Alamance County Man Arrested For Child Porn

Jimmy Blane Murray was charged with three counts of third degree sexual exploitation of a child.

Author: Megan Allman

Published: 8:46 PM EDT April 5, 2019

Updated: 8:46 PM EDT April 5, 2019

https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/alamance-county-man-arrested-for-child-porn/83-a58ac84a-be56-4876-869c-a5ca3899b85d

BURLINGTON, N.C. — Alamance County deputies arrested a man on child porn charges on Friday.

Jimmy Blane Murray, 38, faces three felony counts of third degree sexual exploitation of a minor.

Former Greensboro church day school worker arrested Friday confessed in March she made child pornography, SBI says

Staff report/WGHP 19 hrs ago

https://www.greensboro.com/news/crime/former-greensboro-church-day-school-worker-arrested-friday-confessed-in/article_3beedc11-9112-53fb-bba4-1e1a9f75a4e5.html

GREENSBORO — A woman charged with multiple counts of indecent liberties, sexual exploitation, and sex offenses involving children is in the Guilford County jail under $1 million bail.

Alyson Brooke Saunders, 23, worked at Fellowship Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Day School at 2005 New Garden Road in Greensboro and was arrested Friday morning as part of a child pornography investigation by Homeland Security Investigations.

Saunders is charged with six counts of first-degree sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of sex offense on a child by an adult, four counts of indecent liberties with a child and two counts of crimes against nature.

In late February, HSI Winston-Salem received a tip from HSI London that an individual arrested on child pornography charges abroad had communicated online with Saunders, a news release from the SBI stated.

In response to that tip, HSI special agents conducted a consensual interview with Saunders and received consent to preview her electronic media.

In March, Saunders admitted to exploiting and producing pornography of minor children. In addition to her confession, forensic analysis of electronic media also confirmed that she produced and disseminated child pornography, which led to her arrest.

The child victims were very young, WGHP-Channel 8 reported and stated that HSI has not indicated if the victims attended or were in any way connected to the day school or church.

Bail was set at $1 million for one of the indecent liberties charges and no bail was set for all of the other charges, according to the Guilford County Sheriff's Office website.

Saunders was terminated from the school after her arrest Friday, according to WGHP. Her next court date is Monday.

Efland man faces child porn charges

By Times-News

Posted Apr 3, 2019 at 3:40 PM

https://www.thetimesnews.com/news/20190403/efland-man-faces-child-porn-charges

An Efland man was charged during a joint operation between the FBI and the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office Tuesday, April 2.

Kelvin Vann Godfrey, 59, of 222 N. Oak St., was charged with second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. His bond was set for $500,000.

Deputies with the Sheriff’s Office working with the FBI arrested Godfrey without incident and transported him to the Alamance County jail. According to the warrants, Godfrey received a video of two 5- to 7-year-olds engaging in sexual activity.

“The FBI investigation is ongoing. Possible federal charges are pending,” Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Byron Tucker said in a press release.

Child brides as young as 10 years old in Africa advertised, sold on Facebook: report

https://www.foxnews.com/world/child-brides-as-young-as-ten-years-old-in-africa-advertised-sold-on-facebook

African child brides are reportedly being advertised on Facebook, with parents selling their kids via connections made on the social media giant in order to pay off debts – in some cases bartering their child's freedom with men old enough to be their grandfather.

Girls as young 10 years old from the Becheve community in Nigeria have been sold on social media for money or exchanged for goods, according to the Daily Beast.

FAKE 'GOOD' NEWS? FACEBOOK PAYS MAJOR UK NEWSPAPER TO PUBLISH ARTICLES PRAISING THE TECH GIANT

The girls, known in the community as “money women” or “money wives,” are typically sold to older men, and the prevalence worldwide of Facebook has helped connect buyers and sellers.

The practice of child brides pre-dates social media, of course, with parents in certain cultures taking their young daughters to richer men able to financially look after the girls.

But while it didn't invent the practice, Facebook, and other social media platforms, have made it easier.

“The practice is meant to boost the status of the men in Becheve community,” Magnus Ejikang, a local chief in Ogbakoko, told the Daily Beast. “The more brides you have, the more respect you gain in the community.”

