More On The Key, Conflicted Role Of Faith Based NGOs In The Migration Crisis

A couple of other recent developments supplement the Musk-Gracias Green Bay, WI remarks on immigration at the border. Breitbart News quotes the San Diego Union Tribune:

[T]he county’s two major migrant sheltering agencies gave notice that they will be laying off employees by the end of next month.

Catholic Charities in San Diego will let go of 73 employees at its two shelters, one in San Diego County and the other in Imperial County. Jewish Family Service will do the same with about 115 employees at its San Diego Rapid Response Network migrant shelter — once hailed as a national model for welcoming a large number of people.

According to NBC 7 San Diego,

Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, announced an additional $43,675,626 in Shelter and Services Program funding Wednesday [November 27, 2024] for non-governmental organizations providing support to migrants awaiting their immigration court proceedings.

The Catholic Charities Diocese of San Diego received $21,598,261 and Jewish Family Service of San Diego received $22,077,365 in SSP funding to assist newly arrived migrants. This funding -- which goes toward necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, medical care and transportation -- is in addition to the over $39 million in SSP funding announced in April.

. . . In April [2024], the county of San Diego and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego County were both awarded $19,592,554.

These piecemeal reports suggest that the two faith-based NGOs, which appear to operate the principal migrant shelters on the San Diego section of the border, were between them receiving something approaching $100 million in federal funding in 2024. Breitbart News commented,

[M]igrant crossings have plummeted since Trump took office and allowed the U.S. Border Patrol to do its job, while restoring the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers awaiting court dates.

According to the UK Daily Mail, the Trump border policies have simply eliminated the market for migrant shelters at the border:

California's formerly overrun border with Mexico is now virtually empty just months after Donald Trump's election, images show.

Aid workers have begun packing up after weeks without seeing any migrants, SF Gate reports.

'To say there has been a dramatic change would be an understatement,' Jeffrey Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector, said.

Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.

December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.

The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.

But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.

Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.

December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.

The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.

But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.

. . . Stalnaker told SF Gate the addition of concertina wire has drastically reduced the number of illegal entries, which has seen arrests plummet by 70 percent so far this fiscal year compared to last.

Whether the NGOs have been laying off staff due to the Trump administration's funding cuts or due to the drastic decrease in border crossings is a chicken-or-the-egg question. The San Diego NGOs were getting dollops of grants in the tens of millions to run the migrant centers, when the problem they were meant to address has now suddently disappeared -- but let's keep in mind that the benefits and other assistance they provided were part of the policies that had been attracting the migrants in the first place. In other words, they were facilitating the problem they were somehow supposed to fix.

I see two conflicts for all the fiath-based NGOs that provide migrant services at the border. The first is that they were tacitly relying on traffickers to bring them their clientele. For instance, they complain that cuts in their funding leave them unable to serve the numbers who turn up at their doors:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the administration, by withholding millions even for reimbursements of costs incurred before the sudden cut-off of funding, violates various laws as well as the constitutional provision giving the power of the purse to Congress, which already approved the funding.

The conference's Migration and Refugee Services has sent layoff notices to 50 workers, more than half its staff, with additional cuts expected in local Catholic Charities offices that partner with the national office, the lawsuit said.

But the services Catholic Charities had been performing at the San Diego border assumed a steady supply of migrants delivered by traffickers. Their hands aren't clean. In addition, there's another conflict Catholic Charities has with Catholic doctrine, specifically Catechism 2241:

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.

The faith-based NGOs, among which Catholic Charities is prominent, are reported by DOGE to assist the migrants in obtaining social security numbers at the border, with the understanding that they can be used for various kinds of benefit and voter fraud as outlined in yesterday's post. They are tacitly encouraging, or at least enabling, the migrants to violate US laws. Beyond that, as Antonio Gracias pointed out in Green Bay,

ICE told us that kids are being trafficked back and forth across the border to complete families to make this easier. This is a human tragedy.

The unaccompoanied children numbered in the hundreds of thousands in recent years. Some must be passing through Catholic Charities camps, and it's hard to think Catholic Charities staff is not aware of the situatuion and even knows who these children are, having seen them more than once. Are they doing anything to stop this? Beyond that, as Gracias continues,

And how many of these people died on the way up here that didn’t make it in? What happened to them? We created a system here that created [an incentive] for people to come and be taken advantage of by these traffickers.

