Hispanic thug who murdered refugee in Pennsylvania to stand trial

Diversity is strength, right!

We know his name is Enrique M. Ortiz and you can see his photo here at The Morning Call (charming looking, isn’t he?).  Hispanic alright but nowhere have I seen a report on where he is from, how he got here and what his immigration status is.

I told you about this case four weeks ago in which Ortiz is alleged to have gunned down an Eritrean refugee in Allentown, PA here.   Now, this is the latest news on the case.   From The Morning Call:

The 22-year-old man was mortally wounded from a shot to the neck, but continued running for his life from the man firing at him in an Allentown street last month.

Hagos F. Mezgebo, an African refugee living and working in Allentown, was shot one more time before the life drained out of his body about a quarter-block away.

Enrique M. Ortiz, 25, formerly of Allentown, was later charged with killing Mezgebo, a man he likely didn’t know.

Nine people testified at Ortiz’s preliminary hearing in Lehigh County Court Tuesday, but despite hours of testimony it still isn’t clear what triggered the early Jan. 7 shooting on Fountain Street.

[....]

After police released a wanted poster, Ortiz was arrested on Jan. 9 in a car where heroin, cocaine, drug paraphernalia and $2,810 in cash were found. Police also found a 9 mm handgun with a scratched-off serial number under his seat.

Ortiz faces a slew of charges in three separate cases, including homicide, reckless endangerment, simple assault, possession with intent to deliver and weapons violations.

We learned previously that the murdered man, Hagos F. Mezgebo, was resettled in Allentown, PA by Catholic Charities and was one more African refugee working in meatpacking.   I wonder do the meatpackers give a kickback to Catholic Charities or the US State Department for finding them laborers?   Just asking…   Next!

Epic trial taking shape in Tennessee for 23 Somalis charged in sex trafficking case

By all accounts it could be the largest trial in Tennessee history.  And, what has everyone surprised is that none of those who will stand trial in Nashville next month have cracked and asked for a plea bargain.

We first reported this story here in November 2010 and more recently here.

From The Tennessean:

Nearly two dozen defendants accused of participating in an interstate sex trafficking ring are scheduled to go before a federal jury next month in what is shaping up to be one of the biggest — and most unusual — trials in Middle Tennessee history.

In an era when limited resources and risk aversion have resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of cases that end in plea agreements rather than jury trials, not even one of the 30 defendants in the case has agreed to plead guilty, setting the stage for a massive trial in downtown Nashville that is raising a variety of issues both legal and logistical.

Twenty-nine people, mostly Somalis from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, were charged in November 2010 with running a prostitution ring that sold Somali girls as young as 12 years of age in cities including Nashville. A 30th defendant was indicted in May 2011. In addition to sex trafficking and conspiracy, the defendants also are accused of alleged crimes such as credit card fraud and burglary.

Somalis don’t rat on each other so many believe that is what is keeping any of them from cracking.   Actually I’ve followed lots of Somali crime stories in different locations throughout the US and Canada and it is this African cultural practice that has made it so difficult for law enforcement to solve crimes involving Somalis.  Remember they didn’t grow up with the same prohibitions about lying that those of us who had a Judeo-Christian upbringing have been taught.  Frankly, they lie.

Observers are chalking up the lack of plea agreements in the case to a number of factors.

[....]

“The Somalis have a cultural thing about testifying against each other,” said former U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Ed Yarbrough, who agreed that the trial is on course to be the largest, in terms of the number of defendants, in Nashville history. “I think it’s cultural. That’s what I’ve been told.”

Read the whole story, but this last paragraph shows us again that even while on trial they are whittling away at our judicial system.

The trial, expected to last months, will require modifications of Haynes’ courtroom to ensure there is enough space for the defendants and attorneys. The judge also has granted the defendants’ request to take breaks consistent with Muslim prayer times.

Yes, indeed! I expect they will put on quite a show in the good judge’s courtroom.

Refugee program costs the US tax payers $1 BILLION bucks a year (minimum!)

Your tax dollars!

Here it is, buried on the second to the last page of a 58-page report to Congress!  I knew I had seen it somewhere.