Facebook didn’t respond to Fox News’ request for comment, but the company’s spokesperson told the Daily Mail that “any form of human trafficking – whether posts, pages, ads or groups – is not allowed on Facebook and we remove this content whenever we identify it.”

The statement added: “We're always improving the methods we use to identify content that breaks our policies, including doubling our safety and security team to more than 30,000 and investing in technology."

But even a robust security team can't totally scrub the site clean. One girl named Monica told the Daily Beast how she and her sister were sold without their consent because their father wanted to settle debts.

And because he had a smartphone.

“My father knew nothing about Facebook until my elder brother bought him a smartphone and convinced him to join Facebook and post our photographs whenever he likes,” she said. “He'll buy new clothes and force me and my sisters to put them on before taking photographs of us.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

She claims she got married to a much older man she had never met before. The same thing happened to her sister, too. Monica ran away about a year after the marriage, however.

“It is young people who convince old men to look for wives on Facebook,” she said. “The man I married said his oldest son showed him my photo on Facebook and directed him to my father.”

Griff Jenkins on Fox News

"Ten of thousands of immigrants are being released into the communities with a summons to come to court, and many of whom will not.

Not just a border problem, but it's the entire fabric of the nation"

How El Paso copes as ground zero of the border crisis

[Christian Science Monitor]

Henry Gass

,Christian Science Monitor•April 5, 2019

https://news.yahoo.com/el-paso-copes-ground-zero-border-crisis-191751821.html

For Israel Cabrera, it started five weeks ago.

A friend from another church had called. Immigration agents would be releasing 152 migrants, their processing and background checks completed. Could he take them?

Mr. Cabrera, an associate pastor at the Caminos de Vida church, said he needed time to think. We need an answer now, his friend replied.

Recommended: Why Republicans are balking at replacing Obamacare, again

“Ok,” Mr. Cabrera said. “Yes.”

That left 30 minutes to prepare, and all the church had was a 24-pack of bottled water. By the end of the day, members of the congregation and the community had brought beans, rice, clothes, and blankets. By the end of the week, Caminos de Vida had so many supplies they were helping other churches hosting migrants.

“The amazing thing is, we just said ‘yes.’ That’s all we did,” says Mr. Cabrera. “This is what happens when a community gets together and does something and moves on their own.”

Since the call, Caminos de Vida has been taking in 50 migrants every few days, feeding them, clothing them, and arranging transportation to family or friends in the United States. They are starting to feel the strain, he says while preparing to welcome another 50 migrants. The water bill jumped from $80 to $500; volunteers, many of them elderly, are burning out; and some members of the congregation have left, uncomfortable with what the church is doing.

That tension permeates El Paso. With the entire southwest border experiencing a surge in migrants, primarily families and children from Central America seeking asylum, this West Texas city has become ground zero. Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), came here last week and announced that the U.S. immigration system had reached a “breaking point” due to “vulnerabilities in our legal framework.”

Immigrant advocacy groups dispute that, claiming that the situation on the southwest border has been worsened by policy decisions by immigration agencies and the Trump administration.

What isn’t disputed is that the people handling the migrant flows in El Paso – including CBP agents, city government, and volunteer organizations – are exhausted. The 11-hour-plus work days, buzzing cell phones, and daily chaos is akin to responding to a natural disaster.

If you’re not a part of those groups, the surge in asylum seekers has remained mostly invisible on the ground. In a border city with generations of connections to Mexico, and generations who came to the U.S. under much different circumstances, the situation is provoking mixed feelings.

NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT

On a sunny Monday afternoon, Javier Lopez and Lalo Garcia are playing chess in San Jacinto Plaza. Both men are in their early 20s, and both have lived in the city for the four big migrant influxes it has experienced. They have never seen anything like this one, they agree.

“My neighbor’s actually Border Patrol and he talks about it all the time. Like, ‘Dude, I don’t even know what time I get home. It’s just crazy because we’re shorthanded,’ ” says Mr. Lopez.