Let's keep in mind, the more migrants who were encouraged to show up, the more money Catholic Charities and the other faith-based NGOs got. They didn't have any incentive to limit their number. The only thing that limits them is the likelihood that they will be turned away at the border or deported if they enter illegally, and the threat of deportation is already encouraging them to leave:

If migrants are deported by the United States government, they are separated from their families and detained in crowded jails, sometimes for many weeks. Once legally deported, migrants cannot visit for 10 years or longer, even when their relatives remain in the United States. They also lose possessions and easy access to their bank accounts.

Haitians “are self-deporting right now because they don’t want the worst thing … because [the government] does send them back to Haiti immediately,” Jeff Lamour, an American businessman in Albertville, Alabama, told Breitbart News on Friday.

. . . South of the border, northbound migrants are also turning back homewards. “It is true that people are going different directions,” Caleb Vitello, a senior official in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told the Council on Foreign Relations. For example, the northward foot and boat traffic in the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has dropped “because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there,” he said.

The migrants’ exit is bad news for business groups who want more imported customers, workers, and renters to increase their profits and stock values.

It's also bad news for the faith-based NGOs that provide the business groups with imported customers, workers, and renters and work closely with them. What's remarkable is the perceptiveness and efficiemcy with which the Trump administration has simply knocked the legs off the whole economic stool that drove migration. They cut demand by closing the border and beginning deportations for those who'd gotten in. They cut supply by turning off the funmding spigot to the NGOs that throve off the problem. In a mattrer of months, the immigrant camps have been shutting down.

"It Was A massive, Large Scale Program To Import As Many Illegals As Possible"

Bits and pieces keep coming out about the Biden mass immigration program. Over the weekend, Musk and one of his DOGE associates, Antonio Gracias, outlined a new piece of the overall picture at a rally in Green Bay, WI. This is a less-than-ideal forum -- I certainly hope Musk and DOGE are working on an organized, authoritative written report of their findings. Up to now, most of the insights we've been seeing have been over programs that bypassed the border by recruiting "refugees" in their home countries and flying them in via the CHNV and TPS programs, which I'll update in tomorrow's post.

The Musk-Gracias presentation in Green Bay focused on the border itself. There doesn't seem to be a single, complete transcript; the best I've found is from Beege Welborn at Red State, but annoyingly typical of Salem Media writers, she doesn't provide a link to the full transcript if it exists, and frankly, I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who goes by Beege. I doubt if this is on her birth certificate. (Reminds me of a junior higfh school classmate who went by "Dubby". She became a doctor, I doubt if she still uses that name.)

Anyhow, Gracias's remarks are highly informative:

GRACIAS: "In 2021, 270,000 non-citizens got social security numbers. In 2024, 2.1M non-citizens got social security numbers. We went in to find fraud and found this by accident.

. . . If I hadn't seen this myself, I'm not sure I believed it. I went through it myself and mapped it. And Elon is right. This is true. The defaults in the system from social security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, MAX PAY for these people and minimum collection.

We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs.

And then what was really, really disturbing us was why we're asking ourselves why. So we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population. Yes.

Who did vote? We found some by sampling that ACTUALLY DID VOTE.

We have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation Service. Yeah. Already, already. That is already happening right now. The truly disturbing thing though, I just want you to know this, a truly disturbing thing to me, and the darkest thing about this, to me, the voter fraud is terrible.”

This piece at Real Clear Politics has later passages from Gracias's transcript with more specific information on how the illegals are processed through the system:

I talked to Border Patrol myself. Elon was there too. I went to Laredo and Brownsville; Elon went to Eagle Pass. You walk up to a Border Patrol officer and tell them you want to come in. They have a couple of choices: they could charge you with a misdemeanor or felony under [8 U.S.C. §] 1325, or they can make it an administrative offense, like a parking ticket basically. They were told to do that -- to make it an administrative offense under the last administration.

