Category Archives: Illegal Immigration

United States Becoming Refugee’stan

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There is 1…ONE champion in Washington DC that is leading the charge to stop the reckless Obama/Kerry refugee program threatening our national security at least for two years, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions:

WASHINGTON— Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee’s hearing to investigate the Administration’s controversial plan to admit nearly 200,000 refugees over the next two fiscal years, including a large increase in Syrian refugees, on top of the existing annual admittance of 1 million permanent residents.

  • In the last five decades, 59 million immigrants have entered the United States.
  • Immigration, including the children of post-1965 immigrants, added 72 million people to the U.S. population.
  • One-fifth of the world’s immigrants live in the United States.  No other country has taken in more than 1 in 20.  We have taken in 6 times more immigrants than all of Latin America, and 10 million more immigrants than the European Union.
  • We have permanently resettled 1.5 million immigrants from Muslim countries in the United States since 9/11.
  • In 1970, fewer than 1 in 21 Americans was foreign-born, today it is approaching 1 in 7 and will soon eclipse the highest levels ever recorded.
  • Pew projects new immigrants and their children will add another 103 million individuals to our resident population over the next five decades.  That means for every one new resident produced by our existing population, immigration will add another 7 new residents.
  • Six of the ten decades of the 20th century witnessed immigration declines.  Every decade of the 21st century will see rapidly-rising immigration, with each decade setting a new all-time record.
  • After four decades of large-scale immigration, Pew shows that – by more than a 3:1 margin – the public would like to see immigration reduced, not increased.  According to Rasmussen, only 7% of Americans support resettling 100,000 Middle Eastern refugees in the United States.
  • Meanwhile, recent studies from Georgetown Professor Eric Gould and Harvard Professor George Borjas, have linked this huge increase in the foreign labor supply to the crippling wage stagnation and joblessness afflicting our workers.

 

With that context in mind, we must consider what our economic, social and security infrastructure can responsibly handle.  Let us not also forget that we are presently dealing with our hemisphere’s immigration crisis.

The situation in Syria and throughout the Middle East is not a problem that can be solved with immigration.  While the United States may have a role to play – such as establishing “safe zones” in Syria, as recommended by General Petraeus – it would be more cost-effective to support refugees in locations closer to their homes with the long-term goal of returning them home instead of permanent resettlement elsewhere in the world.  That is why Middle Eastern nations must take the lead in resettling their region’s refugees. It is not a sound policy to respond to the myriad problems in the region by encouraging millions to abandon their home.  Resettling the region’s refugees within the region is the course likeliest to produce long-term political reforms and stabilization. More here.

How bad can it really be?

U.S. Refugee Chief Didn’t Know Boston Bombers Were Refugees

Blake Neff/DailyCaller: At a Thursday Congressional hearing regarding the Obama administration’s plan to welcome tens of thousands of additional refugees into the United States, the administration’s top refugees official revealed that she had no idea whether the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston bombing arrived in the U.S. as refugees.

Barbara Strack, who serves as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service of the Department of Homeland Security, was grilled by the subcommittee’s chairman, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Sessions asked Strack whether it was accurate that the two Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsarnaev, had entered the U.S. as refugees from Chechnya.

 

“I would need to check with my colleagues, sir,” Strack replied.

The exchange can be seen at about 1:48:42 in C-SPAN’s recording of the hearing.

Needless to say, the Boston bombers actually were refugees, with their parents arriving in the U.S. on tourist visas in 2002 and then claiming asylum on the basis that their ties to Chechnya could expose them to persecution back in Russia. Once their parents were given asylum, the two boys and their sisters were able to also receive asylum by extension.

That asylum was upgraded to legal permanent residency in 2007. In 2013, the brothers bombed the Boston Marathon, throwing the city into panic and ultimately killing five people. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed by police during the chase to apprehend the brothers, while Dzhokhar was arrested and recently sentenced to death for his role in the attack.