The volume of asylum requests bothers him though. “I feel like this is a safe haven for everybody, and sooner or later it’s going to be crowded or some other problems are going to come up,” he says.

Mr. Garcia jumps in. “Put yourself in their shoes,” he says. “A lot of people come trying to survive. Not all of them, but most of them,” he continues. “Which is the controversy. We get hit by that, but they need it. So, honestly, it’s up to your morals whether you want to help or not.”

>>6070932

Commissioner McAleenan has described how he thinks the immigration system needs to change.

Border Patrol is projecting that 100,000 migrants will have crossed the southwest border legally and illegally in March, the highest single month figure in a decade. The El Paso sector, which includes West Texas and New Mexico, has seen some of the sharpest increases in recent months. But those crossing are now mostly family units and unaccompanied children, and that change in demographics has forced the CBP in particular to do things it is not used to doing.

The agency has begun medical screening for every child 17 and under taken into custody, a policy Mr. McAleenan called “unprecedented.” And last week, for the first time in a decade, the CBP began releasing migrants directly after they have been processed due to overcrowding in Border Patrol stations and a lack of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bed space.

The agency has reassigned 750 agents from four other ports of entry to process asylum-seekers, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen sent a letter to Homeland Security employees last week asking for volunteers to help on the southwest border.

“This humanitarian mission which we are committed to is undermining our border security efforts,” said Mr. McAleenan last week. “Changes in the law and closing the vulnerabilities in our legal framework is the only way that this flow is going to be reduced.”

‘IT’S A CHALLENGE TO US’

El Paso City Council meetings these days have come to include similar statements about the need for immigration reform.

Certain laws passed in recent years, Mayor Dee Margo said during a meeting this week, “amounts to basically unfettered asylum-seeking. We’re a humanitarian nation. People are coming for their families, economic benefits, but it’s a challenge to us.”

Last week, the city appropriated $20,000 to the United Way to fund a volunteer coordinator position, and they’re now helping Annunciation House – a nonprofit shelter that has been managing the network of more than two-dozen volunteer organizations – open a new 500-bed hospitality center for migrants.

If there is a face for the citizen response in El Paso, it is Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House. He calls and texts with CBP and ICE every day, and calls and texts other churches and volunteer groups to see who could take the migrants in.

But he’s begun to notice what he calls a “concerning” trend. When ICE releases migrants, it contracts with private companies that can transport migrants up to eight hours away – so when bed-space is low in El Paso, migrants can be taken to shelters in Las Cruces and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The CBP doesn’t have that ability, but the volume of their releases has been increasing, according to Mr. Garcia, from 115 last Thursday to 240 this Monday.

Those releases are “basically going to be restricted to El Paso,” he said in a press conference.

“I’m not sure exactly where Border Patrol is headed in terms of the releases,” he added. “I very much hope [it] does not have a political component to it.”

CBP did not respond to specific questions about their migrant releases by deadline.

>>6070939

IT ‘FEELS LIKE WE ARE THE TARGET’

There have been other instances of political manipulation of the immigration bureaucracy, others believe.

Perhaps the most dramatic example was the housing of hundreds of migrants in an outdoor shelter under the Paso del Norte Bridge last week. CBP say they initially opened that camp to deal with the large increase in migrants. Another is “metering,” a policy that limits the flow of asylum claims processed at official ports of entry. Last summer, CBP officials expanded the practice to ports of entry in every border state, causing wait times to stretch for months and more migrants to cross illegally.

Xochitl Rodriguez, a community activist, says it sometimes “feels like we are the target, like they’re trying to break … the community down.”

She has been volunteering at migrant shelters, preparing food – usually pozole soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If she’s lucky she gets one day’s notice of how much to prepare.

“I think we’ll never be so tired we can’t jump on it,” she says.

For other El Pasoans, the situation illustrates how much the immigration system has changed since they had to navigate it themselves.

Darlene Villagrana’s father entered the U.S. without documents and worked for more than a decade before the rest of his family joined him after President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 “amnesty” bill. Ms. Villagrana recently got married and paid $3,000 to bring her husband to the U.S. Earlier this week she was taking her infant son for a stroll in El Paso’s Memorial Park.

