Immigration lawyers report Canadian Muslims being denied entry to U.S.
A number of Canadian Muslims have been turned away at the Canada-U.S. border in recent weeks, immigration lawyers say.
Those denied entry include a prominent Guyana-born Toronto imam who serves as a chaplain with the Peel Regional Police and an Iraqi Turkmen community leader who has family members fighting ISIS in the Middle East.
Attorney Guberman called their denial of entry “Kafkaesque” implying that the US (under Trump!) was acting in a nightmarish and surreal bureaucratic fashion.
The two men — who were denied entry at different border crossings and were not travelling together — are among at least six Canadian Muslim men who have been denied entry at the U.S. border over the last two weeks.
The men and their families, all of whom are Canadian citizens, were given little in the way of explanation by border officials for the decision to deem them inadmissible.
Neither Guyana nor Iraq are among the seven Muslim-majority countries subject to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” executive order, which essentially blocks refugees and visitors from those countries from entering the U.S.
Both men were told to apply for visas at the U.S. consulate in Toronto before returning to the border to seek entry — an unusual process for people who hold Canadian passports.
The six men are represented by the Toronto-area immigration firm CILF — Caruso Guberman Appleby. Lawyers there say that if they’re seeing this level of activity at their law firm, there may be many other Canadian nationals facing similar problems at the border.
“We’ve seen a lot more in the last few weeks and we don’t know what to attribute it to. We know the climate there in the U.S. has changed, it’s a bit different, but at the same time there are processes and procedures and people should be afforded opportunities to challenge a case,” Daud Ali, a lawyer at CILF, told CBC News.
“But it’s hard to know what you’re going up against when you’re not told why you’re denied entry. The fact that they’re all Muslims, that raises some concerns about whether these people are being targeted or if this is a new form of some sort of ban…”
“Having worked as an immigration lawyer for over 40 years nothing surprises me anymore but, in all my years, I have never seen such a Kafkaesque scenario,” said Joel Guberman, a partner at the firm.
When asked if there has been a new directive in recent weeks with respect to Muslim travellers from Canada, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the agency “has not had any new policy changes.”
While unable to speak to specific cases because of privacy laws, the CBP spokesperson said “applicants for admission bear the burden of proof to establish that they are clearly eligible to enter the United States. In order to demonstrate that they are admissible, the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility.”
Canada has been rapidly expanding its African and Middle Eastern population and I expect more problems in the future with undesirables of all stripes crossing over from Canada. Looks like the Trump Admin is trying to get a handle on it!
Of course I still want to know how all the poor Africans found the money to get them to Brazil in the first place!
The US Justice Departmentmade the announcement of the arrests here earlier this month.
International Law Enforcement Cooperation Leads to Brazilian Takedown of Significant Human Smugglers
Brazil Federal Police
Earlier today, extensive coordination and cooperation efforts between United States and Brazilian law enforcement and prosecution authorities culminated in the Brazil Federal Police (DPF) conducting a significant enforcement operation to disrupt and dismantle a transnational criminal organization.
The human smuggling organization targeted is alleged to be responsible for the illicit smuggling of scores of individuals from East Africa and the Middle East, into Brazil, and ultimately to the United States. The enforcement operation included the execution of multiple search warrants and the arrests of three prolific, Brazil-based human smugglers on Brazilian charges: Abdifatah Hussein Ahmed (a Somalian national); Abdessalem Martani (an Algerian national); and Mohsen Khademi Manesh (an Iranian national).
“We commend today’s efforts by our Brazilian counterparts to take decisive action under their recently enacted human smuggling laws against criminal networks that threaten the national security of Brazil, the United States and other nations,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Such collaborative efforts with our foreign law enforcement partners show our collective resolve to hold international human smugglers to account to the fullest extent of the law.”
Assistance provided by U.S. authorities was coordinated under the Extraterritorial Criminal Travel Strike Force (ECT) program, a joint partnership between the Justice Department, Criminal Division’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).The ECT program focuses on human smuggling networks that may present particular national security or public safety risks, or present grave humanitarian concerns. ECT has dedicated investigative, intelligence and prosecutorial resources. ECT coordinates and receives assistance from other U.S. government agencies and foreign law enforcement authorities.
The Center for Immigration Studieshas more on this, see here.
U.S.-Supported Brazilian Op Busts Smugglers Moving Migrants from Muslim-Majority Countries
Maybe the Prez is already doing it, but he should be trumpeting news like this at rallies and on Twitter.
The average American has no idea that his Administration is making some headway in the area of law enforcement—whether that involves the opioid crisis as I reported yesterday here, or big Medicare, Medicaid and Food stamp fraud busts that I’ve been reporting on regularly here at Frauds and Crooks.
