Eau Claire residents are speaking out against a plan to relocate potentially hundreds of Somali refugees to the northwest Wisconsin community without the consent of elected city officials.
One Eau Claire County resident who spoke to The Wisconsin Daily Star said the relocation effort amounts to “taxation without representation.”
World Relief Wisconsin, a liberal resettlement non-governmental organization, expects to relocate 75 Somalis to Eau Claire and potentially the surrounding area beginning in 2024. Officials told The Daily Star that federal resettlement law allows extended family members to live with the designated refugees, bringing the total numbers over time into the hundreds.
But the resettlement, which raises questions about taxpayer resources and security, was brokered by unelected City Manager Stephanie Hirsch in May. The Eau Claire City Council did not sign off on the plan. According to State Representative Karen Hurd (R-Fall Creek), some council members didn’t even know about it.
Hurd, whose 68th Assembly District includes most of Eau Claire County, said she wasn’t notified of the plan, nor were Eau Claire County supervisors and the sheriff.
“We found out about it recently by a local station that just put out there they were going to bring 75 refugees into Eau Claire. Everybody was like, ‘What?’” the lawmaker told The Daily Star .
Hirsch did not return a call seeking comment. Nor did City Council President Emily Berge.
The Biden administration has ratcheted up the number of refugees that the U.S. takes in each year. That number is presently at 125,000.
Local jurisdictions don’t have a lot of power over where the relocations take place, but federal law does require government officials overseeing the efforts to “consult regularly . . . with state and local governments” before placing refugees in localities.
Hurd said the pushers of the Eau Claire refugee plan failed to do that. Hurd has heard an earful from her constituents, and they are demanding World Relief Wisconsin put its plan on the agendas of the city council and board of supervisors, allowing elected officials and citizens to weigh in.
Residents from Eau Claire and surrounding areas protested a forum on Monday that laid out the resettlement plan.
“My concern is that the law and policies weren’t followed,” area resident Bill Upthall told a local TV station. “It doesn’t really matter to me where they come from. This was all done in a darkness. And they’re just trying to ram it through.”
Hurd said the federal government will pick up the tab for the refugees for the first three months, but eventually housing, food, medical, and other services will be absorbed by local taxpayers.
There are also concerns about vetting of the refugees, particularly in a time of rising national security concerns amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The Biden administration and the NGOs insist the process is thorough, but the home countries are also charged with vetting. The refugees are largely coming here from war-torn countries with troubled governments.
Susan Tully, a senior field representative for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told Restoration News that there’s no legitimate government in war-torn Somalia to do full background checks on these refugees.
“That also means that, if any commit crimes, we cannot deport them,” she said.
After the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, western Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy took in thousands of refugees. Several crimes involving refugees were reported at the military installation, including two Afghan refugees accused of attempting to sexually assault children and physically abusing a woman in separate incidents.
As Restoration News notes:
Minneapolis is represented by the Somalia-born Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the most radical and anti-Semitic members of Congress. Somalia is more than 90 percent Sunni Muslim. Omar, a practicing Muslim, is an apologist for the Palestinian terror group Hamas who’s equated the United States and Israel to the Taliban.
Last week, she raged over Biden’s support for Israel following the terror group’s unprovoked slaughter of over 1,300 women, children, and unarmed civilians.
Hurd said she has been in contact with U.S. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Derrick Van Orden (R-WI-03), asking the lawmaker to look at the federal code and clarify that NGOs must coordinate with elected local officials on refugee relocation plans, not unelected bureaucrats.
“They did an end-run around the people,” the state representative said. “You could say it’s naïveté, but you cut the people out of the process. We didn’t have a say in it and it’s going to be our tax dollars.”
World Relief Wisconsin did not return a call seeking comment.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Eau Claire, Wisconsin” by Itrytohelp32. CC BY-SA 4.0.