“I know they have problems, but … I don’t think it’s fair,” she says. “They just come and they cross” immediately.

“It’s something I’m really struggling with,” she adds. “They think they can just come here. But everyone deserves a better life.”

Trump says ICE chief wasn't tough enough

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/5/trump-says-ice-chief-wasnt-tough-enough/

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Friday, April 5, 2019

President Trump said Friday he pulled his nominee for country’s top deportation officer because the man wasn’t tough enough.

Ronald D. Vitiello, a longtime Border Patrol agent who has been acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly a year, had his nomination withdrawn Thursday, in what could be the beginning of a shakeup at Homeland Security.

“Ron’s a good man but we’re going in a tougher direction. We want to go in a tougher direction,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Vitiello’s pick had been stalled on Capitol Hill for months, but had finally shown some movement in recent weeks. He cleared the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was slated for a vote in the Judiciary Committee next week.

But Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with his Homeland Security team’s inability to make headway on denting the surge of illegal immigrants streaming across the border.

ICE has had its hands tied, by both Congress and the courts, in what it’s able to do to respond to the rising numbers on illegal immigration. The courts have imposed a catch-and-release policy that prevents ICE’s ability to hold illegal immigrant families. With the near-certainty that they will be released and have a chance to disappear into the shadows, families have headed north in record numbers.

Mr. Trump on Friday suggested it was time to do away with the immigration court system that gives some migrants myriad appeals, dragging cases out for years — and giving the migrants a chance to disappear into the shadows.

“Frankly we should get rid of judges. You can’t have a court case every time somebody steps a foot on our ground,” the president said.

He also said the country should “get rid of” the asylum system. He did not say whether he wants to do away with asylum itself, or just change the protection. Asylum is the humanitarian protection granted to people who reach U.S. soil and prove they are fleeing persecution back home.

50 percent jump in gang member immigrants; 650,000 illegals to be freed into U.S. this year

By World Tribune on April 5, 2019

https://www.worldtribune.com/50-percent-jump-in-gang-member-immigrants-650000-illegals-to-be-freed-into-u-s-this-year/

by WorldTribune Staff, April 5, 2019

The former chief of U.S. Border Patrol said there has been a 50 percent increase in illegal immigrant gang members coming into the United States this year.

“As an example, last week, three MS-13 members who were arrested in Maryland for stabbing a rival gangster and burning the body were resettled basically as refugees under the false pretenses of being brought to this country as ‘unaccompanied minors.’ Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated example,” Mark Morgan, who headed up Border Patrol from 2016-2017, said in testimony on April 4 before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Loopholes in federal law will result in some 650,000 illegal immigrants being released into the United States this year, a former Border Patrol chief said.

“Long Island and Maryland became hot spots for MS-13 activity during the surge of Central American teens in 2014. The number of teens coming in now, both individually and with families, dwarfs the 2014 numbers,” Morgan said.

“The MS-13 is one of the most violent and prolific transnational gangs the U.S. as ever seen and the influx of minors into the country through the current crisis will provide them with unlimited vulnerable prospects. While Border Patrol is tied up with the humanitarian mission, the smugglers business is thriving. According to Border Patrol, 800 gang members were apprehended so far this year, a 50 percent increase from last year. Imagine what they’re not catching.”

Morgan warned the committee that loopholes in federal law will result in some 650,000 illegal immigrants being released into the United States this year. Most will “never to be heard from again,” he said.

Morgan said that the U.S. isn’t sure of the background of those entering through the southern border.

“It’s simple – they step one foot on American soil, say the magic words under ‘credible fear’ and within a few days they’re allowed into cities all across the U.S.,” Morgan said. “What should sound additional alarms of concern is that most of the family members either lack proper identifying documentation or effective vetting of what they produce is impossible, so we know virtually nothing about who we’re letting in. Once in, they are typically never to be heard from again.”

Committee chair Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, blamed Congress.

“This crisis is not the fault of the dedicated, hardworking men and women of DHS; they have been given an impossible task,” Johnson said. “The fault rests with Congress alone. I challenge my colleagues to act. Unless you support this new reality of open borders, work with me now to address this crisis.”

