Did UPS Plane(s) Secretively Bring “Refugees” to America from the Middle East?

Refugee Resettlement Watch
February 7, 2016

Uzbek refugee Fazliddin Kurbanov convicted of Islamic terror charges in Idaho. Did we bring trouble-making Uzbek Muslims to the US in a special arrangement with the government of Uzbekistan in the Bush Administration?

I don’t know! (Sorry if you were expecting a definitive answer!)

The rumor has been going around for months (surely you’ve seen it).

My first reaction is to dismiss the story because it would require so many people in-the-know and I can’t believe that they would all stay silent for so long.  Or, since everyone has a camera, did no one take a picture of the “refugees” being loaded on to buses and moved to some undisclosed locations?  And, are there no resettlement agency personnel with a conscience dropping hints?

What about those Uzbeks?

That said, there is pretty good circumstantial evidence that the US Refugee Admissions Program has been used to secretively bring people into the country where the US State Department wants to ‘help’ some world leader with a ‘problem’ group of people.

I’m talking about the alleged airlift of Uzbeks in a joint effort between the CIA and the US State Department during the Bush Administration following the 2005 uprising of more ‘devout’ Muslims against their own Muslim government in Uzbekistan.

Learn more about the Andijan uprising here at Wikipedia.  And, see here where we mentioned the rumors about an airlift of Uzbeks to the US.  By the way, about 96% of the population of Uzbekistan is Muslim.

Checking the State Department data base I see we admitted 2,848 Uzbeks since 2002.  And, although we brought “refugees” from many religious groups, Muslims were the single greatest number and in 2006 (after the uprising) we saw the largest number of Uzbek “refugees” of any year since 2002 arrive in the US—480—and the vast majority were Muslims that year.

See our archive on Uzbekistan here and note the relatively high number of Uzbeks arrested on terror charges over the years.

I’m reporting the Uzbek persistent mystery because I believe there is something to the story, and it suggests that maybe it is possible to bring “refugees” into the US outside of the normal process.  So I can’t say it couldn’t ever happen!

Now back to that UPS plane story…..

A readers sent this youtube clip (over a half a million views) which suggests there may be something to the rumors flying around now, but it in no way gives us any hard evidence.  (30 busloads of people from one plane?)

Perhaps the most useful bit of the clip shows NJ Governor Chris Christie telling Bill O’Reilly that he has/had no idea that non-profit groups like Catholic Charities have been dropping refugees in NJ for years.  It also shows how ignorant O’Reilly is about the resettlement process that is over 35 years old!  Where the h*** have they all been?

I’ve heard from some of you asking for some confirmation about this story.  I can’t give it to you, but I urge all of you to send me links (either confirming it or debunking it) to more on this story through the comment thread here.

And, for goodness sake, if you see something fishy where you live, take photos!

Until further notice, this post is filed in our ‘rumors’ category.