Then you walk across the border. They do what’s called a "release on your own recognizance" and give you an NTA, a notice to appear, to appear at a judge. The wait times on judges are like, average, six years. Look at Grok, you’ll see it on immigration judges. There’s only 700 of them; this is 5.5 million people, okay?

So what happens then? Once you’re in the country and you’ve got asylum through one of these pathways—and we’ve mapped the whole thing out—you can apply for a work document. You file a 765; it’s the work form. You get this form called the 766—that’s the authorization—and then the Social Security Administration automatically sends you your Social Security number in the mail. No interview, no ID.

Musk then summed up the main point:

So it’s really if you create a massive financial incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, then that’s what they will do. It would be strange—it would be odd if that didn’t happen.

So the really the thing that actually has the Democrats losing their mind, by far, the real reason for these attacks and sort of the burning of the cars and everything is that we’re going to turn off the payments to illegals.

Because I mean, because that’s not the deal. It’s simply not right. And look at that thing with the Roosevelt Hotel and like the luxury hotels in New York where the Federal Emergency Management Agency funds were being used to house illegals in luxury hotels in New York that the average American can’t afford. And they were given a welcome package and ten thousand dollars debit cards and everything else. Like, it’s super real.

I mean, it’s like a—I think it’s the biggest voter fraud thing in history by far. And moreover, if left unchecked, it would have succeeded.

Pieces of the whole program and its objectives are gradually coming out in almost a stream of consciousness. First, we heard about the Haitians, then the Venezuelans and the Tren de Aragua, and we've heard in little bits about how these programs were facilitated by nine- and ten-figure grants to faith-based NGOs, whicn designated "sponsors" to find the unvetted immigrants housing, training, Engliah classes, jobs, and cars, which somehow turned into highly profitable schemes for slumlords and sweatshop employers.

But this was just the part of the overall program that bypassed the border. Now we're starting to learn what actually happens at the border itself. And we've already seen that the same NGOs were facilitating that humanitarian crisis on the border:

The American Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have come under fire from some Republicans who allege they are helping migrants cross the southern border into the U.S.

Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, wrote on social media that NGOs "are FACILITATING illegal immigration to the U.S., like the International Committee Red Cross, providing maps and information about traveling to the southern border."

In another post on X, formerly Twitter, Roy said the International Committee of the Red Cross was "not even hiding it—its website has U.S.-bound migration maps for 2023 in DIFFERENT LANGUAGES!"

And the NGOs were working with the human traffickers who brought the migrants to the border. They wouldn't have been there for the NGOs without them. Gracias points this out:

Because what you don’t understand, people don’t know, Americans need to know, that’s why I’m here, is that human traffickers made thirteen to fifteen billion dollars off of this. Okay? That’s the money that’s going around the world, moving people around the world to our borders because of these incentives. How does it work? What happens?

If you’re in Africa and you’re in South America, you’ve got to walk up through Mexico and through here South America. Who do you pay? You pay the narcos. You pay the traffickers.

And we found, we were told by ICE, it’s between twenty thousand dollars and five hundred dollars depending on they pick you up to walk across all those countries and get all the way up to the border. Where does that money go? It goes to the cartels. It goes to human traffickers.

The Biden policies, which funded the NGOs that ran the migrant camps at the border, provided benefits to the migrants and facilitated their entry, created a demand for the traffickers' services, with which the faith-based NGOs were complicit. The traffickers provided them with the migrants that were the reason for their lucrative government funding.

In tomorrow's post, I'll have more to say about the faith-based NGO activities at the border and the efficiency with which the Trump administration has knocked the legs off that stool.

Jeffrey Goldberg Says Mike Waltz Lied; Dershowitz Also Weighs In

My biggest point yesterday was that people don't just get on Signal the way they get on Outlook. There has to be a good reason for them even to learn what it is at all, and while I've been out of the business so long that I've never worked with it myself, my instinct is that normally you have to have a tech install it, especially if you're just a suit or a talking head. Thus the most puzzling part of Dershowitz's commentary was at 4:47:

Look, I don't know very much about technology, I'm really a Luddite when it comes to this, but I am on Signal.

