WASHINGTON EXAMINER
U.S. to send specialized commando force to Iraq
Illegal youths crossing border jumps 269%, HHS warns of running out of beds
The FBI is pulling out all the stops to try and keep track of 48 Islamic radicals who may carry out a terrorist attack. Elite surveillance teams consisting of up to a dozen agents, along with assistance from local law enforcement, are watching ...
JUDICIAL WATCH:
Terrorism Border Threat Update
NOVEMBER 20, 2015
Importing TerroristsObama’s Citizenship Push for Immigrants the Focus of New Judicial Watch Lawsuit
Judicial Watch Uncovers Email Describing Hillary Clinton as “Often Confused”
Importing Terrorists
Judicial Watch and a small band of patriots in Washington have been highlighting the existential threat to our nation caused by the lack of border security and the Obama administration’s lawless approach to immigration. We have also exposed the dangerous pro-Islamist approach to counter-terrorism by the Obama administration that, for instance, saw Obama administration officials working with Islamists and terrorist fronts in putting forth the lie that an Internet video, rather than Islamic terrorists, were responsible for the attack on our facilities in Benghazi.
After last week’s terror attacks in France, likely assisted by at least one ISIS terrorist who posed as a Syrian refugee, it would be reasonable to think that good sense might prevail on the Islamist terrorist threat. Unfortunately for the safety of America, the Obama administration doubled down on its dangerous and dishonest radicalism.
As the bodies of Islamic terrorist victims were still being identified in Paris, and as France went into a state of war in response to the carnage, the Obama administration’s first substantive move on Islamic terrorism was to use the focus on the Paris attacks to release five al Qaeda terrorists from our secure military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama, on a crusade to close Gitmo, is releasing terrorists from the facility on a regular basis, and is reportedly planning to try to move the terrorists into the United States despite a law absolutely prohibiting him from doing so. With Obama, amnesty isn’t limited to illegal aliens – it includes the kinds of terrorists who murdered dozens in Paris and, just today, in Mali.
The release of terrorists isn’t enough for this administration; it imports terrorists, as well. Or, in the case of alleged refugees from what we are supposed to believe is Syria, Barack Obama would admit thousands from the center of the terrorist storm in the Middle East without any serious security background checks. Rather than listen to the American people, who oppose the refugee proposal in large and bipartisan numbers, Obama’s plan to spend your tax money to bring 10,000 refugees from Syria to the United States is moving full speed ahead.
Judicial Watch has long been monitoring this issue and reported over a month ago on how our national security officials confess they can’t vet these refugees for terrorist ties:
During a recent congressional hearing a director with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which operates under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), confirmed that the U.S. has no method of vetting the new refugees because the Syrian government doesn’t have an intelligence database to run checks against. It’s actually embarrassing to watch the footage of the DHS director, Matthew Emrich, getting grilled by the senator who chairs the committee that conducted the hearing a few days ago. The session was held to address the fiscal and security implications of the Obama administration’s refugee resettlement program.Obama’s own FBI Director reconfirmed that there is no reliable way to “certify” these refugees will not pose a threat to national security.
Under questioning from Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Emrich admits that there is no reliable way to assure that individuals coming from Syria are properly checked. The exchange lasts about seven minutes and Emrich sounds desperate when he says “we check everything that we are aware of” and that “we are in the process of overturning every stone.” The bottom line is that there is no way to verify the identity of Syrians so the defeated Homeland Security official proceeds to say that “in many countries of the world from which we have traditionally accepted refugees over the years the United States government did not have extensive data holdings.”
Obama’s reaction to efforts to either slow down or, most appropriately, stop this refugee madness has been venomous. As is typical in Washington, the extremist Obama opposes modest (and likely ineffective efforts) to slow his refugee program down. Republicans (and many Democrats) are now defending a bill that, some suggest, would do little to stop Obama from pursuing his plans to increase the flow of refugees from Syria here by a factor of 20 times! I suppose a fake debate over a piece of legislation that would do nothing to address a serious problem is better than what typically goes on in Washington, D.C., as at least border security and the terrorist threat are under debate here.
Once again, Judicial Watch is in the middle of this debate – exposing the facts, exploding the corrupt lies, and educating Americans about this core national security issue.