Maybe it might best be described as Hating Trump Voters 101.
I’m not spending a lot of time on this, too much backed up in my posting queue, but I just saw this Opinion piece at the Philadelphia Inquirerthat tells us to see the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s “Hate at School” report. (I’m betting there is nothing in it about how to treat evenTrump supporters with respect.)
Do your kids have the “emotional intelligence” to be ready for the 2020 Presidential election? Indeed are they ready to confront “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity” this year?
If not, may I suggest home schooling!
To confront the 2020 election cycle, we need emotional intelligence in schools | Opinion
In the history classes I teach, I begin with a digital dialogue called “What Gives Us Pause.” Before we begin formal instruction, I invite students to share with each other the social and political currents that worry them most, or make them most hopeful for the future. This dialogue unleashes a flood of student voices.
Author Brendon Jobs a “teacher leader.” http://marcusedu.blogspot.com/2013/02/brendon-jobs-interview-how-to-be.html
Every year, students name wars that tear nations apart, gentrification that disrupts the fabric of urban communities, environmental crises, and hate and prejudice. I expect them to talk about the most recent incidents of mass shootings and gun violence right here in Philadelphia. Very quickly, this bonds the classroom in ways that prepare us to support and hold each other accountable, and name patterns of behavior we witness — in the news cycle, on social media, and in our own lived experiences — as the year unfolds.
When I began teaching in 2007, the first years felt sterile. I was discouraged from getting too political or confronting social power structures like racism, patriarchy, or class. I was trained to believe that teachers had to create “safe spaces” that were apolitical and socially neutral. We celebrated civil rights victories but did not discuss the dark legacy of slavery. We didn’t talk about the environment. Textbook-driven instruction drove my practice at the expense of student voices and authentic connections with each other.
Grrrrr! “Student voices!” “Authentic connections!” But, did they learn anything about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War?
I digress…. after a recent visit to the Antietam Battlefield, a friend whispered a question—what about all the northern white families who lost their husbands, fathers and sons fighting to free the slaves, don’t they deserve reparations?
Jobs goes on….
Too often, public conversations stop at simply naming transgressions: identifying something as hurtful or difficult and then moving on. In other cases, policy-driven mandates aiming to keep discourse respectful — like bans on the use of specific words, music, readings, or opinions — leave little room for gray areas. School communities, on the other hand, can model practical responses to and discussions of these moments that young people can use their entire lives, including when confronting racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. [You can bet any students who support our President will never emote in Jobs’ classes!—-ed]
[….]
The SPLC calls it the “Trump Effect” (LOL! note the obligatory dark cover of the report!) https://www.splcenter.org/20190502/hate-school
The stakes feel high. The special report “Hate at School”by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project showed a sharp increase in hate and bias in schools since the 2016 election.
Thankfully, the “Hate at School” report offers many entry points for engaging students, educators, and families in inquiry around how to notice, name, and combat acts of bias and hatred on an ongoing basis — not only when individual moments grow large and public. This defines the work that educators across the nation prepare to engage as school resumes, just over a year out from the 2020 election. [It is all about 2020 to the Progressives.—ed]
Are you looking for a project? Even if your kids are grown, how about looking into what is being taught in your local schools?
My post over the weekend about Michigan teachers being indoctrinated with incomplete information about Islam, see it here, was a huge success on social media.
Fascinating that the beat goes on at the Southern Poverty Law Center. You might think the media (and people like Jobs) would hesitate for a few minutes about using the work of the hypocrites at the SPLC after the incredible airing of their dirty (racist!) linen earlier last spring.
See my complete archive on the SPLC by clicking here.
It is your classic not-in-my-backyard case where the mostly Democrats who control the Washington DC government and its bedroom communities in Northern Virginia (some of the wealthiest counties in American) are in a furor because the Trump Administration has dared to propose child migrant centers in THEIR communities.
Monica Showhalter writing at the American Thinkertells us all about it,
Rich part of Washington, D.C. goes tooth-and-claw to prevent new child-migrant shelter in its neighborhood
First she tells us what the Washington Post said on Friday about the actions of the local elites.
MANY AMERICANS are rightly outraged by the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant children, who have been separated from parents and ill-treated by authorities. Democrats have been understandably eager to distance themselves from such policies — a stance that can result in knee-jerk opposition even to sensible practices in effect during the Obama administration.
DC Mayor Bowser in pink pussy hat protesting the President
That might explain the nearly uniform outcry from Washington-area politicians incensed at federal plans to build new shelters for migrant children in Northern Virginia and the District .
The shelters, state-licensed and similar to scores across the county in operation since before President Trump took office, would help move migrant children out of squalid, cramped Border Patrol stations near the U.S.-Mexico border. They would provide a way station for unaccompanied minors while federal officials seek to place them with U.S.-based relatives or foster families.