In one 12-day period – March 21 to April 1 – DHS released over 17,000 border crossers and illegal immigrants into the interior of the U.S., Breitbart News reported, citing newly obtained data. Since December 21, 2018, DHS has released about 125,565 border crossers and illegals into the interior of the country.

“The Catch and Release process often entails federal immigration officials busing border crossers into nearby border cities and dropping them off with the promise that they will show up for their immigration and asylum hearings, sometimes years later,” Breitbart noted. “The overwhelming majority of border crossers and illegals are never deported from the country once they are released into the U.S.”

Since December 21, 2018, DHS has released:

12,745 border crossers into the San Diego, California area.

22,000 border crossers into the Phoenix, Arizona area.

37,500 border crossers into the El Paso, Texas area.

53,320 border crossers into the San Antonio, Texas area.

The crisis could reach nearly unprecedented levels between April and June, Princeton Policy researcher Steven Kopits told Breitbart News.

“A half million border apprehensions in the next three months would not surprise me,” Kopits said. “I think the current situation is likely unsustainable and will likely result in a political crisis somewhere before the middle of July.”

Kopits’ projection is that the U.S. could see potentially 130,000 arrests at the southern border in April, 170,000 arrests in May, and 150,000 arrests in June for a total of about 450,000 arrests in just three months.

To put that rate of illegal immigration into perspective, there were less than 400,000 arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border in the entire Fiscal Year of 2018.

Facebook Erases 74 Cybercrime Groups With 385,000 Members Selling Passwords, Credit Cards And Hacking Services

Thomas Brewster

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/04/05/facebook-erases-74-cybercrime-groups-with-385000-members-selling-passwords-credit-cards-and-hacking-services/#372a3cc170af

Facebook has launched a crackdown on cybercrime on its platform after security researchers from Cisco Talos discovered what it called an “online criminal flea market” on the site. They uncovered scores of groups where hundreds of thousands of members oversaw the trade of passwords, credit card information and hacking tools. The news comes as Facebook faces renewed criticism for its failure to moderate violent content, extremism and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

Indeed, Facebook has been tasked with putting out numerous dumpster fires in recent months, from Russian misinformation campaigns to neo-Nazi hate speech. Then there was the horror of a live-streamed mass murder in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, run-of-the-mill crooks continue to benefit from the openness of the platform to reach a wide audience to sell illegal offerings. It took a warning from the Cisco cybersecurity unit to get Facebook to remove 74 groups, many of whose 385,000 members were offering a wide array of cybercrime services. Those criminal offerings included stolen credit card details with CVV security numbers, usernames and passwords, and email spamming tools, a Cisco Talos report released Friday revealed. Some of the groups had managed to remain active for eight years.

“These groups violated our policies against spam and financial fraud and we removed them,” a Facebook spokesperson said over email. “We know we need to be more vigilant and we’re investing heavily to fight this type of activity.” Facebook said it was still investigating a number of those running the now-banned groups and had blocked their ability to create new ones.

Martin Lee, outreach manager at Cisco Talos, told Forbes there was no magic bullet to solving the cybercrime problem on Facebook. “Criminals are adept at abusing social platforms. To remove these activities we all need to work together.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

“Platform administrators need to play their part in identifying and removing malicious groups. The wider security community must work together to actively share information, take action and inform our customers. But also we need to engage users and encourage them to be proactive in reporting abuse when they encounter it to help take down these groups.”

Facebook algorithm “helps you find spammers”

Anyone with a Facebook account can quickly find groups where criminal services are on offer or credit card information is traded. Just entering searches such as “spam,” “carding,” or “CVV” will typically return multiple results, and once a user joins, Facebook’s algorithm will recommend other groups, exacerbating the problem, Cisco Talos’ report noted. Together, the hubs of illegal activity had created something akin to an “online criminal flea market,” the researchers wrote.

>>6071045

“So far, Facebook has apparently relied on these communities to police themselves, which for obvious reasons, these criminal communities are reticent to do,” the report read. “As a consequence of this, a substantial number of cyber-scammers have continued to proliferate and profit from illegal activities.”