We helped get the ball rolling on the refugee issue on Fox News this past Sunday. At the end of that interview, I suggested citizens ask their local leaders whether they were going to allow Syrian refugees to settle in their towns. We predicted that would be the issue over the next few weeks. Well, the American people needed no prodding as governors from across the nation immediately revolted and said their states would not allow Obama to settle refugees from Syria, for now, in their states (to see if your state is on the list of objectors, click here for a map.)
In addition, as the refugee debated heated up in Congress this week, it was Judicial Watch’s Pulitzer Prize-deserving reporting on the border terror threat that helped drive the argument for the pausing of the refugee program. Key House members pushing for tough border security cited our work, noting our April 2015 report that “ISIS was operating training bases in close proximity of the U.S. Southern border.” Last year, our Corruption Chronicles first broke the news of Islamic terrorists on the border, including the fact they have already entered the United States through the Mexican border. Moreover, Homeland Security sources have told JW that four terrorists were apprehended by federal authorities and the Texas Department of Public Safety in McAllen and Pharr. We alerted Americans that ISIS is operating in a Mexican border town just eight miles from El Paso, Texas.
Let me close with a point that you won’t hear anywhere else but may well know as a Judicial Watch supporter: the Benghazi scandal and the ISIS disaster are connected.
We proved this beyond all doubt in documents we forced out of the Obama gang thanks a court order issued in a May 15, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed against the Defense and State Departments. The headlines from our May press release tell it best:
Administration knew three months before the November 2012 presidential election of ISIS plans to establish a caliphate in IraqThat material provided the first official confirmation that the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria. The documents also included an incredibly important August 2012 analysis, warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria. The August 2012 document, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, deserves careful review by anyone interested in the ISIS threat and how it could have been prevented. As our release noted:
Administration knew of arms being shipped from Benghazi to Syria
[T]he opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The growing sectarian direction of the war was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, which included the “grave danger” of the rise of ISIS:This DIA report is getting new attention these days, most recently in The New York Times this week. No wonder Obama gets so crazy when pushed on the Syria disaster, as this documents his alliance with jihadists in Libya led not only to the killing of four Americans in Benghazi but helped spark the ISIS war that threatens to ensnare the West in another world wide war.
The deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:
This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.
Some of the “dire consequences” are blacked out but the DIA presciently warned one such consequence would be the “renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena.”
Our litigation, our reporting, our investigation, and our educational efforts on these national security and related immigration/border issues won’t slow down. Your Judicial Watch takes the Islamist terrorist threat seriously, especially when the politicians of both parties move on to other, petty topics. You can track our work here, at www.judicialwatch.org. Please get the word out about our essential work to your elected leaders, family, friends, and colleagues.
Obama’s Citizenship Push for Immigrants the Focus of New Judicial Watch Lawsuit
Further proof that the Obama administration is a menace to the rule of law, our nation’s security, and our republican form of government can be found in the background behind just one new Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. Judicial Watch attorneys filed the lawsuit last month to obtain records related to letters sent by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to current green card holders, urging individuals to become naturalized U.S. citizens prior to the 2016 election.
In April 2015, President Obama’s “White House Task Force on New Americans” issued a strategic action plan to help millions of green card holders become U.S. citizens. Immigration Services is reportedly reallocating vast resources away from its “Electronic Immigration System,” a computerized system designed to facilitate national security and criminal background checks, to a campaign of letters to all nine million green card holders urging them to naturalize before the 2016 election. The Obama administration’s push includes federal funding for leftist groups that advocate for illegal aliens and amnesty.
On May 14, 2015, Judicial Watch submitted a simple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Immigration Services asking for:
- Records related to letters sent by [Immigration Services] to current green card holders urging such individuals to become naturalized U.S. citizens prior to the 2016 election, including, but not limited to, memoranda, guidance, and/or instructions provided to [Immigration Services] staff regarding such letters and records of [Immigration Services] funds allocated to such efforts.
Obama’s effort to replace the American electorate with one more amenable to his despotic approach government means getting the millions of aliens to apply for and be granted citizenship as quickly as possible. However, Immigration Services is obligated to conduct a criminal and security background investigation of an immigration applicant upon his or her filing for naturalization.