But local politicians, nearly all Democrats, have balked at cooperating with federal authorities on any immigration matter. They have denounced the proposed new shelters with objections that smack of NIMBYism masquerading as humane concern for children.This month, the administration of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) enacted emergency rules that blocked a planned federal shelter.
The Washington Post is saying that (LOL! not VDARE!).
Showalter goes on. Here are a few snips. I’ve left out her descriptions of some horrible murder cases in the area, so be sure to visit American Thinker for the whole piece.
Actually, the area has been plagued by some of these child migrants, getting its name in the news more than once for its gruesome murders.
[….]
MS-13 Recruits the ‘children.’ https://www.breitbart.com/border/2017/05/25/detective-ms-13-using-kids-bolster-ranks-commit-violent-crimes/
It’s indisputable that bringing in more unvetted migrants mean there are going to be more of these killings going on, something that might just affect property values and the quality of life in this tony district.
[….]
So many gruesome crimes? Gangs increasing? Recruitment younger and younger? Child migrants here alone looking for some “family”? Gangs know child decapitators won’t get punished? With that sort of thing going on, you can bet the migrant center is going to be a bonanza for gang recruitment and a new wave of gruesome crimes.
Funny how these asylum seekers always seem to end up in U.S. areas where those gangs they’re supposedly fleeing are right there waiting for them.
[….]
The migrant community that rich Washington D.C. has encouraged for its cheap gardeners and maids — and “can’t live without” — as the Daily Beast says, has always been insulated from the real problems of allowing all unvetted comers into the country.Well, now the place for the child migrant shelter is being rightly placed in an affluent part of Washington so they can live with the consequences of their choices, too.
It sounds like President Trump or whoever he’s got on the federal side trying to build this shelter is combining proximity to the Salvadoran illegal immigrant community – Washington’s largest – with a little taste of the medicine these liberals would like to inflict on the border regions and poorer parts of the country.
I can’t think of a better place to put that shelter. Let them live with the result of their own hypocrisy.
I think its a good proposal if the goal is to bring attention to the issue and to twist the tails of Progressives, however it has no practical purpose in my opinion, and, here is why:
People (refugees are here legally!) are permitted to move anywhere in America and none of us wants that permission revoked! Freedom of movement is at the very heart of our most cherished ideals as Americans.
Lewiston, Maine Somalis protest
And, since Horowitz mentions Lewiston, Maine in his piece, and since I’m too lazy and too rushed to parse it all, how about if I simply repost most of a post I published at Refugee Resettlement Watchnearly ten years ago entitled,
Somali Migration to Maine: it’s the welfare magnet, stupid
It is about the SECONDARY MIGRATION to Maine by Somalis in search of welfare, and to escape Atlanta, Georgia where they had been placed by refugee contractors working for the US State Department.
Lewiston was primarily transformed by secondary migration!
They didn’t stay where they had been placed!
And, that is why I say the Trump proposal might make us think we, in local communities, will have some say in the process, the truth is we won’t!
Lewiston, Maine didn’t want them initially, but now it seems most of Maine is being transformed by Africans on the move with the encouragement of the Open Borders Left.
(Unfortunately some of the links don’t work because WordPress took RRW down, but you get the gist!)
From RRW on November 2, 2009:
Yesterday I brought to readers’ attention that now that the Somali population in Lewiston, ME is large and well-established, the demands for accomodation of Muslim religious practices has begun, see CAIR threatens,here. Among those who study Islamic supremacism around the world, this is known as the Stealth Jihad (see our entire categoryhere)—changing a country from within to bring about Islamic dominance.
In my post I attributed a role to Catholic Charities in bringing the first Somalis to Maine, and after a little research I found that assertion was accurate. However, the majority of the thousands of Somalis now continuing to upset Lewiston are secondary migrants resettled by Catholic Charities and other federally contracted agencies in Georgia.
Here is the best summary (Free Republic still has full Newhouse News Service article here) I’ve found so far about how Lewiston got to the point it’s at now with CAIR breathing down the necks of school administrators. I’ve only taken a bit of this very long and thorough 2002 article, so please read the whole thing.
LEWISTON — Every week, another four or five Somali families arrive in this workaday city on the Androscoggin River.
They are refugees from the clan-wracked ruins of their homeland on the Horn of Africa, from years of waiting in camps in Kenya. And they are migrants from their place of first resettlement in America, more often than not trekking 1,000 miles from the heat and multihued humanity of metropolitan Atlanta to this sparse, wintry, whitest of all states.
They are nomads, their ancient instincts honed to a 21st century edge. Pioneers in a new world, they discovered Lewiston and claimed a bit of it for themselves.