The Obama administration recently announced plans to settle about 200,000 refugees in the U.S. over the next two years, including about 10,000 from Syria. On Thursday, the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest called a hearing to discuss the plan and whether it exposed the U.S. to unnecessary risks.

The experience of the Tsarnaevs is relevant, as critics of Obama’s refugee plan argue that importing thousands of Syrian refugees could essentially import Syria’s problems into the United States, exposing the country to more terrorist attacks motivated by radical Islam.

 

 

 

Obama Admin Paying Latin American Juveniles Millions

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$13 Mil to Help Central American Youths That Don’t Make it to U.S.

It’s not enough that the U.S. government is spending enormous sums to care for the recent influx of Central American illegal immigrants, the Obama administration also keeps sending large amounts of taxpayer dollars to the countries they came from to help those who stayed behind.

Judicial Watch first reported on this last year after discovering that the administration dedicated $2.5 million for juvenile justice reform in the Central American nations that had just bombarded the U.S. with tens of thousands of illegal alien minors. Officially coined Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) by the U.S. government, they came in herds from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala via Mexico. The Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three countries even though they have long been plagued by serious crime and rampant bloodshed.

Now American taxpayers are funding the UACs education, housing and medical care in this country as well as programs back home for those who don’t make it north. For instance, the $2.5 million allocated last year will help “improve corrections administration and professionalism” in the Central American countries. It will also create opportunities for “re-socialization” of the offenders through community service, paid work or studies to learn a profession or trade and pay for legal representation. The administration claims the investment will help minimize the impact of international crime and illegal drugs on the United States, its citizens and partner nations.

This month Uncle Sam sent over another $13 million to provide job training to at-risk youth in El Salvador and Honduras. The goal is to help them develop “mark-relevant skills and secure good employment,” according to the official government announcement. It’s part of a four-year project called Youth Pathways-Central America and it’s expected to help 5,100 low-income youth, ages 14 to 20, who reside in areas with high rates of violence. Social services and emergency shelter will also be available and so will training services for 1,900 of the youth’s family members.

This is the same demographic that’s entered the U.S. in droves in the last year, 60,000 by the government’s latest count. They have mostly made their way into the country through the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, brought in dangerous diseases—including swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis— and occupied our military bases as shelters. Many have been disbursed throughout the U.S., igniting a crisis for overwhelmed public school districts nationwide. Last year Judicial Watch reported on a study that revealed states are spending an astounding $761 million a year to educate the UACs in public schools around the country.

This includes special Limited English Proficient (LEP) classes conducted in Spanish or in other indigenous Central American languages as well as free school meals for the new arrivals. In many cases the UACs have very little if any education, making the task all the more difficult. Texas and New York will get hit the hardest, the study reveals. Texas has the most UACs—5,280—and it will cost $78 million a year to educate them, the figures show. New York has less—4,244—but will spend more, $148 million, because evidently it’s more expensive to school kids in the state.

Soon Americans will inevitably get stuck with exorbitant incarceration costs for some of these UACs. Just a few weeks ago JW reported that many have joined the nation’s most violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13. The information comes from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which reveals in a 19-page report that MS-13 has emerged as a top tier gang in the state thanks to the new arrivals. A year earlier JW had already reported that gangs were actively recruiting UACs at shelters immediately after arriving in the U.S. and they were using Red Cross phones to communicate.

Obama did not Invite FBI Director to Seminar

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Place this story and decision into the WTH file.

F.B.I. Chief Not Invited to Meeting on Countering Violent Extremism

NYT > WASHINGTON — The White House did not invite the most senior American official charged with preventing terrorist attacks — the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — to the three-day conference this week on countering violent extremism in the United States and abroad because the administration did not want the event too focused on law enforcement issues, according to senior American officials.
But Mr. Comey’s Russian counterpart — Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet K.G.B. — was at the meeting, even though international human rights groups have repeatedly accused the Russian security service of unjustly detaining and spying on Russians and others.


The service also declined to provide American counterterrorism and intelligence officials with information before the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that would probably have led to more scrutiny of one of the suspects.