We can’t trust this to happen.
In 2012, Immigration Services abandoned required background checks, adopting, instead, “lean and lite” procedures in effort to keep up with the flood of amnesty applications spurred by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive amnesty, an expansion of which has been ruled illegal by the federal courts. Nevertheless, thousands of illegal aliens exempted from deportation under Obama’s unilateral amnesty moves are also potentially eligible for citizenship. The Obama administration has already admitted into the United States a large number of people with documented ties to ISIS and other radical Islamic groups. By the way, refugees (from Syria, Somalia, and other countries) can become citizens as soon as six years after receiving refugee or asylum status. President Obama is dead set against serious background checks for refugees from these Islamist regions.
Despite the release of criminal aliens by the administration and other immigration non-enforcement, violations, and failures, the administration is reportedly expanding the naturalization effort.
The Obama “New American” initiative is reminiscent of Al Gore’s Clinton-era “Citizenship USA” program, which saw citizenship applications approved without the required FBI criminal background checks in the run-up to 1996 presidential election, in which President Clinton was reelected. As our friends at PJ Media report:
Naturalization plus mobilization is the explicit aim of the DHS “Task Force on New Americans.”I hope you see what is happening.
Multiple sources at DHS confirm that political appointees are prioritizing naturalization ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Empirical voting patterns among immigrants from minority communities demonstrate that these new voters will overwhelmingly vote for Democrat candidates. If the empirical rates of support for Democrats continued among these newly naturalized minority voters, Democrats could enjoy an electoral net benefit of millions of new voters in the 2016 presidential election.
The Obama administration is violating the federal transparency law to cover up it plans to use tax money to rush through citizenship for millions of legal and illegal aliens just in time for the 2016 elections. Americans should wonder about whether this administration is importing voters and granting unilateral amnesty to help win elections at the expense of the safety and security of American citizens.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
DHS Knew Illegal Aliens Falsely Claimed “Credible Fear” to Stay in U.S.
NOVEMBER 23, 2015
The Obama administration let hundreds of illegal immigrants stay
in the U.S. even though federal authorities knew in advance that an open
borders group coached them to falsely claim “credible fear” to get
asylum, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The operation was part of a scam conducted by an immigrant rights organization called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA), which in recent years has coordinated demonstrations along the Southwest border in Texas and Arizona. In mid-2014 the group orchestrated a racket seeking to bring 250 illegal aliens into the U.S. through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. To assure the migrants were allowed to stay in the U.S., the group had them falsely claim that they had a “credible fear” of returning to their native country. Foreigners can claim asylum under five categories, based on fear of persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group
In this particular case, the DHS agency charged with guarding the border—Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—actually admits knowing about the ploy in advance but allows the illegal aliens to stay anyways. Here’s an excerpt from the records obtained by JW through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): “BACKGROUND: The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA) activists have coordinated previous demonstrations along the Southwest Border (Laredo, Texas and Nogales, Arizona). During this iteration, NIYA seek to bring 250 people to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry where they will request entry to the U.S. Previous CBP reporting of these events indicate the individuals applying for entry will have no entitlements to enter, pass through or remain in the United States and will summarily claim Credible Fear (CF).”
This is downright outrageous and has been going on for years, though we’ve never seen written evidence that the feds were complicit in a specific “credible fear” scam. In 2013 JW wrote about a San Diego news report that said droves of illegal aliens were flooding the Otay crossing claiming “credible fear” of Mexican drug cartels. In just one day 199 migrants had entered through Otay, the story revealed. The piece quoted a Border Patrol agent saying this: “They are being told if they come across, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they will be allowed into the country.”
Credible fear asylum in the U.S. has become so popular that illegal aliens are hearing about it on Facebook and federal immigration authorities are overwhelmed with applications. In the last few years the number of foreigners, including large numbers from terrorist countries, asserting credible fear to gain asylum in this country has skyrocketed. During congressional testimony a few years ago, the heads of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP confirmed that the percentage of individuals expressing a fear to remain in the U.S. has risen tremendously in the last few years.