“It’s like finding a small island in the middle of the Pacific,” says Mohammed Abdi, who last year moved here from Decatur, Ga., and was quickly hired as the liaison between the city’s schools and the burgeoning Somali community. “We put it on the map.”
They were originally resettled with American blacks and that wasn’t going so well, an issue we have discussed at RRW on previous occasions.
In their exodus, they say they are looking for peace and quiet, cheaper housing, a more benevolent welfare system, better schools and a place to raise their children — families of seven or more are common —with fewer perils and temptations. That they are leaving a metro area renowned as an African-American mecca to resettle in Maine, home to fewer than 7,000 blacks in 2000, is less a matter of irony than intent, given the prickly state of their relations with African-Americans and a desire to protect their children from assimilating too quickly.
Scouts sent out! But, I will bet you anything they had some hints from their friends at Catholic Charities which was already resettling Somalis in Portland, ME.
Fed up with life in Atlanta —he was robbed twice — Abdiaziz Ali said members of the Somali community there researched other places on the Internet, comparing crime rates, the cost of housing, test scores. Then they sent scouts to a handful of cities — Kansas City, Mo., Nashville, Tenn., San Diego, Houston and El Paso in Texas, and Portland and Lewiston in Maine.
Maine was preferred, and Portland was full.
It is cold but the welfare is oh so good! Note when you read the article that some of the men stayed back in Georgia to continue to work while the wives and kids went to Maine for the welfare.
Indeed, in moving from Georgia to Maine, Somalis are trading one of the nation’s least generous welfare systems for one of its most generous.
Lewiston provides general assistance to anyone in need, splitting the cost with the state. Such relief was unavailable in Clarkston. In Georgia, there is a four-year time limit for receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In Maine it’s five, but even that can be extended. About a quarter of Lewiston’s Somali families receive that form of welfare, according to the state. And in Maine, a state-funded program assists single parents while they attend college.
There is a waiting list for public housing in Lewiston, but not nearly as long as back in Georgia. About a third of the more than 90 apartments at Hillview, Lewiston’s largest public housing project, have Somali tenants, and about 35 more Somali families have received Section 8 vouchers, which subsidize the rent on private apartments.
[…]
Fulfilling that expectation [that people work] is complicated because so many of the Somali families are single mothers and children, the fathers dead, missing, still in Africa or still in Atlanta.
“The men don’t like it here — it’s too cold or too quiet or too behind,” says Fatuma Hussein, whose own husband still drives a taxi in Atlanta, making frequent visits to her and their three young children.
The role of Catholic Charities
There were no Somalis in Lewiston prior to the colonization that began after 9/11.
Note in the article that Somalis are quoted as saying Portland was “full.” That would be full of primarily Somalis and Sudanese resettled in Maine by Catholic Charities, the only refugee resettlement contractor in the state for 30 years. That makes it easy for us to check the numbers Catholic Charities brought. Not nearly the tens of thousands resettled in other states, but from 1983-2005, Catholic Charities resettled 498 Somalis and 607 Sudanese (I mention the Sudanese because we have heard lots about problems with the “Sudanese community” of Portland recently). You will see later that the number 498 is inaccurate because in just 3 individual years during that time period, reported in annual reports to Congress, below, the number exceeds 498.
To this day, Catholic Charities is resettling new Somalis in Maine. The stats aren’t out for 2009 but in 2007 the number of Somalis resettled was 118 and in 2008 it was 60 (that drop may be because of the discovery by the State Department of the fraud in the family reunification program).
I don’t believe the Somali scouts found Lewiston all on their own—-I think there is a really good chance that earlier resettled Maine Somalis and Catholic Charities (CC) in Atlanta tipped-off the scouts to the lucrative welfare in Lewiston. So, I checked the Office of Refugee Resettlement annual reports to Congress for the years 1997, 1998, and 1999 to see how many Somalis CC had brought to Maine in the years preceding the migration. Sure enough, in 1997, CC resettled 228 Somalis to Maine, in 1998 the number was 168 and in 1999, 277. What are the chances that a few of those Somalis were “related” to Atlanta Somalis and told them to ‘come on up, the public assistance is great!’
Note to readers in Maine: I have many more discoveries I want to share with you in another post, things that need further research, but this is getting too long!
The President only has one real way of reforming the US Refugee Admissions Program and that is to set the number to be admitted for FY2020 to zero and tell Congress to get the hell to workand reform the entire program or scrap it altogether.
If he sets the admissions number to zero, and sends none of our tax dollars to the federal contractors like Catholic Charities, until Congress takes up the issue, then he might actually have some serious leverage.
He should have done that in year-one of his Presidency!
