Tag: Catholic Charities

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Why Isn’t Tennessee Helping to Fight the Border Battle?

It’s not as if illegal aliens crossing Biden’s open border aren’t settling in Tennessee.

Last week Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent a half hour talking with Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian, about everything his state is doing to push back against Biden’s open border for illegal immigration.

Paxton is an AG who understands the value of lawfare and that states cannot remain complacent indentured servants to the federal government. To date, Paxton’s office has filed five lawsuits challenging the Biden administration on immigration actions.

Tennessee’s AG Herb Slatery on the other hand, appears to be sitting out the fight which is easier to get away with when you don’t have to answer to the voters. Texas and forty-two other states, unlike Tennessee, elect their AG. And the Tennessee General Assembly isn’t willing to give that power to voters.

Viewed through the laissez-faire illegal immigration lens of Tennessee’s AG and the lack of legislative enthusiasm for insisting that every business in Tennessee use E-verify to help avoid employing illegal aliens, why should we expect anything else.

Add to this that Haslam, who campaigned opposing illegal immigration ending up endorsing actions that encouraged more illegal immigration to the state. For example, in the waning years of Haslam’s second term when he thankfully was going to not be the governor anymore, he was pushing in-state tuition for illegal alien students. Did he stop to even question how many came as UACs (unaccompanied alien children)? Then he cowardly refused to sign the anti-sanctuary city bill that Tennessee needed to make the law effective.

That bill became law without his signature anyway.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQxqgJxAgY

When it comes to the UACs crossing the border illegally and arriving in Tennessee, Bill Lee can deny any and all knowledge about it til the cows come home but good luck to him putting a credible spin on the paperwork which the Times Free Press reporter diligently unearthed and which makes Lee look like a ____(feel free to fill in the blank yourself).

So far according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services data which is only current to April 2021, Tennessee has received 1,111 putting the state in the top ten receiving states. The same data which only tracks counties that receive 50 or more UACs shows the following county numbers – Davidson – 436, Shelby – 213, Hamilton – 99, Knox – 53, Rutherford – 71, Sevier – 51.

U.S. Customs & Border Protection data for the total number of illegal border crossers in the current fiscal year, including family units, accompanied minors, single adults and UACs current to May totals 929,868 individuals. The UAC totals current to May are 79,948 crossing illegally.

By the end of March 2021, the latest data available, 2,946 UACs were released to a parent or step-parent in the U.S. and another 2,991 UACs were released to a relative (see category definitions here).

According to U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, HHS data from 2018-2019 shows 79% of these sponsors were “without status” – that means here illegally.

If you have any doubt, read this April story: 

“Lorena, a Guatemalan mother living in Atlanta, recalls getting a 4:25 a.m. call from her teenage daughters on March 12, a day after they’d crossed into the United States. The girls had borrowed a hidden cellphone from another teen being held in a packed Border Patrol tent in Texas. ‘We’re here,’ said Nancy, 16, crying. ‘When can you come get us?’ That was more than a month ago. The girls were transferred to a makeshift shelter at a San Diego convention center, where the younger daughter – Britney, 15 – became sick with covid-19. ‘I just want them to give me my daughters,’ said Lorena, who wanted her last name withheld because she came to the United States illegally.

Lorena left her daughters with her mother in their rural village outside the city of Huehuetenango more than a decade ago, soon after splitting up with their father.

She earns $14 an hour in a carpet factory in Atlanta, and lives with her 4-year-old U.S.-born son, a brother her daughters have never met. When the eldest began showing symptoms of acute anxiety and a sense of abandonment, Lorena decided the time had come for them to join her in Atlanta.

In November, she paid a smuggler $5,000 to bring the two girls to the Mexican border where they could surrender to U.S. agents. The Trump administration used an emergency health order to deny the girls’ release into the United States and flew them back to Guatemala.

Lorena paid smugglers $5,000 again in February. The Biden administration has pledged to no longer return minors to their home countries, so the girls were allowed in. Lorena said she is filling out all the paperwork, but she’s scared to travel to San Diego because her Guatemalan passport is her only legal identification.”

Human smuggling much? Apparently it’s the best known non-secret in Congress. Even Reuter’s is writing about it.

Are passive states like Tennessee complicit? Are passive federal and state legislators complicit?

And it’s not just people from Mexico and Latin America.

Both Haslam and Lee have feigned shock and surprise upon “discovering” that UACs were being delivered to parents and other relatives living in Tennessee. Surely these governors know that the illegal alien population has been growing for some time in Tennessee. Will Bill Lee pretend he doesn’t know about this either? 

Tennessee’s AG is super soft on illegal immigration going so far as to advocate for amnesty for the “dreamers” after meeting with the director from the TN Immigrant & Refugees Rights Coalition. When was the last time the AG asked your opinion about endorsing illegal immigration?