Several other foreign law enforcement officials attended the conference, which was held in Washington. The meeting has been criticized as ineffectual and irrelevant, and not focused on immediate and tangible solutions to stop terrorists. And some Republicans said that President Obama’s speech to the assembled leaders on Wednesday did not lay out a strategy for defeating groups like the Islamic State.
The omission of Mr. Comey adds further uncertainty over who in the government is in charge of the anti-extremist effort. Just a few months ago, the F.B.I. put out a lengthy bulletin on its website about how it was leading “a new approach to countering violent extremism.” Many of the strategies listed by the F.B.I. appear similar to ones mentioned at the meeting.


An Obama administration official defended the decision not to invite Mr. Comey, saying that “while the F.B.I. works tirelessly to keep the country safe, this conference was not centered on federal law enforcement.”
The official said that the administration’s efforts to counter violent extremists “are premised on the notion that local officials and communities can be an effective bulwark against violent extremism, and most of the participants — spanning community leaders, local, law enforcement, private sector innovators, and others — reflected this bottom-up approach.” A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.
Mr. Comey’s boss, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., attended the conference, and several F.B.I. officials participated in its panels, the official said.
The administration did not specifically invite Mr. Bortnikov, the official said. Instead, it had sent a general invitation to the Russian government, which chose Mr. Bortnikov, along with others, to come to Washington.
The administration did not try to prevent Mr. Bortnikov, who rarely visits the United States, from attending, said the official, who did not want to be identified discussing internal White House deliberations. Mr. Bortnikov is on the European Union sanctions list in response to the crisis in Ukraine, but he is not subject to American sanctions.
The programs intended to prevent Americans from becoming extremists are led by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Obama administration said in a news release on Wednesday that the effort to counter violent extremism “encompasses the preventive aspects of counterterrorism as well as interventions to undermine the attraction of extremist movements and ideologies that seek to promote violence.”
Stopping terrorist attacks has been the F.B.I.’s highest priority since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The bureau oversees joint terrorism task forces in every major American city that bring together federal, state and local authorities to investigate terrorism.

***

This is not the first little confab concocted by Barack Obama. Back in February of 2015, Obama had the same session calling on 60 nations. Progress? Not so much.

WASHINGTON — President Obama called on Americans and more than 60 nations on Wednesday to join the fight against violent extremism, saying they had to counter the ideology of the Islamic State and other groups making increasingly sophisticated appeals to young people around the world.
On the second day of a three-day meeting that comes after a wave of terrorist attacks in Paris, Sydney, Copenhagen and Ottawa, Mr. Obama said undercutting the Sunni militant group’s message and blunting its dark appeal was a “generational challenge” that would require cooperation from mainstream Muslims as well as governments, communities, religious leaders and educators. “We have to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies that these terrorist groups use to incite people to violence,” Mr. Obama told an auditorium full of community activists, religious leaders and law enforcement officials — some of them skeptical about his message — gathered at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. “We need to find new ways to amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion, and we especially need to do it online.”

WH has Task Force Terror Report, No Strategy

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Not since the Bush Administration and the 9/11 Commission Report has there been a task force or congressional study group that has investigated and evaluated a new domestic threat report. In March of 2015, a bi-partisan committee in Congress was established with 10 members to study domestic Islamic soldiers and sympathizers. The report is chilling and further it has declared the White House has no strategy, so the committee crafted 32 recommendations. The full report is here.

The report studied individual cases where they were provided access to files by the FBI as countless other cases are still under investigation. Minnesota, California, New York and New Jersey were the 4 top listed states that had the majority of travelers leaving the United States to join Islamic State or other in kind terror groups. Up to at least 250 are known at this time.

The United States has failed to stop the flow back and forth and further allied intelligence agencies and countries are not advanced enough or have authorization to fully cooperate with the United States.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has largely failed to stop more than 250 Americans who have traveled overseas since 2011 to join or try to join terrorist groups, including the Islamic State group, a new congressional study concluded on Tuesday. It did not provide details on the several dozen who have sneaked back into the United States without being arrested or monitored.