This is the Fiscal year 2012 annual report in which the President tells Congress how many refugees he wants to allow into the US, who they are, where they are coming from (who the UN has picked for us!) and at the very end how much it will cost!

Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2012: Report to Congress, here.

Bottomline: $1,064,700,000

As they point out themselves in a footnote, the figure does not include:

….it does not include costs associated with the Unaccompanied Alien Children’s Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, or Supplemental Security Income programs.

Nor does it include subsidized housing, food stamps, or the cost of educating the kids!

While you are having a look at Obama’s report, note (p. 5) that we brought 54,000 refugees to the US this past fiscal year (a lower number then several prior years), however the Obama Administration has the ceiling up to 76,000 for fiscal year 2012.  I guess he and the State Department must see a labor shortage in the meatpacking industry on the horizon.

Catholic Charities Tennessee tries to pretend refugees don’t use welfare for the longterm

Here is an opinion piece from The Tennessean (published while I was away over the weekend) once again highlighting the problems encountered in many states regarding the supposed speedy self-sufficiency refugees are said to attain upon resettlement.  Even if we didn’t have the facts and figures, it defies logic that tens of thousands of third-worlders, many with no English and little formal education, are arriving in the US and becoming self-sufficient within months.

Writer Don Barnett, tells us more about the visit earlier this month by a high level entourage from Washington to his native Nashville.  We told you about it here and here.

Reacting to public concern about the U.S. refugee program and not wanting to lose another city for its resettlement program, the U.S. State Department mounted a charm offensive in Nashville recently.

The visit from Washington consisted of a press conference preceded by small group meetings involving David Robinson, the director of the State Department’s refugee bureau; local program participants; a lobbyist; and state legislators.

Tennessee’s law allowing localities to request a “time out” from the program if social services are shown to be overly burdened was deemed compatible with federal law. Why it was needed at all was the question raised during the visit. After all, according to Tennessee’s state refugee coordinator, refugees “are financially self-sufficient within a few months and are not dependent on public welfare.”

Actually, a federal study of refugees who arrived in a recent five-year period shows high welfare usage among refugees. Almost 45 percent of refugees in this group ages 16 and older are on Medicaid (TennCare in Tennessee — 35 percent funded by state taxes). According to a Metro Nashville Social Services report: “More services will be needed for the refugee and immigrant population. More translation services are needed now. Currently, there is more demand for rent, utilities, medical and transportation assistance.”

Read it all.

Readers might also wish to visit the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s 2008 annual report to Congress and note that on pages 92 to 94 are some very interesting tables about welfare usage (in 2008! imagine what it is today!).   We learned early in the report that the refugee program costs the US taxpayer around $1 billion per year (for on average 60,000-80,000 refugees).  And that doesn’t include some of the costs on Table II (page 92).

Nearly 30% of refugees that year were on some type of cash assistance,  44% were receiving medicaid or other money for medical costs, 24% were getting assistance with housing and a whopping 50% were receiving food stamps.

On page 93 is another interesting table which tells us the big users of “public assistance” in 2008 were the Africans and Middle Easterners.  Hmmmm!

The states with the highest welfare usage were 1) California (no surprise), 2) Missouri (surprise) 3) Washington State (page 94).

Tennessee is the only state in the Nation which has taken steps to ascertain just exactly how much the refugee program is costing the state in order to better get a handle on this issue of “self-sufficiency” trumpeted by federal contractors like Catholic Charites.   New Hampshire is also seeking a legal remedy that would allow a community to opt out of the program should the city (the taxpayers!) be unable to afford the public assistance costs of importing poverty to America.

Nashville is at the epicenter of the growing concern, not just about the cost of resettlement, but also about the cultural trauma experienced by communities receiving large numbers of Muslim refugees.  We have a whole category on Nashville, here.  By the way, The Tennessean has generally been hostile to any criticism of immigration and you will see that if you visit some posts in the Nashville category.

UN picks more Somalis from Malta to come to the US

If you are a new reader, you probably don’t know that the tiny island of Malta is an illegal alien magnet in the Mediterranean Sea.  Since 2007 we have been helping them out by taking some of their excess illegal aliens to the US.