If your state legislator tells you there’s nothing the state can do about illegal immigration because it’s all in the hands of the federal government, suggest this – take back the $7.3 million dollar grant the state handed over to Catholic Charities of Tennessee to spread their operations into more counties and instead, send it to Texas to help build the wall. 

It’s the least our state elected officials can do.

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TN State Funds Catholic Charities’ Infrastructure for Refugee Resettlement

In November 2020, Tennessee’s Department of Human Services used the state’s bloated TANF fund to award Catholic Charities of Tennessee (CCTN) a $7.3 million dollar grant. The money will be used to help Catholic Charities expand its operations in Middle Tennessee by establishing family resource centers in ten locations – Montgomery, Maury, Marshall, Bedford, Coffee Grundy, Warren, White, Dekalb and Putnam counties.

Family resource centers in Davidson County are staffed to assist individuals including refugees to access public benefits and services. In fact, one such center specializes in assisting refugees. Last year CCTN moved its South Nashville family resource center into the Conexion Americas Casa Asafran building. It now shares space with the Global Education Center and Metro Public Schools, the American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC), and Justice For Our Neighbors (JFON), an organization which advocates for illegal alien “rights” including Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC)* who are currently being transported and housed in Chattanooga.**

As part of their services, CCTN assists in connecting UACs dropped off at the border, to family members in Tennessee who may have also entered the U.S. in violation of immigration laws like the case of Edwin Mejia in Tennessee.

CCTN’s former State Refugee Coordinator Holly Johnson admitted that her agency helps link UACs to their family members in Tennessee. At the US Conference of Catholic Bishops level, taking custody of the UACs is the “doing well by doing good” business – over $23 million dollars in 2019, quite a haul considering that the UAC numbers were extremely low compared to what the Biden administration has unleashed.

Regarding the resettlement of refugees from overseas, it is no secret that Bill Lee is a passionate supporter  for spreading them throughout the state. He is joined in his support for the federal program by state Sen. Page Walley who works for an organization that makes money providing refugee resettlement services.

Over the years the refugee mileage placement rules have enabled CCTN to place refugees in many of the counties that the $7.3 million dollars in state money is now funding to help CCTN expand and set up more formal operations.

50-100 miles covers almost the whole state

CCTN’s executive director thanked Governor Lee and the DHS for their largesse in giving them the largest grant in the history of the organization assuming of course that the multi-millions received year after year from the federal government, is ignored.

CCTN wears several hats in Tennessee including operating as the State Refugee Coordinator (SRC) overseeing the federal contractors paid to bring refugees to the state. In 2008, then governor Phil Bredesen formally withdrew the state from the federal program after which the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement chose CCTN to continue the state’s refugee resettlement program.

Once Catholic Charities took over the program opening the TN Office for Refugees and employing the State Refugee Coordinator, the number of refugees being brought to the state increased by over 60% even as numbers were declining nationally.

CCTN’s state plan was to increase the number of agencies resettling refugees so they could increase the number of refugees being brought to Tennessee.This federal program has been a cash cow for CCTN and the federal contractors resettling refugees.

Government funding, in particular for work related to refugee resettlement, has dominated CCTN’s work. For example, the last available CCTN report, FY2015-16, shows just under $10 million dollars in refugee resettlement grants which come from the federal government.

The financial breakdown clearly showing the heavy dependence on refugee resettlement funds was available on CCTN’s website until 2018 – it has now been removed making the organization’s operations much less transparent.

However, according to the financials posted on the Tennessee Secretary of State website, CCTN’s budget appears to continue to be heavily dependent on government funding.

None of the resettlement contractors operating in Tennessee, including CCTN and the SRC, consult with or are accountable to the state legislature which is forced to expend state dollars to operationalize the refugee resettlement program.

For this reason alone there are reasonable and legitimate questions about why the Tennessee state government chose CCTN of all organizations, to infuse with big dollars. Asked another way, why hasn’t the state simply taken back the SRC function so the state can control the number of refugees brought to the state and the amount of state dollars used for the federal program?

On April 16th, Biden signed a memo intended to speed up the arrival of refugees but left Trump’s FY21 low cap in place – that was until the religious groups who need to fill their coffers, raised the roof. By the afternoon of the 16th, Biden caved and promised that by mid-May, the cap for the remainder of the fiscal year, would be raised to over 60,000.

Don’t be surprised if the enhanced vetting criteria put in place by Trump goes by the wayside. In 2016, after Obama announced that the U.S. would take 10,000 Syrian refugees, his administration “repeatedly shortened the timeframe” for vetting these refugees in order to get as close to that number as possible. So when refugee contractors claim that refugees are the most thoroughly vetted immigrants to the U.S…..

On thing is for certain – when the call comes that refugees are ready to come to Tennessee, CCTN will be ready!