The figures are incredibly alarming. In the last five years the number of “credible fear” asylum applications made at the border has increased sevenfold, from less than 5,000 to more than 36,000, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal immigration official told Congress during a hearing earlier this year. Now a law professor at a prominent university, the official told lawmakers that statistics from USCIS Asylum Division show an approval rate of 92% for credible fear claims before the 2014 border surge. “Unfortunately the high approval rate for credible fear claims, and the resulting backlog in the immigration court system, have meant that in practice ‘credible fear’ has served to screen into the United States undocumented aliens wishing to make asylum claims,” the professor, Jan C. Ting told Congress. “That explains why many illegal border crossers don’t run from the U.S. Border Patrol, but instead seek them out to make asylum claims subject only to the low threshold of credible fear.”
Today, the backlog of credible fear cases pending in federal immigration courts is an astounding 450,000, according to a news report published this month. This could create huge national security risks because often asylum seekers are released from custody to await a court hearing. Just last week eight Syrian refugees turned themselves into U.S. immigration authorities along the U.S.-Mexico border. They are asking for asylum because they fear returning to their war-torn, terrorist-infested nation, but U.S. authorities have no reliable way to vet them.
The operation was part of a scam conducted by an immigrant rights organization called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA), which in recent years has coordinated demonstrations along the Southwest border in Texas and Arizona. In mid-2014 the group orchestrated a racket seeking to bring 250 illegal aliens into the U.S. through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. To assure the migrants were allowed to stay in the U.S., the group had them falsely claim that they had a “credible fear” of returning to their native country. Foreigners can claim asylum under five categories, based on fear of persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group
In this particular case, the DHS agency charged with guarding the border—Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—actually admits knowing about the ploy in advance but allows the illegal aliens to stay anyways. Here’s an excerpt from the records obtained by JW through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): “BACKGROUND: The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA) activists have coordinated previous demonstrations along the Southwest Border (Laredo, Texas and Nogales, Arizona). During this iteration, NIYA seek to bring 250 people to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry where they will request entry to the U.S. Previous CBP reporting of these events indicate the individuals applying for entry will have no entitlements to enter, pass through or remain in the United States and will summarily claim Credible Fear (CF).”
This is downright outrageous and has been going on for years, though we’ve never seen written evidence that the feds were complicit in a specific “credible fear” scam. In 2013 JW wrote about a San Diego news report that said droves of illegal aliens were flooding the Otay crossing claiming “credible fear” of Mexican drug cartels. In just one day 199 migrants had entered through Otay, the story revealed. The piece quoted a Border Patrol agent saying this: “They are being told if they come across, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they will be allowed into the country.”
Credible fear asylum in the U.S. has become so popular that illegal aliens are hearing about it on Facebook and federal immigration authorities are overwhelmed with applications. In the last few years the number of foreigners, including large numbers from terrorist countries, asserting credible fear to gain asylum in this country has skyrocketed. During congressional testimony a few years ago, the heads of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP confirmed that the percentage of individuals expressing a fear to remain in the U.S. has risen tremendously in the last few years.
The figures are incredibly alarming. In the last five years the number of “credible fear” asylum applications made at the border has increased sevenfold, from less than 5,000 to more than 36,000, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal immigration official told Congress during a hearing earlier this year. Now a law professor at a prominent university, the official told lawmakers that statistics from USCIS Asylum Division show an approval rate of 92% for credible fear claims before the 2014 border surge. “Unfortunately the high approval rate for credible fear claims, and the resulting backlog in the immigration court system, have meant that in practice ‘credible fear’ has served to screen into the United States undocumented aliens wishing to make asylum claims,” the professor, Jan C. Ting told Congress. “That explains why many illegal border crossers don’t run from the U.S. Border Patrol, but instead seek them out to make asylum claims subject only to the low threshold of credible fear.”
Today, the backlog of credible fear cases pending in federal immigration courts is an astounding 450,000, according to a news report published this month. This could create huge national security risks because often asylum seekers are released from custody to await a court hearing. Just last week eight Syrian refugees turned themselves into U.S. immigration authorities along the U.S.-Mexico border. They are asking for asylum because they fear returning to their war-torn, terrorist-infested nation, but U.S. authorities have no reliable way to vet them.
Sign Up for Updates!
No comments:
Post a Comment