In some startling cases, credit card numbers and the CVV security codes on the back were being sold, sometimes with ID documents or photos of the victims. The cost, Cisco Talos told Forbes, was around $5 to $10 for credit card numbers and $25 to $30 for account log-ins. The researchers also saw some criminals asking to split profits 50/50 for money laundering services.

Other members were using Facebook to sell large email lists for spammers. One was promising to scam Apple customers, with a phishing email that included a fake invoice from the iPhone maker. When users asked to either view or cancel the order, they were taken to a phishing site where they’d be asked for their identifying information.

It’s been another annus horribilis so far for Facebook in terms of privacy, safety and security. It struggled to remove videos of the mass murder at Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques last month. Just weeks later it admitted that it had accidentally left as many as 600 million passwords exposed to its own staff in plain text, before quickly addressing the problem. And this month, a third-party app developer left an Amazon server containing Facebook IDs, account names, comments and post reactions open to anyone with an internet connection.

But it’s not the only platform having to deal with a massive influx of hate speech and illegality. Earlier this year, a Forbes investigation into Discord, a $1 billion-valued communications app aimed at gamers, found it was rife with many of the same breed of cybercriminal on Facebook, selling vast numbers of logins and credit card data. Previous reports revealed far-right groups have also migrated to Discord after being banned from mainstream social networks.

The problems have become so varied and voluminous that Facebook, Microsoft and other tech giants are now calling for more government regulation, something that not long ago seemed entirely anathema to the Silicon Valley elite.

Asylum for sale: Refugees say some U.N. workers demand bribes for resettlement

A seven-month investigation found reports of U.N. staff members exploiting refugees desperate for a safe home in a new country.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/asylum-sale-refugees-say-some-u-n-workers-demand-bribes-n988351

April 6, 2019, 7:00 AM EDT

By Sally Hayden

This is the first story in a three-part series about alleged corruption in refugee resettlement.

DADAAB, Kenya — Hamdi Abdullahi stands outside the United Nations compound in this dusty, sprawling camp — home to more than 200,000 Somali refugees — and throws stones at its barbed wire fence and heavy gates.

Though the U.N.'s refugee agency, UNHCR, is known everywhere as the chief protector and spokesmanfor most of the globe's 25 million refugees, Abdullahi shouts as she hurls the stones, accusing the agency of stealing her children.

She has been protesting outside the compound off and on for years.

The Somali refugee's four children are now 8,000 miles away in Minnesota, with her former husband and his new wife. She last saw them in 2014. They were among the less than 1 percent of refugees in the entire world chosen to be resettled in a new country and given a chance to start their lives again.

Abdullahi said that while her family's need to resettle was genuine, she was left behind because of false information fed to the U.S. government by a UNHCR resettlement officer, David Momanyi, to whom her ex-husband paid a hefty bribe. "I always remember his face," Abdullahi said.

Their status as vulnerable refugees who'd fled a war zone helped her children, her ex and his new wife get into the United States. But Abdullahi says the bribe left her in the Dadaab refugee camp, where she now throws rocks and curses, only to be chased away by the security guards.

"I'm like the walking dead," she said.

Her account is corroborated by a former U.N. contractor, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, who said he personally collected tens of thousands of dollars from refugees while acting as a middleman for Momanyi — and other UNHCR staffers — over several years. He said Abdullahi's ex-husband paid almost $20,000 in multiple installments.

In separate interviews, more than a dozen other refugees said Momanyi was known for taking bribes. One described the Kenyan as "the architect of corruption and refugee resettlement problems."

In an interview at Dadaab, the UNHCR's staff denied corruption could have played any role in the outcome of Abdullahi's case. They also looked up her case number and said her files show her husband remains in Kenya and was never resettled. Two UNHCR Dadaab staff members also denied that Momanyi had ever worked there.

Click here to read the 100Reporters and Journalists for Transparency version of this story.

Contacted on his UNHCR email address, Momanyi — who now works in another country — referred questions to a UNHCR media spokesperson, who said she could not comment on individual staff members.

