemala seeking asylum from persecution based on gender identity. In six months in all-male detention, she alleged that male guards constantly groped and insulted her. Another male detainee sexually assaulted her. When she protested these conditions, she was put in solitary confinement, she said.

These are only a few of many more sexual abuse allegations. The Government Accountability Officeinvestigated over 200 such complaints filed from 2009 to 2013. Yet even this number is an underestimate. Detainees often avoid reporting incidents, fearing retaliation or re-traumatization.

The sexual abuse of migrants in detention centers is the dirty underbelly of the USA’s migrant detention system. It’s a problem that has been known to authorities for years, yet there has not been sufficient effort to clamp down on these kinds of criminal activities that prey on deeply vulnerable women.

So what can be done to stop the abuse?

For starters, freeing certain detainees would probably help. Last month, a federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release mothers and children detained together. (The Texas women who alleged sexual abuse had been in such a family-detention center.) While a welcome change, this one step is far from a solution. Thousands of women are still detained. They are still potential victims of abuse.

There are broader, systemwide changes that might also push the needle in the right direction.

For one, the DHS does not follow guidelines set by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). These rules include more checks, training, and restrictions on guards. A first step is to improve compliance with PREA. Yet even that would only go so far. Detainees, like prisoners, are inherently vulnerable to abuse.

Also, many detainees are simply waiting to go to court. They have been convicted of no crime and pose no security threat. Detention is a drastic method just to ensure court attendance. Detainees might stay locked up for months. Each day they spend in detention, they remain at risk of abuse.

Finally, alternatives to detention already exist in many countries. In the USA, effective methods include social services and legal representation. Asylum-seekers are very likely to pursue their cases, even with no supervision.  With a better chance in court, people are more likely to show up for hearings. They need not be locked up beforehand.

Changes will be slow. The detention system is entrenched. To comply with Congressional budget directives, DHS must detain at least 34,000 people a day. Politicians must change this mandate to make detention reform possible.

The United Nations can play a role. It has already urged US compliance with PREA in detention centers. It can make more Americans aware of the abuses in detention centers and the alternatives to detention. Many voters know little about immigration detention, which happens in remote sites.  Alternatives to detention may be hard to imagine. The UN can help US advocates see how other countries have successfully used alternatives. With this knowledge, advocates can press for reforms to detention.

No immigration system should allow abuses in detention. Women fleeing violence must not suffer again. Asylum-seekers to the US must truly find refuge there.

*** Hold on…while this is a self inflicted wound at the hands of the Obama doctrine on immigration and while Jeh Johnson is his corrupt soldier…there is more they are hiding and with purpose.

STONEWALLED: Feds Hide Fiscal Details About Vast Operation To Resettle Illegal Alien Minors

Illegal aliens who show up at the border have been resettled all across United States of America instead of being detained and deported, as Donald Trump recently called for in his new immigration plan.

Breitbart: According to data from the Justice Department obtained by Breitbart News, 96 percent of Central Americans caught illegally crossing into the country last summer are still in the United States. Now Breitbart News has learned exclusively that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a pro-security group about the cost of this operation is being stonewalled.

In January of 2015, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, on behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), filed a FOIA request to discover the cost of accommodating the tens of thousands of illegal unaccompanied minors who came across the border encouraged by President Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty for illegal youths.

The FOIA letter made five requests of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency: that the federal agency detail (1) the costs of building of family detention centers; (2) the costs of apprehending, processing and detaining unaccompanied minors; (3) the costs transporting, transferring, removing and repatriating unaccompanied minors; (4) the costs related to ICE’s representation of government in removal procedures involving unaccompanied minors; and (5) the number of instances where objections to the return of unaccompanied minors were raised by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The federal agency, however, refused to answer many of these questions– instead only partially answering two of the five requests. The agency provided only the costs of transporting, transferring and removing illegal minors, as well as the costs of the man-hours such tasks required. Those costs totaled $58.2 million—quadrupling ICE’s costs of $15.6 million in the year previous.

FAIR told Breitbart News that the agency did not provide clear documentation nor explanation as to how it arrived at this estimation.

FAIR asserts that, “The failure to provide most of the cost information related to the surge of [unaccompanied minors] indicates that the government has either failed to properly document those costs, or is refusing to reveal them.”

Because this FOIA request only inquired into the fiscal impact on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency– it does not at all take into account the cost incurred by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nor the public education system. Because most of the unaccompanied minors were turned over to HHS following their apprehension, FAIR notes that HHS’ costs “for providing shelter, food, education, health care and other services, likely vastly exceed additional costs incurred by ICE.”