 

*in line with the Biden administration’s unconstitutional rewrite of U.S. immigration law and erase the illegal immigration status of UACs, they are now referred to simply as “UC” – unaccompanied children.
**once UACs are released to sponsors in Tennessee, they are entitled to attend public school.

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Tell Greedy Refugee Contractors to Keep Their Hands Off Your Community!

But you’ll need the help of your mayor and your city council and/or commission.

President Trump’s Executive Order is giving power back to Tennessee citizens to decide whether they want federal refugee contractors to “transform” their communities with imported refugees.

Here are the rules of this game:

  • both the Governor and the “locality” for refugee placement, have to say “yes” we want refugees. This means they also agree to pay any and all short and long-term costs imposed by the federal program.
  • however, if either the Governor or the “locality” say no thanks, then supposedly, newly arriving refugees from overseas won’t be placed in that “locality.”
  • however, the Governor may consent to resettling refugees in only certain consenting localities within the state. This option is a total fiction and is as good as agreeing to put almost ALL cities and counties in Tennessee up for grabs for resettlement – even if they’ve never been an initial resettlement site.

FEDERAL RESETTLEMENT CONTRACTORS ARE ALLOWED TO PLACE REFUGEES ANYWHERE FROM 50 TO 100 MILES FROM THE REFUGEE CONTRACTOR’S OFFICE. 

                50-100 miles covers almost the whole state

This is just one of the many dirty little secrets that the federal contractors keep to themselves.

 And it’s been going on in Tennessee for years. Here’s the proof – the State Department’s reports show that over the years refugees have been resettled in Clarksville, LaVergne, Smyrna, Murfreesboro, Mt. Juliet, Franklin, Spring Hill, Shelbyville, Gallatin, Johnson City, just to name a few.

A few years ago, Catholic Charities of TN employee and federal contractor Holly Johnson who became the state refugee coordinator after the State of Tennessee withdrew from the voluntary refugee program, insisted during testimony to a legislative committee, that refugees were never directly resettled in Bedford County.

Well oops!!! A report subsequently issued by TIRRC about the victimization of Muslims in Tennessee, disclosed that in fact, at least 13 refugees had been directly resettled in Bedford County during the time period Johnson was asked about.

And just in case anyone (ie, Governor Lee) thinks you can pick and choose which refugees you get like maybe all Middle Eastern Christians, Refugee Resettlement Watch and Voice of America clear this up – no you can’t:

Again, by agreeing to ‘welcome’ refugees, your governor is saying your state will take any number from anywhere in the world!

Despite the consent requirement, state and local governments will not be able to choose which refugees it wants to accept, or to exclude certain groups.

Even the rules say you can’t pick and choose.

And just in case you’re thinking that the refugee resettlement industry has anything to do with religious prescriptions about welcoming the stranger – think again – it is first and foremost about money and cheap labor.

It wasn’t that long ago that Catholic Charities’ Holly Johnson, state refugee coordinator and federal contractor, wouldn’t even help the newly arrived refugees that had literally been dumped in Rutherford County by another refugee contractor who got their money, closed their office and left the refugees with nothing.

The State Department guidance says local consent or non-consent for bringing in refugees, has to be in writing from the “chief executive officer of the local government.

Open border leftist groups and the federal refugee contractors have been working at this for weeks. Some say December 25 is the deadline, others say January 21 and others suggest that the deadline can extend to June 1, 2020 when the new grant money comes into play.

But since the left has made this a referendum on Trump’s immigration policies, the sooner you get your local government’s support for Trump out there, the better.

Hopefully, Governor Lee will get the message about what voters in Tennessee want – the same voters who put him into office.

Knoxville’s city council passed a unanimous resolution to keep refugees coming and directed their leftist mayor to put the city’s consent in writing. There should be little doubt that Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga’s city councils and mayors will do the same in the coming weeks.

And it’s still critical to contact the Governor’s office and remind him that the federal government has admitted to transferring the costs of the refugee program to the states – the very reason Tennessee has a lawsuit challenging the program. If the Governor consents to refugee resettlement even for just the four counties where the contractor offices are located, the state’s lawsuit goes away and he puts almost every single town, city and county in the state up for grabs.

So what exactly Governor Lee’s office mean when they said that “[w]e will continue working with the federal government to determine the best outcome for Tennessee.” And who is he listening to??

 

What about the voters who put him into office????

 

 

 

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The Religion of Peace & Catholic Charities Brings Murderers, Gangs, “Juvenile” Thieves & Other Criminals to Nashville

Try and guess what these guys all have in common aside from being lowlife dregs and would anybody be surprised that none of the detailed reports about their brutal crimes and thievery mention one word about their ethnicities?