Reached by phone, Abdullahi's husband confirmed he had been resettled in Minnesota, but said any allegations of corruption were "false information."

"The U.S. government gave me resettlement to come to the United States but that's it. There's no bribe," he said. "She was rejected by the United States government. That issue, it's over… You know (in) America there's no bribes."

The allegations of corruption at the UNHCR are not limited to one man or one place. A seven-month investigation across five countries with significant refugee populations has found widespread reports of the UNHCR's staff members exploiting refugees, while victims and staff members who report wrongdoing say the agency fails to act against corruption, leaving them vulnerable to intimidation and retaliation.

>>6071082

In interviews, more than 50 refugees registered with the UNHCR in Kenya, Uganda, Yemen, Ethiopia and Libya have described corruption and exploitation involving the agency's staff and personnel from other aid agencies, followingsimilar claims by refugees in Sudan last year.

Refugees who are part of the Nakivale settlement in southwest Uganda said UNHCR staffers and officials from organizations that work with them demand bribes for everything from medical referrals to food rations to contacting police, and it can cost $5,000 in bribes to resettle a family.

In the Dadaab refugee camp, whose residents are almost all Somalis, 19 refugees said it used to cost as much as $50,000 to resettle a large family, or roughly $3,000 per person, before the Trump administration effectively stopped resettlement of Somalis in the U.S.

Refugees who cannot afford to pay bribes report that unscrupulous resettlement workers will sell their case files, often compiled painstakingly over years, to others with more wealth.

Most of those interviewed for this investigation do not know one another. They are separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles, but their accounts follow starkly similar patterns involving large amounts of money and middlemen — often other members of the refugee community.

Reporting included on-the-ground interviews in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya and the Nakivale refugee settlement in southwest Uganda. Refugee sources were not paid for interviews, and most said they wanted to speak out because they have exhausted all other options, including complaining to the UNHCR itself. Only refugees who explicitly agreed to be named are identified; all others are kept anonymous because of the risk to their safety.

Refugees, current and former UNHCR employees, aid workers and two former U.N. investigators say bribery and corruption are found in a variety of services the UNHCR and companion organizations are charged with providing, but report that it is especially unavoidable in resettlement — a precious opportunity for the world's most vulnerable refugees to restart their lives in safe new countries, usually in the West.

While UNHCR staff have occasionally faced internal punishment for taking bribes, these sources — almost unanimously — accuse the organization of ignoring or "whitewashing" charges so as not to risk losing the support of donors. Suspected perpetrators are allowed to resign or move to other locations rather than face investigation, according to dozens of refugees and former and current staff. Temporary suspensions of resettlement — as is happening in Sudan following allegations of corruption there in mid-2018 — doubly punish the most vulnerable, they say.

Three former UNHCR staff members said their employment contracts were unexpectedly terminated after they spoke out about fraud and exploitation or took steps to stop it. Instead, corrupt staffers in positions of power replaced them with others more willing to tolerate bribery or other misconduct, they allege. Alternatively, staff suspected of misconduct may receive good references so they are promoted and moved to other locations, current and former staff said.

"You're punished if you care too much about the rights of refugees," one former staff member in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya said. "It's not a place for that."

"All the processes are geared on the trust of the staff member," a current UNHCR resettlement staff member said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. Resettlement fraud happening somewhere like Dadaab, where there are few processes in place and higher officials aren't doing appropriate checks, is "the perfect Petri-dish of corruption," the staff member continued. "You can do it easily."

UNHCR spokesperson Cecile Pouilly said the agency strongly denies the allegations of widespread corruption within the organization.

"The overwhelming majority of 16,000 staff and affiliated workforce are deeply committed professionals, many of whom are working in difficult environments, sometimes risking their own safety. But as in other organizations, we are not immune to risk or failures on the part of individuals," she said. "This is why we have established a solid safeguarding structure, which has been further strengthened in the last two years and which we continuously seek to improve."

More at Link:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/asylum-sale-refugees-say-some-u-n-workers-demand-bribes-n988351