That brought me up short. He's a brilliant guy, a celebrity, a retired law professor and appellate attorney, but why does he need high-level commercial grade encryption? Remember that the German Enigma code was basically just a tweak of an earlier commercial-grade product. This is heavyweight stuff. That briefly made me wonder if in fact everyone gets Signal the way they get Outlook. But then I realized he's a friend and adviser to Netanyahu and the Israeli government, and you can bet an Israeli tech installed it on Dershowitz's phone for a very good reason. He goes on,

I use Signal, because it is more confidential, it I think makes the message disappear fairly quickly, but I don't have any secrets -- but I do, I have loyal client secrets, but I don't usually put them online at all.

Yes, exactly, this is why Trump has never used e-mail, and it's why attorneys normally don't, because it's discoverable. As Dershowitz puts it, the real client secrets are just in his head, and he'll take them to the grave. But Netanyahu presumably isn't a client, stricty speaking, as far as I can parse this. I've got to assume he has a separate security category for items that are not ethically flagged as client secrets, but must be communicated securely over the web -- for instance, confidential advice to Netanyahu that is not specifically legal. Signal is adequate for this.

He then raises the same question that puzzles me -- how did a journalist get on the call? Jeffrey Goldberg himself doesn't believe the public explanation:

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg is accusing Mike Waltz of lying about talking with him — ridiculing on Sunday the claim that his phone number was mysteriously “sucked into” the national security adviser’s cellphone before being included in a Signal group chat about Yemen airstrikes.

“This isn’t ‘The Matrix.’ Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” The Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about there. You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone.”

And a tech had to install Signal on Goldberg's phone and configure it so it could talk to the national security Signal system. And after installation, it had to be tested to be sure it worked. This was all deliberate and fully authorized, at least up to Waltz's level, and several people were involved in setting it up over a period of days, something Goldberg had to have been at least generally aware of, because they were working on his phone. Again, I don't believe someone at the editor-in-chief level would install a phone app himself.

Instructions for installing Signal are on line here. They involve, in part:

• Downloading Signal to the phone and running the install program
• Registering a phone number and waiting for a verification code
• Entering the verification code and finishing the onboarding process
• Editing a user profile and notifying a chat admin of it.

Signal had to have been loaded on Goldberg's phone, a phone number registered to Signal, a profile for Goldberg had to have been created and known to the Signal chat group, and it had to have been added to the chat. There was nothing random, accidental, or inadvertent about the process. Several people working in several different capacities had to have been involved. Goldberg probably didn't load Signal on his phone or set himself up to do it, but he was clearly aware that something had been done, and he implied this in his interview with Welker.

Another tidbit is that according to the Signal site, anyone on the chat can see the user profile of everyone else on the chat. It's entirely credible that nobody on the chat at the Rubio-Hegseth-Gabbard-Vance et al level would understand this, but someone handling call security had to have been fully aware of everyone who was on the call. Nothing just slipped through.

Here's My Puzzle On The Signal Chat Kerfuffle

Feeling more and more like an op by neocons to take out Pete and damage JD. Complete and total BS. Now I’m at the point where, fine, you little twits want to dance, let’s dance: Trump should cut pretty much most of NSA and NSC, from the top down, and install Bridge Colby as NSA.… https://t.co/H5SPoDW79z

— Ned Ryun (@nedryun) March 27, 2025

As I often note here, I spent much of my IT career working the nuts and bolts of computer security in both classified and civilian environments. Security works in basic ways across the board, and once you're used to it, it isn't rocket science. Thus I'm a little puzzled when I see this:

Elon Musk is helping lead the investigation into the Signal chat leak involving top national security leaders and the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, the White House press secretary said Wednesday.

"The National Security Council, the White House Counsel's Office, and also, yes, Elon Musk's team" will be leading the investigation into the Signal leak, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Wednesday's White House press conference.

You don't need Elon, DOGE, ot any of those others to figure it out. From everything I read, the Signal app was routinely installed on the phones of national security types above a certain level just in the normal course of business. It was authorized for unclassified communications. That doesn't mean just anyone could join in a chat, there waa an authorization list. The question was how Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg got on the authorization list -- but I would add a second question, how Goldberg got a copy of Signal on his phone that just happened to be tuned in to the national security network.