Here is a report on the latest bunch on the way to your town, from the Times of Malta:

11 Somalis and Eritreans left Malta today to start a new life in the United States.

The immigrants – nine singles and a couple, went to the US under the US Refugee Resettlement Programme. [Singles usually are young men, but I don't know that for sure here---ed]

They departed on a flight to London from where they will transit to their flight to New York. On arrival, they will be assisted by non-governmental organisations to proceed to their final destinations in various states.

They were selected following a process involving the UNHCR (Malta office) as well as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) at various stages. US Government officials also conduct interviews in Malta.

This latest departure brings the total of beneficiaries of international protection resettled to the United States from Malta since 2007 to 847.

Unfortunately, I have no time to fill you in on the history of this ill-conceived (and precedent-setting!) project.  You can imagine how this serves as a magnet for more illegals to try to get to Malta—to win the US resettlement lottery.  Search RRW for ‘Malta’ and you will see what I mean.  Here is one story to give you some idea of what is going on with the Jesuit-run pipeline form Malta to the US.

What happens when whites and Christians become the persecuted minorities?

Will the United Nations and the refugee industry be as eager to resettle them to America?  After all the conventional wisdom is that only white people are racists and the world is full of Islamophobes, but what about “Christophobes.”

This article in the Times Live (Johannesburg) about white South Africans increasingly seeking asylum around the world and an article recently in Newsweek by Ayaan Hirsi Ali got me thinking about all this again.

Here is news about how increasing numbers of Afrikaners, fearing for their safety in black-ruled South Africa, are seeking asylum around the world.

A South African family is desperate to remain in the US, its members claiming they cannot return home because, as Afrikaners, they will be subject to racial discrimination.

The family’s legal representative has been contacting US academics in a bid to get a scholarly opinion that would bolster the asylum application.

The family, described by the law firm as “white Afrikaner farmers”, is among dozens of South Africans who, over the past decade, have applied for asylum abroad for a range of reasons, including fear of persecution and violent crime. Some of the applications have been successful.

I had to laugh, it is so predictable, US “academics” quoted flatly deny there is any reason for whites to fear for their lives in South Africa—they are so desperately holding onto the “rainbow nation” myth created when apartheid ended and blacks came to power.  (Just type ‘rainbow nation’ into our search function and see the mess South Africa is in!).

As many as 800 whites seeking asylum!

Adriana Stuijt, a retired Dutch-born journalist who worked in South Africa, estimates that there are almost 800 South Africans living as refugees around the world.

Stuijt has a blog that monitors the number of refugees and is a member of the Afrikaner Rescue Action Fund, which was started in the Netherlands to help poor Afrikaner communities.

By the way, be sure to take note of how these white asylum seekers are being grilled in the US and consider how easy it was for this Rwandan woman to get into the US as a refugee and to become a citizen!

Christophobia indeed!

Then here is Nina Shea writing at National Review Online about a conspiracy of silence around the increasing persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.

Best-selling author, film director, women’s-rights advocate, former Dutch parliamentarian, Islamist death-threat survivor, refugee from a Somalian forced marriage, and a fierce champion of individual freedoms — that of others as well as her own — Ayaan Hirsi Ali has demonstrated her courage once more. In the cover story she penned for the current issue of Newsweek, entitled “The War on Christians,” which is excerpted in The Daily Beast, Hirsi Ali gives a tour d’horizon of the most politically incorrect subject of all human-rights reporting: the ongoing religious persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. It makes heartbreaking reading.

She criticizes the media for giving short shrift to this development, favoring instead the narrative that Muslims are the victims of religious persecution by the West. She writes:

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.

The international media does report on the isolated anti-Christian atrocity: the Nigerian church that was blown up last Christmas, the Egyptian Coptic demonstrators killed for protesting religious persecution in October, and the 2010 Iraqi church bombing (the 70th documented church bombing in that country since 2003), which killed or maimed three priests and everyone else in it, to cite but a few examples. But it rarely looks at the global pattern, or even national patterns, and their significance.