The flood of minors has also placed fiscal strains on our public education system. FAIR notes that, “68,541 [unaccompanied minors] were apprehended entering the U.S. Virtually all of them have been allowed to remain in the U.S., at least temporarily.”

Because federal law dictates that all children are entitled to an education regardless of their immigration status, the fiscal burden of educating these students has fallen onto our public education system.

As FAIR notes, educating 68,541 illegal immigrant children at “an average annual cost of $12,401 per child enrolled in K-12 education, the annual cost to local schools is at least $850 million. However, since virtually all of the [unaccompanied minors] are non-English proficient, the actual costs are likely substantially greater.”

The increased costs and difficulties associated with educating illegal minors from poor and developing countries has been well-documented. As Fox News Latino reported in June of this year, the border surge has left many “schools struggling with influx of unaccompanied minors.” While the federal government’s policy of releasing illegal minors into American communities imposes burdens all across our nation’s education system, it will perhaps hurt minority American students most profoundly, by straining the educational resources needed in their communities.

For instance, New York’s Hempstead School District, which is a 96 percent black and Hispanic district, had about 6,700 students dispersed amongst its 10 schools and usually receives an average of a couple hundred new students every year. “However, last summer’s enrollment skyrocketed to about 1,500 new kids – most of them undocumented immigrants.” Fox News Latino writes, “The crush of new enrollees left the district scrambling, forcing it to dip into its emergency reserves to shell out more than $6 million to hire more English as a Second Language teachers and additional staff to alleviate overcrowded classrooms. Still, it has not been enough. The average classroom in the district now has about 40 to 50 children and [as one teacher explained is] posing a safety issue… ‘You have to understand,’ [one teacher said], ‘many of the children are not even proficient in their native language, Spanish, and now we have to teach them how to speak English. That can be very difficult.’”

Deporting instead of resettling illegal immigrants would save taxpayer dollars in two ways.

First, by deterring future border crossings, it would reduce the amount of illegal immigration in the future. As FAIR explains, refusing to implement immigration law has only encouraged more illegal immigrants to unlawfully enter the United States: “In July 2015, the Government Accountability Office confirmed that President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program played a substantial role in triggering the surge of [unaccompanied minors] in 2014.”

Second, deporting rather than resettling illegal immigrants would save the costs of feeding, clothing, housing, educating, hospitalizing, and caring for illegal immigrants and their relatives. A previous study conducted by FAIR documented that illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers about $113 billion every year. After FAIR explains that by comparison, “The estimated cost of deporting an illegal alien is $8,318. Using just the partial enumerated $58.2 million costs to ICE and the conservative $850 million estimate for education of [unaccompanied minors] resettled in the U.S., the amount of taxpayer money spent on dealing with unaccompanied minors would have paid for the removal of an additional 109,000 illegal aliens.”

Obama’s Stand-down Order on Crimea/Ukraine

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Putin put 150,ooo troops on ready status during the Olympics for a military confrontation against Ukraine, but none was to come. The White House only responded with the usual condemnation. Russia continued to test the will of the West and there was no response. Russia already had military facilities in Crimea as the Russian Black Fleet is based there.

The United Nations issued their own warning to Russia over Ukraine, yet to date, almost 7000 are dead. Sanctions are the weapon of choice and there has been some impact on the Russian economy.

Russia will accept any compliant Russian government in Ukraine, beyond that or if threatened, Putin will increase his aggressions.

The shades of the Orange Revolution and the hostilities between Russia and Georgia in 2008 are at the core of the United States lack of will, strategy and response.

The back story here is the Minsk Agreement has no value and to date is not deliverable as the standing with Ukraine remains in an incubation condition at the hand of General Breedlove and NATO.

The U.S. has looked to support the Baltics under the building threat of Putin’s aggressions there.

Secretary of Defense is working the NATO operations and is European Command under Operation Atlantic Resolve.

U.S. Told Ukraine to Stand Down as Putin Invaded

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As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces took over Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014, the interim Ukrainian government was debating whether or not to fight back against the “little green men” Russia had deployed. But the message from the Barack Obama administration was clear: avoid military confrontation with Moscow.

The White House’s message to Kiev was advice, not an order, U.S. and Ukrainian officials have recently told us, and was based on a variety of factors. There was a lack of clarity about what Russia was really doing on the ground. The Ukrainian military was in no shape to confront the Russian Spetsnaz (special operations) forces that were swarming on the Crimean peninsula. Moreover, the Ukrainian government in Kiev was only an interim administration until the country would vote in elections a few months later. Ukrainian officials told us that other European governments sent Kiev a similar message.

