Well this news answers a mystery swirling around the US refugee resettlement industry.
Where’s Larry?
In happier days, this is Lawrence Bartlett posing in front of a map depicting the hundreds of resettlement sites around the US. We once obtained that map, but are no longer able to find it. Where is the transparency? Come on Rex Tillerson, get this information out to taxpayers!
Lawrence Bartlett, Director of Refugee Admissions is in Puerto Rico. Of course the assignment could be temporary as that US territory is still not anywhere back to normal.
But his departure from the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration, which reportedly is in a funk since refugee numbers are declining significantly in President Trump’s first full year running the program, may be more significant than it appears.
Here is Michael Leahy at Breitbart with the interesting news:
A veteran State Department official who was on Breitbart’s February list of removable Obama holdovers has been reassigned to Puerto Rico, at least temporarily.
Lawrence Bartlett, who has served as the Director of the Office of Refugee Admissions in the State Department’s Bureau of Population Refugees since 2010, is now working out of an office in Puerto Rico, not the State Department’s offices in Washington, DC.
“Larry Bartlett is on temporary duty in Puerto Rico assisting FEMA with hurricane recovery efforts. Mr. Bartlett has more than 25 years of experience in humanitarian and development work, including experience working on natural disaster relief,” a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News on background.
“While Mr. Bartlett is on temporary duty in Puerto Rico, Deputy Director Kelly Gauger is Acting Director in PRM’s Office of Admissions,” the spokesperson added.
Bartlett, in our experience, has demonstrated that he is a true believer in the program that has seen hundreds of thousands of third worlders admitted to the US in his tenure as director of admissions.
He has been a great advocate for the contractors (the VOLAGs) during his tenure and has been impervious to citizen demands for more transparency in the program.
Anyone who watched him in action in Twin Falls, Idaho a couple of years ago will have no doubt about his commitment being first and foremost to the refugees and their well-being. He showed his disdain for concerns local citizens have about the program.
Here is one of several posts we wrote at the time of that September 2015 public meeting.
See more from Leahy here on this point.
US Refugee Admissions Program built on a house of cards!
I told Breitbart that I’m hearing reports of panic growing among the VOLAGs (the resettlement contractors) as many jobs are on the line since the whole program is built on a house of cards that depends on numbers of refugees (paying clients) entering the US each year.
Maybe this is just a good time (no fun with Trump in White House) and a good way—an easy out through an assignment in Puerto Rico (hopefully he isn’t there to concoct some way for Puerto Ricans to be designated refugees!).
And, by the way, Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have still not placed a Trump loyalist in to head the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration leaving the whole refugee admissions program in the hands of deep state bureaucrats who have over the years formed deep connections with the resettlement contractors they fund and supposedly oversee.
Click here to read the full article on its original website.