Think about it. I may have gmail or Outlook installed on my phone, but that doesn't mean I just get random messages from General Motors executives every morning when I check my e-mail. And unless I have something very wrong, neither I nor Jeffrey Goldberg have any reason even to have Signal installed on our phones. If it isn't installed and configured to receive messages from the government, even if I mistakenly got such a message, I wouldn't be able to read it.

Remember, Signal is an end-to-end encryption system. That means when you type in a message, it scrambles it and makes it unreadable unless another Signal system on another phone receives it, knows who sent it, and can unscramble it with a key. Somebody had to install it on Jeffrey Goldberg's phone and set it up so it would know Pete Hegseth was sending a message with a key it would recognize and use to unscramble the message.

So for starters. I would want Jeffrey Goldberg's phone. Goldberg didn't just randomly get that chat out of the blue. This all had to be set up by one or more tech guys. I'd want to talk to the tech guys, too, and since they work for the government and have security clearances, I'd want to talk to them fast. In fact, I'm pretty sure they've already been talked to.

Next, someone else, almost certainly not the same tech guy who installed Signal on Goldberg's phone, had to add Goldberg's ID to the chat. Frankly, this had to have been done at someone's instruction. People like Gabbard, Hegseth, and Waltz don't do their own security administration. Somewhere in the natsec apparatus is a Signal administrator who puts together the chat lists. Somebody with the authority to do this had to have told this guy, "OK, add Jeffrey Goldberg -- yeah, that same guy who's editor of The Atlantic and works for lefty Laurene Powell Jobs, yeah, the same guy we set up to use Signal with the ID we gave him last week -- to the chat list for the Houthi chat."

This is another guy who works for the government, has a security clearance, and will need to explain what happened, or he'll wind up in Club Fed at best. I'm sure he's already been talked to, and in fact, I suspect there's just no mystery here. For whatever reason, things are being kept quiet. And for that matter, Jeffrey Goldberg had to have been aware that Signal was being installed on his phone, why, how to use it, and when to dial in for that chat.

Even if nobody talks -- even if all the techs and admins who had to have been involved in this are rubbed out, whacked, terminated with extrreme prejudice -- the system logs will still have records of everything that was done and who did it. This is all kabuki on both sides. Elon and DOGE know there's no need for them to get involved. I think Politico understands this prety well:

On Wednesday evening — following a brutal day of headlines surrounding the now-infamous Signal chat — Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles and top personnel official Sergio Gor gently offered President Donald Trump some advice in a private meeting.

National security adviser Mike Waltz’s accidental inclusion of a journalist in the chat was creating a major embarrassment for the White House. Perhaps it was time to consider showing him the door, they suggested, according to two people familiar with the conversations who were granted anonymity to discuss them.

. . . Despite simmering anger directed at the national security adviser from inside the White House, Waltz still has his job five days after The Atlantic first published its explosive story on the Signal chat. That doesn’t mean he’s safe yet, according to the two people.

In fact, the two allies have heard some administration officials are just waiting for the right time to let him go, eager to be free of the newscycle before making changes.

Accidental my big toe. Too many people had to be involved, and too many records created on too many system logs. This is all kabuki on both sides.

Amtrak Update

As I mentioned in my post on Amtrak last week, there's a whole sub-sub genre of YouTubers who liveblog their Amtrak trips. They aren't really train buffs like I am; they seem just to enjoy the scenery combined with amenities like eating in the dining car or riding in the sleeping cars or business class. This would be perfectly fine, except that Amtrak travel is predictably nightmarish, with trains regularly canceled or running nine or 12 hours late or even longer, with the diner and snack bar out of food, toilets clogged, heat out, and so forth.

In that post last week, I mentioned one of the best-known Amtrak YouTube channels, Grounded Life Travel, with the charming couple Allie and Rob, who go ga-ga over the Amtrak long distance trains they ride several times a year on crosss-country trips, often between cruises on opposite coasts. Frankly, this sort of Amtrak travel is high-risk activity. Even Allie and Rob mention oh, by the way, Amtrak canceled the Coast Starlight on their Los Angeles-Seattle leg, but no big deal, they just rented a car, drove 18 hours, and got back on the train.