Aweis Haji-Mohamed, a/k/a Son Son – in 2018, pleaded to 35 year prison sentence

He is described as a “man at the heart of violent crime activity in the [Nashville] J.C. Napier and Tony Sudekum Public Housing neighborhoods” Indicted in 2016, Son-Son was indicted in July 2016, charged charged with a variety of federal firearms offenses relating to his involvement in an on-going violent crime wave, including armed robberies and murders. He was also into robbing cocaine dealers.

“On January 24, 2015, Haji-Mohamed entered a house on Joseph St., in Nashville, armed with a .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun and looking for a Bloods gang member that he had been in an argument with earlier, as a result of Haji-Mohamed stealing a gun from another Bloods Gang member. The house was occupied by the gang member’s elderly grandmother and other persons, including several juveniles and a disabled child. Not finding the person he was looking for, Haji-Mohamed fired numerous rounds into the walls and floor before leaving the house.”

Several days later, he found the cocaine dealer he was looking for and murdered him by shooting him in the head.

It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that this guy is Somali.

Mohamed Almahmmody – arrested in 2015 and in January 2018, was found guilty of premeditated murder and three counts of aggravated assault.

This guy has a variety of earlier charges including vandalism, reckless endangerment and assault. He also had an accomplice girlfriend who was in a psych hospital.

This guy’s name strongly suggests he is Iraqi although he could be Kurdish. Another reason to think he might be Kurdish is because he was being investigated by the Nashville Gang Unit.

In 2007, the Kurdish Pride Gang (KPG) which grew out of the Nashville refugee Kurdish enclave, shined a different spotlight on the Kurdish community. Police described gang members as “increasingly vicious and brazen.” Gang experts warn that gangs made up of people that come from war-torn countries pose a “unique problem” because they are desensitized to violence and dismissive of authority.

In 2012, Metro police used a new tactic to break the KPG gang. A judge ruled the gang a public nuisance.

“Based on a lengthy investigation by the police department’s Gang Unit, the Metropolitan Legal Department this morning filed the lawsuit in Davidson County Criminal Court. It alleges KPG members are known to engage in vandalism, assaults, the illegal possession and discharge of guns, burglaries, witness intimidation, street robberies, conspiracy to commit murder, threatening police officers, gambling, arson and fraud. The investigation found that many of those acts take place on a regular basis in order to maintain power over the community, recruit new members, and threaten and intimidate citizens to keep silent about KPG activities.”

Of course, this never stopped Nashville’s Kurdish activists including Remziya Suleyman, Drost Kokoye and Kasar Abdullah, who helped launch the American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC) and its sister organization American Center for Outreach (ACO) from downplaying the existence and activities of the KPG.

Last year, Jiyayi Suleyman, Metro Nashville’s first Kurdish policeman, was charged with 57 counts of official misconduct and accused of KPG member.

Suleyman’s sister Remziya, was among the most aggressive pro-Islamist activists in Nashville – thankfully she doesn’t live her anymore. In fact, most of the pro-Islamist activism has been initiated and led by members of the Nashville Kurdish community actively abetted by Nashville’s Somali community.

Last week a quad of thugs – Adam Mohamed, Amir Adam, Jamal Abdillahi and Sakariy Mohamed – also a safe bet they are Somalis.

These thugs, were involved in a car-jacking, attempted robberies, assault – all committed while pointing a gun at their intended victims.

Amir Adam was reported to be free on $3,500 bond. “At the time of his arrest, he was already free on a $6,500 bond for his March 18th arrest fo unlawful drug and handgun possession.”

It has become a pretty standard practice that when it appears that individuals of a certain, very specific, most likely, ethnicity and/or faith group, are involved in distasteful behavior, that information is not released for public reporting.

That being said, there is no way to know whether these lowlifes were born here or were imported via the Catholic Charities of TN (CCTN) refugee resettlement program which is credited with bringing Somali refugees to Nashville.

Two of the lowlifes involved in last week’s crime are reported to be 19 years old and the other two, 17 years old, making them “juveniles” for purposes of criminal law. Of course, there is absolutely no way to be sure that these ages are even accurate. Many refugees have no knowledge of their birth dates or documentation listing their actual birthdays and end up being assigned a January 1 birthday when they arrive in the U.S.

The FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment noted that Somali nationals involved in gang activity were mostly refugees and that Somali gang activity was reported in Nashville.

“Somali gangs tend to align and adopt gang names based on clan or tribe, although a few have joined national gangs such as the Crips and Bloods…

Somalian gangs are involved in drug and weapons trafficking, human trafficking, credit card fraud, prostitution, and violent crime. Homicides involving Somali victims are often the result of clan feuds between gang members. Sex trafficking of females across jurisdictional and state borders for the purpose of prostitution is also a growing trend among Somalian gangs.” 

Minneapolis, the city with the highest concentration of Somalis in the U.S. was reported to have experienced a dramatic increase last year in violent crimes because of Somali gang activity.