But the main concern was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As U.S. officials told us recently, the White House feared that if the Ukrainian military fought in Crimea, it would give Putin justification to launch greater military intervention in Ukraine, using similar logic to what Moscow employed in 2008 when Putin invaded large parts of Georgia in response to a pre-emptive attack by the Tbilisi government. Russian forces occupy two Georgian provinces to this day.

Looking back today, many experts and officials point to the decision not to stand and fight in Crimea as the beginning of a Ukraine policy based on the assumption that avoiding conflict with Moscow would temper Putin’s aggression. But that was a miscalculation. Almost two years later, Crimea is all but forgotten, Russian-backed separatist forces are in control of two large Ukrainian provinces, and the shaky cease-fire between the two sides is in danger of collapsing.

“Part of the pattern we see in Russian behavior is to test and probe when not faced with pushback or opposition,” said Damon Wilson, the vice president for programming at the Atlantic Council. “Russia’s ambitions grow when they are not initially challenged. The way Crimea played out, Putin had a policy of deniability, there could have been a chance for Russia to walk away.”

When Russian special operations forces, military units and intelligence officers seized Crimea, it surprised the U.S. government. Intelligence analysts had briefed Congress 24 hours before the stealth invasion, saying the Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border was a bluff. Ukraine’s government — pieced together after President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev for Russia following civil unrest — was in a state of crisis. The country was preparing for elections and its military was largely dilapidated and unprepared for war.

There was a debate inside the Kiev government as well. Some argued the nation should scramble its forces to Crimea to respond. As part of that process, the Ukrainian government asked Washington what military support the U.S. would provide. Without quick and substantial American assistance, Ukrainians knew, a military operation to defend Crimea could not have had much chance for success.

“I don’t think the Ukrainian military was well prepared to manage the significant challenge of the major Russian military and stealth incursion on its territory,” said Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, told us. This was also the view of many in the U.S. military and intelligence community at the time.

There was also the Putin factor. In the weeks and months before the Crimea operation, Russia’s president was stirring up his own population about the threat Russian-speakers faced in Ukraine and other former Soviet Republics.

“They did face a trap,” said the Atlantic Council’s Wilson, who was the senior director for Europe at the National Security Council when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. “Any Ukrainian violent reaction to any of these unknown Russian speakers would have played into the narrative that Putin already created, that Ukraine’s actions threaten Russian lives and he would have pretext to say he was sending Russian forces to save threatened Russians.”

The White House declined to comment on any internal communications with the Ukrainian government. A senior administration official told us that the U.S. does not recognize Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea, and pointed to a series of sanctions the U.S. and Europe have placed on Russia since the Ukraine crisis began.

“We remain committed to maintaining pressure on Russia to fulfill its commitments under the Minsk agreements and restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea,” the senior administration official said.

Ever since the annexation of Crimea in March, 2014, there have been a group of senior officials inside the administration who have been advocating unsuccessfully for Obama to approve lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. These officials have reportedly included Secretary of State John Kerry, his top Europe official, Victoria Nuland, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and General Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander for NATO.

Obama has told lawmakers in private meetings that his decision not to arm the Ukrainians was in part due to a desire to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia, one Republican lawmaker who met with Obama on the subject told us. The U.S. has pledged a significant amount of non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military, but delivery of that aid has often been delayed. Meanwhile, Russian direct military involvement in Eastern Ukraine has continued at a high level.

Even former Obama administration Russia officials acknowledge that Ukraine’s decision last year to cede Crimea to Moscow, while making sense at the time, has also resulted in more aggression by Putin.

“Would a devastating defeat in Crimea serve the interest of the interim government? Probably not,” said Michael McFaul, who served as ambassador to Russia under Obama and is now a scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. But nonetheless, McFaul said, the ease with which Putin was able to take Crimea likely influenced his decision to expand Russia’s campaign in eastern Ukraine: “I think Putin was surprised at how easy Crimea went and therefore when somebody said let’s see what else we can do, he decided to gamble.”

The Obama administration, led on this issue by Kerry, is still pursuing a reboot of U.S.-Russia relations. After a long period of coolness, Kerry’s visit to Putin in Sochi in May was the start of a broad effort to seek U.S.-Russian cooperation on a range of issues including the Syrian civil war. For the White House, the Ukraine crisis is one problem in a broader strategic relationship between two world powers.

But for the Ukrainians, Russia’s continued military intervention in their country is an existential issue, and they are pleading for more help. While many Ukrainians agreed in early 2014 that fighting back against Russia was too risky, that calculation has now changed. The Ukrainian military is fighting Russian forces elsewhere, and Putin is again using the threat of further intervention to scare off more support from the West. If help doesn’t come, Putin may conclude he won’t pay a price for meddling even further.