Once almost 20 years ago, I took just such an Amtrak odyssey, booking Grounded Life style sleeping car accommodations between LA and Philadelphia. There were no cancellations, and the toilets mostly worked, but there were numerous problems with the ventilation and drunken, noisy sleeping car passengers. As I changed trains in the early morning of the third day in Pittsburgh, the conductor on the new train, once he looked at my tickets, said only, "I feel your pain." I'd said nothing to him; he simply understood what the Amtrak experience is really like. This will never make it to Allie and Rob's videos.

In this week's news, the Amtrak Eugene, OR-to-Vancouver, BC route, the Cascades, which Allie and Rob pitch in the video above as "Amtrak's Most Underrated Route", has been almost completely eliminated and substituted with charter buses, not because of anything Elon Musk has threatened to do, but because of an entirely forseeable circumstance:

The years-long process to restore regional intercity rail service and build up train ridership in western Washington and Oregon was dealt a major setback this week when Amtrak suddenly withdrew dozens of train cars from service for emergency repairs.

It means the state-supported Amtrak Cascades service is, for now, left with just one working train.

On its website, Amtrak said substitute bus service will be offered to passengers booked on cancelled trains “until further notice.”

Corrosion discovered on Amtrak’s aging Horizon-class railcars caused the trouble. The rail company immediately removed all 70 of its Horizon train cars from the fleet nationwide, including 26 used on the Amtrak Cascades line.

As even Allie and Rob pointed out in the video I linked last week, Amtrak's equipment is old, dirty, and poorly maintained. The Horizon cars were delivered in 1990, making them 35 years old,

In the Pacific Northwest, 26 cars were sidelined, leading to the cancellation of all but one of the seven daily round trips for the Cascades in the Vancouver, British Columbia-Seattle-Portland-Eugene, Ore., corridor. The single round trip continuing to operate will be a Seattle-Eugene, Ore., round trip — trains Nos. 503 and 508 — using the Cascades’ lone operable Talgo trainset; a second such Series 8 train has been sidelined since November after striking a tree during a storm.

Oh, OK. They at least had one spare, or they had it until it hit a tree last fall. But that leaves out an earlier problem that took other Talgo-type equipment out of service:

On December 18, 2017, Amtrak Cascades passenger train 501 derailed near DuPont, Washington, United States. The National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) final report said regional transit authority Sound Transit failed to take steps to mitigate a curve at the accident location, and inadequately trained the train engineer. [However, Amtrak operated this service, the engineer was an Amtrak employee, and Amtrak was responsible for his training.] . . . A number of automobiles on southbound I-5 were crushed, and three people on board the train died. -

. . . [T]he WSDOT owned Talgo Series VI passenger trainset, was also damaged beyond repair. The NTSB later said that the use of these trainsets should be discontinued "as soon as possible," because of their lack of crashworthiness and overaged safety straps used for assembly retention. This led WSDOT and Amtrak to retire and scrap the remaining Talgo VI trainsets. The sets will be replaced with new Siemens Venture train sets.

So let me see. Amtrak put the then-30-year-old Horizon cars in service on the Cascade trains because its Talgo VI cars were unsafe, but that's OK, they'd be replaced with Siemens Venture cars, except the Venture cars, nine years later, still haven't been delivered. But this allowed the Horizon cars to stay in service on the Cascades until someone found they were corroded and unsafe, so they have to be taken our of service now, too. And they'd have an extra Talgo 8 set to use, but it hit a tree. As I say, riding Amtrak is high-risk behavior.

Where are Allie and Rob? This is all beyond them.

Meanwhile, just this past Thursday,

Amtrak President Roger Harris emailed employees that the railroad would consider ways to reduce costs in the coming weeks, including cutting the number of management positions within the company. In a statement provided to Railfan & Railroad, an Amtrak spokesperson confirmed that the railroad was indeed tightening its belt.

“Given the current environment, the Executive Leadership Team and the Board have determined that we must act now,” the statement read. “We will do this by examining our costs, including the size of our management staff, in a proactive and controlled way. In addition, we will be more selective in starting new projects and will look harder for efficiencies and innovative ways to address the problems and opportunities we face.”

