Thousands of Muslim refugees are flowing into the small Idaho town of Twin Falls because of closed-door decisions made by a group of self-serving advocates in and around Washington D.C.
One key player is Lavinia Limón, CEO of the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). That’s a government-backed group that is paid to place migrants in Americans’ towns. Her group is also called a “voluntary agency,” or ‘VOLAG.’ The group’s local affiliate, the College of Southern Idaho, has already placed 1,000 Iraqi refugees in Twin Falls.
Limón is married to a man that she met in Saudi Arabia while bringing refugees to the United States, and since 1975, she’s been using the government-supplied flood of unskilled and culturally distant migrants to convert Americans’ neighborhoods into “new American communities.” Most of the targeted neighborhoods are in politically weak towns far from wealthy districts, who are protected from migrant inflows by influential politicians.
Limón is part of a circle of Democratic progressive politicians who believe Americans’ government should not favor Americans over foreigners, and that all humans — Americans and Afghans, Christians and Muslims, skilled and unskilled, healthy and diseased — should be welcomed in the United States. She is allied with various business groups — plus their GOP supporters — who use each annual inflow of migrant workers as replacements for prior years’ migrants, many of whom flee to better and safer jobs.
She was named director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) by President Bill Clinton in 1993, where she worked for Donna Shalala, who was Secretary of Health and Human Services. These days, Shalala is the current president of the Clinton Foundation.
Before she left ORR in 2001, Limón funded a 48-page report that published in 2004 by the Migration Policy Institute. That report, titled, “Building the New American Community: Newcomer Integration and Inclusion Experiences in Non-Traditional Gateway Cities.” is the how-to plan used by migration activists to transform small cities into refugee homes by partnering with local institutions, such as the Chamber of Commerce and community/technical colleges.
Limón took over the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants in 2001, and she used the how-to plan to push migrants into Twin Falls. Other cities who got migrants include Lowell, Massachusetts, Nashville, Tennessee and Portland, Oregon, all of which were “model programs” touted in the 2004 Migration Policy Institute study.
USCRI has recently expanded its push for a “new American community” program to other small cities, such as Rutland, Vermont, where it secretly cooperated with the mayor to resettle 100 Syrian refugees against strong local opposition. Those 100 Syrians are just part of the 10,000 Syrians that President Barack Obama is rushing into the country before his departure in January.
Those plans have worked well for Democrats and their business allies. The politicians have gained millions of new welfare-dependent voters, and the business groups have gotten a flood of replaceable low-wage workers that don’t complain about unsafe working conditions and low wages.
But those plans have dumped a variety of problems on Americans’ cities — crime, low-wage jobs, higher education costs and social turmoil, for example.
One result of the “new American community” that Limón and her local allies created in Twin Falls is the tension and conflict between foreign migrants and Americans, which is exemplified by the five-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted in an incident involving three refugee boys, age seven to fourteen, this past June.
On Thursday, Breitbart‘s Lee Stranahan spoke exclusively with the father of the victim, who said that he had viewed the video taken by one of the three refugee boys of the assault in which ” new allegations against a ten-year-old boy who was involved in the June 2 attack were revealed in court on Thursday afternoon, alleging the boy both anally and orally penetrated the five-year-old, in addition to urinating on her, as revealed by the father in the clip below.”:
I watched about thirty seconds of it. There was a lot more on there that I did not see. But what I did see is… is horrific for a father to watch for their… for that thing. And so after I watched all that, I came outside, trying to keep my composure because that whole family was still outside my apartment, you know, they were trying to stop us from calling the police, pleading with us.
The shift in American immigration policy from full “assimilation” down to mere side-by-side “integration” was imposed with little notice by a phalanx of social engineers — including Limón — has had extremely damaging effects on the fabric of Americans’ civic culture. This was described by John J. Miller in his 1998 book, The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined the Assimilation Ethic. A review by the Ashbrook Institute said:
In his book, Miller contends that the United States is currently in the midst of an assimilation crisis—one brought about not by immigrants, but by American institutions that have surrendered in the struggle to help newcomers assimilate.
Tensions in Twin Falls, as in many targeted refugee resettlement communities around the country, are not limited to classroom problems, reduced wages or common criminality.
As Breitbart News reported previously, the Idaho Department of Welfare and Health has confirmed that seven recently resettled refugees have been diagnosed with active tuberculosis in the state between 2011 and 2015.
At least one resettled refugee in Idaho posed a national security risk. Fazliddin Kurbanov, a resettled refugee from Uzebek, was convicted of three terrorism-related charges in 2015. Charges included providing material support to a U.S. designated terrorist organization and planning an attack in the U.S.
Refugee resettlement in Idaho increased significantly during Limon’s tenure at ORR. It rose from 252 of the 119,000 resettled in the entire country in FY 1993 to 676 of the 84,000 resettled in the entire country in FY 2001. Jan Reeves, currently the head of the Idaho Office of Refugees, helped those placements while employed by the state of Idaho. In 2013, Reeves was “Champion of Change” honored by President Obama and featured on the White House website.
Reeve’s Idaho Office for Refugees is an affiliate of a large VOLAG now known as Janus, which in August 2015 reported having 76 full-time and 58 part-time employees.
Around 2002, Idaho withdrew from the federal refugee resettlement program, and Janus was hired by the federal government to operate the program. The federal government bypassed the state’s opposition by using the statutorily questionable Wilson Fish alternative program, which was created by a regulation pushed through the Department of Health and Human Services by Limon while she headed ORR during the 1990s.
