Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
May 24th State Dept. PRM Conference Call Briefing
Posted by Christopher Coen on June 1, 2011
One of the reporters for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mark Johnson, asked some pointed questions regarding the refugee scandal in Milwaukee on a recent State Department PRM conference call briefing regarding the domestic end of the US refugee resettlement program. The transcript is at NexisLexis News.
Barbara Day, Domestic Resettlement Chief, Office of Admissions, PRM, State Department, and Ronald Munia, Director of the Division of Community Development, Office of Refugee Resettlement, (ORR), US Dept. of HHS participated in the call.
Q: Thanks very much for holding this conference and for taking — for taking questions. I wanted to ask a question about responsibility. One of the things I’m unclear on is where the buck stops when things go wrong in terms of agencies that bring refugees here and are supposed to be helping them resettle. If they don’t — if they leave them in difficult, bad situations, who makes sure that those agencies are, you know, sort of correcting their procedures?
I mean, does anybody police them?
MS. DAY: Hi, this is Barbara from the State Department. That’s a really great question and one that is a challenge in a lot of communities to answer….
…OPERATOR: Thank you. And our next question comes from Mark Johnson from the Milwaukee Journal. Your line is open.
Q: Hi. Thanks. I just wanted to follow up and maybe be a little bit more specific here. Our paper recently did an article on dozens of refugees who ended up in some really filthy cockroach- infested apartments. And it turns out that there weren’t background checks done on landlords as a matter of policy.
And I wondered: Is that something that’s left up to individual agencies to determine, or are there any federal guidelines that say, you know, when it comes to actually settling refugees, you know, you must perform some sort of, you know, due diligence?
MS. DAY: This is Barbara, (the State Department ?). So in terms of initial placement into housing, we have a list of guidelines that were generated in FY 2002, so they’ve been in place now for almost 10 years. And the definitions of — we have words like “decent,” “safe,” “sanitary,” “affordable.”…
…Q: Did either of you want to answer how often you’ve actually been in the position of recommending corrective action or suspending an agency for not living up to your standards?
MS. DAY: Sure, I’ll talk about that… Read more here
By the way, that question is never answered.