The "current environment", of course, is an oblique reference to Elon Musk and his characterization of Amtrak as "kind of embarrassing", which, given the via dolorosa of the nearly decade-long Cascades fiasco, is hard to dispute.

It sounds as if Amtrak has been top-heavy with deputy assistants to the assistant director, but the question that sticks in my mind is that airlines have been familiar with problems of one or another type of plane being temporarily or permanently grounded, or individual planes being hit by helicopters, landing upside down on the runway, or whatever. My impression is that they have contingency plans to reassign equipment in place covering every such eventuality.

All of a sudden, big surprise, Amtrak discovers 70 35-year-old coaches, already characterized by Amtrak's biggest fans as old, dirty, and poorly maintained, are also unsafe, and they have to be taken out of service. Nine years earlier, another type of equipment was declared unsafe and had to be taken out of service -- but apparently nobody at headquarters had the tiniest inkling that such a thing could ever happen, much less happen again.

“Amtrak is determining how to replace the grounded Horizon trains by redistributing other trains in its national fleet,” said Washington State Department of Transportation rail division spokesperson Janet Matkin via email Wednesday. “Amtrak will notify the states of Washington and Oregon as soon as a plan is in place to move replacement trains to the Pacific Northwest.”

They'll be back with a solution just as soon as they can come up with a plan. Doggone, Allie and Rob sure liked those trains. Maybe they can liveblog a ride on the bus replacements, except there's no dining car, no snack bar, no roomettes, just the usual drunks and crazies. I would go a step beyond Musk: don't privatize it, just let Greyhound buy more buses and be done with the whole problem.

Musk's Interview With Bret Baier

In a remarkable interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Elon Musk and members of his DOGE team put on a surprisingly grounded performance. Musk sometimes comes off as having a little too much fun trolling his opponents, but this interview gives a clear idea of why he's gotten so rich -- he actually understands business and IT, something most business and IT people don't.

However, it's difficult to find a single written transcript. The best I can come up with is in this post at Red State, which quotes extensive excerpts, for instance,

MUSK: We're talking about elementary financial controls, that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit, it will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.

I spent most of my career on the controls side of IT, security, procedures, contingency planning, and related areas. Part of my function was to be audited almost constantly. Internal and external auditors and bank examiners would come in and want to see in detail how the company, for instance, made sure that only the people who were specifically authorized to sign checks outside the computer system were also exclusively permitted to issue equivalent payments through the computer.

Another issue was how the company identified confidential customer and employee data and made sure it was kept confidential. That would include medical and medical insurance data, financial information, social security numbers, personnel actions, legal strategies, and so forth.

Another issue was ensuring that the company could maintain critical operations that relied on the availability of its IT systems and data. Just as an example, several major financial companies had both their executive offices and their IT facilities in the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on 9/11. How did they react to losing their major officers and their whole IT operation? Recognize that if there were no way quickly to recover customer accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars would be inaccessbile for weeks or months, or possibly just disappear forever.

(As it happened, in that case, the brokers and so forth typically had mirror-image backup operations already running in places like New Jersey, because the auditors had recognized the potential problem for decades and had long since insisted the companies plan for it.)

These are the sorts of things auditors ask about. They report directly to the corporate board of directors, in large part because as Musk puts it, if such controls aren't in place, the company would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. Failing an audit in the private sector is a big deal; it leads high-level managers to get fired.

Via the Red State summary,

Another manipulation of the fraud gap discovered by engineer Steve Davis is over $300 million in Small Business Administration loans had been given out to people under the age of 11 and over $300 million distributed to people over the age of 120. Musk discussed how this gap occurred, lamenting how fraudsters exploit the Social Security numbers of newborn babies.

It had been reported weeks ago that there were people over 200 years old still in the Social Security files who weren't flagged as "deceased". This was pooh-pooed at the time as being unimportant, since it involved relatively few cases, and they weren't actually receiving benefits. But if the numbers are active, people can steal them, whether they're getting benefit checks from that account or not. This was the reason for the large-scale marking of accounts for 120-year-old-plus people as "deceased". Quoted in the Red State piece,

[DOGE member Anthony] ARMSTRONG: The reason this is happening is that the two systems are not talking to each other. Right? So, you don't know at the Small Business Administration that you're giving a loan to a nine-month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross-referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. So, that very, very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. There are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another, and if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.