According to its website, the College of Southern Idaho Refugee Program [CSRIP] “is the only provider of refugee specific services for South-Central Idaho.”
Since it’s inception [in 1982], the CSIRP [College of Southern Idaho Refugee Program] has resettled more than 2500 refugees from a variety of different continents; providing local businesses with a steady source of entry level workers. The Program has also brought more than $3 million of federal money and benefits back to the Magic Valley that have been used to purchase goods and services from local merchants. It has also been a source of students pursuing career and professional upgrades through the College of Southern Idaho. Many former refugees now hold prominent positions in the Twin Falls community.
The CSIRP affiliated with USCRI in 1993.
Other VOLAGs operating in Idaho include the International Rescue Committee, World Relief, and Janus.
The largest concentration of refugee nationalities for refugees resettled in Idaho since 2000 have come from “Iraq, Congo, Burma, Bhutan, Afghanistan, and Somalia,” according to the Idaho Office for Refugees.
Thirty-five Syrian refugees were resettled in Boise in FY 2015.
Though the CSIRP said in April it expects to be resettling Syrian refugees in Twin Falls, no date has yet been set for their arrival.
Twin Falls and the immediate area is a center of food processing center, and many local employers in that industry hire refugees as workers.
As Breitbart News reported previously:
Chobani Yogurt, the company that owns and operates the largest yogurt manufacturing facility in the world in Twin Falls, thanks in part to $54 million in federal and state grants, relies heavily on refugees brought in by USCRI and the College of Southern Idaho as employees. In 2015, CNN reported that 600 of the company’s 2,000 employees are refugees.
In September 2015, USCRI’s Limón appeared with Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya at a panel hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative, whose purpose was, in part, to encourage American companies to hire refugees instead of Americans.
Limón told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999 she began her career working with Vietnamese refugees in 1975:
After graduating from the University of California in Berkeley with a degree in sociology in 1972, Limon had a couple of jobs she did not like. One was processing mortgage loans. She quit and went to live with her parents at the motel they owned in San Clemente.
It was 1975.
“We watched Vietnam fall on television, and then we started getting all these people coming in and staying at the motel who were working out at Camp Pendleton with the Vietnamese refugees,” Limon said in an interview in her spartan office at task force headquarters.
The new guests, employees of voluntary agencies, at first had little effect on Limon, who was spending her time “sleeping late and hanging around the beach.”
“But one day one of them asked my mother if she knew anybody who needed a job, because they were going to need to hire a lot of folks. . . I was asleep, and my mother opened up the door and said, `Do you want a job out at Camp Pendleton with the refugees?’ And I said no, because it never occurred to me. She said, `Well, you have an appointment at noon, so you need to get up.’ ”
Limon said that during the job interview, she demonstrated a real lack of enthusiasm. “I was actually trying not to get hired at all,” she said.
Still, she got the job and they took her to the camp.
“As far as you could see were these tents with these Vietnamese refugees, and I was stunned, because here was this whole other world on the other side of the hills from sleepy San Clemente.
“I started that afternoon, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”
In 1986, Limón was named director of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a job she held until 1993. Her duties there apparently allowed her to do free-lance work for the State Department as well.
“Between 1979 and 1992, at the request of the U.S. Department of State, Limon established, designed and implemented programs for the processing of Iraqi refugees in Saudi Arabia, Cubans who requested asylum at the Peruvian Embassy in Costa Rica and Indochinese who fled from their homelands to Singapore and Thailand,” the press release announcing her appointment as head of ORR stated in 1993.
Limón met her husband during that State Department sponsored trip to Saudi Arabia in 1992 when she implemented that program for processing Iraqi refugees, the Inquirer reported in that 1999 article:
Other assignments took her to Costa Rica, where she worked with Cuban refugees in 1980, and to Saudi Arabia in the early ’90s. There, she worked with Iraqi refugees and met her husband, Mohammed Hanon, an interpreter.
“I wore black from head-to-toe,” she said.
“Hopefully you can do something so that they can build a new life,” Limón told the Inquirer of her work in refugee resettlement. “For me, this is the best of what America can do,” she added.
Limón has spent a career promoting her vision of “the best of what America can do” for refugees. Many residents of the local communities where these refugees have been “integrated” rather than assimilated believe Limón’s efforts–and those of her ideological allies–are destroying their communities and their country.
On Thursday, Brigitte Gabriel, founder and head of Act for America, spoke in Twin Falls about the problems posed by refugee resettlement.
“All of us know something is not right with our country,” Gabriel told an audience of two hundred, as reported by MagicValley.com:
Gabriel talked a bit about what happened here, mostly in the context of refugee resettlement in general, which she sees as a way for churches and contractors involved to make money and as part of a larger Islamic plot to infiltrate and take over the West. She also spoke of sexual assaults elsewhere in the United States and in Europe that she blames on Muslim refugees. She urged people to vote out the Twin Falls City Council, which she accused of trying to cover up what happened. City officials and law enforcement have repeatedly denied this. The case is sealed, as is usual with juvenile cases, but they ended up releasing some basic details due to the public outcry.
“A petition for a ballot measure to shut down the Refugee Center failed to get enough signatures this spring,” MagicValley.com reported. Many Americans in Twin Falls now expect a renewed effort to close the College of Southern Idaho’s Refugee Center.
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