“The findings are concerning; we are losing in this struggle to keep Americans from the battlefield,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Tuesday after his committee released the 65-page report.

The report said the Obama administration lacked a strategy to prevent such travel abroad, identify all who try to return to commit terror attacks, or cope with new recruitment practices and technology that allow extremists to communicate securely.

“Of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them,” the report said. “Several dozen have also managed to make it back into America.” It noted that several people were identified and arrested this year trying to return to the United States.

In other cases, authorities are monitoring people who have returned form the region, said McCaul, R-Texas.

Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., who helped author the report, said radicalization of Americans over the Internet “poses probably the biggest problem” for U.S. law enforcement and others trying to detect and combat efforts by international terrorist organization to recruit U.S. citizens to join the fight overseas.

The report said of particular concern were western Europeans who travel to Iraq or Syria and would be permitted to fly to the U.S. without applying for a visa.

“American returnees are not the only threat to the United States,” it said.

Katko said the committee will work to draft several pieces of legislation based on the report’s 32 recommendations.

After the release of the committee report, the State Department announced that 10 people and five groups were declared Specially Designated Global Terrorists. People in the U.S. are generally prohibited from doing business with those given that designation.

POTUS Granted Refugee Status to Terror Connectors

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Courtesy of Judicial Watch:

During Fiscal Year 2014, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) applied 1,519 exemptions to individual applicants under the Secretary of Homeland Security’s exercises of discretionary authority.1 Of those 1,519 exemptions:

 

 806 were processed for refugee applicants,

 19 were processed for asylum applicants,

 614 were processed for applicants for lawful permanent resident status,

 29 were processed for beneficiaries of petitions for derivative refugee or asylum status,

 34 were processed for applicants for Temporary Protected Status,

 9 were processed for applicants for Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA); and

 7 were processed for applicants for relief before the U.S. Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

Regarding the reasons for the 1,519 exemptions:

 627 were processed for an applicant’s provision of material support, while under duress, to an undesignated terrorist organization as defined at INA section 212(a)(3)(B)(vi)(III), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B)(vi)(III) (Tier III terrorist organization), under the Secretary of Homeland Security’s February 26, 2007 exercise of authority relating to Tier III organizations,

 189 were processed for an applicant’s provision of material support, while under duress, to a designated terrorist organization as defined under INA section 212(a)(3)(B)(vi)(I)-(II), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B)(vi)(I)-(II) (Tier I or II terrorist organization), under the Secretary’s April 27, 2007 exercise of authority relating to Tier I and Tier II organizations,

 9 were processed for an applicant’s receipt of military-type training, while under duress, from a terrorist organization, under the Secretary’s January 7, 2011 exercise of authority relating to Tier I, Tier II and Tier III organizations,

 28 were processed for an applicant’s provision of voluntary medical care to members of a terrorist organization in the course of their professional responsibilities without assisting in the violent activities of an organization or individual, under the Secretary’s October 13, 2011 exercise of authority relating to Tier I, Tier II and Tier III organizations,

37 were processed for certain qualified aliens with existing immigration benefits under the Limited General Exemption2 who: provided material support to, solicited funds for, solicited individuals for membership in or received military-type training from certain qualified Tier III terrorist organizations, under the Secretary’s August 10, 2012 exercise of authority relating to certain Tier III organizations;3 and

 628 were processed for applicants who had certain activities or affiliations with specific groups which the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General, has approved for consideration of an exemption.4

Exemptions allow certain refugees and other aliens the opportunity to receive a benefit or protection following the successful completion of a thorough vetting process. USCIS procedures require that all applicants’ names and fingerprints be checked against a broad array of records of individuals known to be security threats, including the terrorist watch list, and those of law enforcement concern. In addition to rigorous background vetting, including checks coordinated across several government agencies, the Secretary of Homeland Security’s discretionary authority is only applied on a case-by-case basis after careful review of all factors and all security checks have cleared.

Read the full DHS report here.