Will we be seeing the refugee lobby in DC that includes contractors such as the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, World Relief, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and so forth clamoring to resettle persecuted Christians (instead of all the Muslims they resettle), or indeed say that white South Africans are worthy of their help—I doubt it!   Why? It doesn’t fit the narrative the international Left has so successfully established.

Manchester, NH: Rwandan refugee to stand trial tomorrow on genocide charges

This is just what the federal contractors and the US State Department don’t want to see in Manchester, NH of all places.

Remember it is Manchester’s mayor who is pushing for a moratorium on refugee resettlement in that diversity-challenged city.

We learned from earlier reports I posted here and here that Beatrice Munyenyezi allegedly passed herself off as a refugee (resettled by Catholic Charities!) and the court will determine if she committed fraud by lying* on her refugee application about her role in the Rwandan genocide.

The story is here at the Union Leader (hat tip: Jeannine):

Beatrice Munyenyezi of Manchester is accused of personally participating in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, then lying about it to enter the United States and gain citizenship. She is set to stand trial on fraud charges in U.S. District Court in Concord Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors allege Munyenyezi, 41, was a member and active supporter of the ruling ethnic Hutu party and a ring leader in its radical youth militia — along with her husband, Arsene Shalom Ntahobari.

Munyenyezi, who came to Manchester in 2002, was arrested in 2010. [an earlier report said she was resettled by Catholic Charities in 1999, here---ed]

Prosecutors claim the Hutus carried out systematic and widespread killings of members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group and that Munyenyezi oversaw and participated in killings, rapes and kidnappings of numerous people — mostly Tutsi — from a roadblock in front of a Butare hotel.

The killings that began in April 1994 ended in July when Tutsi rebels invaded Rwanda from neighboring countries and defeated the interim government. An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were killed during the three-month period commonly known as the Rwanda genocide.

Be sure to read the rest of the article, but definitely don’t miss the comments!

*Lying—hmmm! sounds familiar, oh yeh, the Iraqi refugee terrorists in Kentucky, here, are charged with the same crime.  Imagine that.

UK Prime Minister warns of radical Somalis in Great Britain

Here is the story from The Independent:

David Cameron will warn today [yesterday, Monday] that Britain faces a growing security threat from Somali-born youngsters who have been “poisoned by radicalism”, as he calls for a fresh drive to rescue the east African state from the grip of terrorists and pirates.

The Prime Minister will host an international conference this week on Somalia, which will be attended by representatives of more than 50 governments and international organisations, including the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.

Mr Cameron will meet Somali community leaders in this country today to appeal for their help in the fight against terrorism here and in the struggle to bring stability and peace to their trouble-torn homeland.

Up to 50 Britons are believed to be fighting for al-Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qa’ida which controls much of the centre and south of Somalia. Intelligence sources fear that they could return with the expertise to launch terror attacks in the UK.

Read it all.

Now Guatemalans are asking for Temporary Protected Status!

Because of a tropical storm that happened two years ago!

Sorry, I have been so busy in Maryland that I haven’t gotten much posted here.  This is a story I just posted at Potomac Tea Party Report earlier this morning and it might interest readers here as well.

While we are all busy [in Maryland and elsewhere] arguing over illegal immigration and how to combat it, the Obama administration is busy with backdoor amnesty.  One such program to legalize the illegals is quietly becoming increasingly popular— Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Read it all, here.

ORR: Where is the annual report?

Here we go again, BY LAW (here) the Office of Refugee Resettlement is required to send to Congress an annual report three months after the close of the previous Fiscal Year on September 30th—that means by January 31st of the next year.

The last annual report prepared by ORR (Department of Health and Human Services) and available to the public is for FY 2008, here.  That means that ORR is now BEHIND FOR THREE YEARS!  They owe Congress the reports for 2009, 2010 and 2011.  

What that says to me, is that the ORR doesn’t want Congress and the public to know how bad things are—how few refugees are employed and how many are on welfare.

Check back here periodically to see when we might see some new (albeit old by the time you see it!) hard data on the program.

And, if you know any public interest lawyers willing to look into this matter, send them my way!