The piece quotes another DOGE engineer, Steve Davis:

As an example, there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system.

BAIER: And that's an accurate figure?

DAVIS: Correct. Correct. This is something that has been identified as a problem, a pre-existing problem since 2008, at least from an IG report. So, there are some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this, 2008, and nothing was done about it. And so, 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that could be used only for bad intentions, there would be no way to use those for good intentions. So one of the things the DOGE team is doing is carefully, and very methodically, looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.

There are other problems that can also grow in private and NGO environments that can easily get out of control, for instance, quoted in a Fox News link:

Davis brought up federal credit cards, which he labeled a "mundane" but "illustrative" example of DOGE's work.

"There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn't make sense. So one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we've worked for the agencies and said, 'Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?'" Davis explained.

Corporate credit cards can be used for all sorts of things, not least motel rooms for office trysts, something I've seen come up in my own experience. There can be no question that this sort of thing is going on -- even if it could be claimed that the amounts are negligible, it shouldn't be allowed, and controls should be in place to eliminate the problem.

My impression of Musk, even though in certain areas he's not a serious guy -- remember the frozen embryos with Amber Heard? -- has gone up. He dresses as badly as Bill Gates, but while Gates is just a flake, Musk is an eccentric with many redeeming features.

Spreading False Narrative

I found a pretty typical legacy media take from CBS Miami this morning, More than half a million Latin American, Haitian immigrants given deadline to self-deport:

The Department of Homeland Security officially posted a notice to end protections for 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to the Federal Register on Tuesday.

This sets up a 30-day deadline, which will fall on April 24, for those affected to self-deport or face the consequences.

"The Department of Homeland Security is warning that if these people do not voluntarily depart the country, they will be found, arrested and deported from the country," CBS News immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez said. "In fact, the administration is saying that the people affected by this policy change should sign up to self-register on a smartphone app provided by the government and tell people that they will be departing the country."

This isn't really news to start with; this step had been expected, and a month ago, the administration froze funding for many of the NGOs that pass money through to the migrants. Nevertheless, CBS maintains the convenient fiction:

Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado said the new guidelines unfairly target individuals who were legally admitted into the country.

"That's not fair, because people that came in with the parole came in legally through the legal system and they were authorized by the United States authorities to remain legally in the United States," Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado said. "So, the fact that you're having to leave within 30 days, facing the possibility of being detained is definitely something that's not like it's not due process, like it's just a violation of what they were initially granted."

The CHNV program never granted "legal" status to anyone who came into the country via its provisions; the "immigration attorney" is incorrect. They have been here under "humanitarian parole":

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to exercise discretion to temporarily allow certain noncitizens to physically enter or remain in the United States if they are applying for admission but do not have a legal basis for being admitted. DHS may only grant parole if the agency determines that there are urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons for a person to be in the United States, and that person merits a favorable exercise of discretion. Grants of parole are made for limited periods of time, often to accomplish a discrete purpose, and individuals are typically expected to depart the United States when the authorized period expires unless another form of status or relief is conferred.

There are several iffy questions about the CHNV program. For instance,

To come to the U.S. under CHNV, a person needed a sponsor who could demonstrate they could financially support the person or family who would live here.

Just who the "sponsors" are has never been quite clear. The money for the CHNV program has come from grants to a small number of faith-based NGOs amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, which I've discussed in recent posts. These NGOs then identify individual sponsor groups, who apparently receive money from these grants to support the specific migrants, who appear to be purposely settled in specific communities, such as Springfield, OH, Charleroi, PA, or Rockland County, NY, where a group of about 5,000 Haitians had been settled, according to the link.

The sponsor groups, according to the sketchy reports we've had from the communities where the Haitians have been resettled, then work with private real estate managers, grocers, employers, and car dealers to supply the sponsored Haitians with slum housing, sweatshop employment, cars in apparently at least some cases, food, and other goods and services. It appears that these payments are in bulk from the "sponsors" to the private entities, and as a result, they're highly profitable business. But they never reach the Haitians themselves, who in fact appear to be captive to the "sponsors".

However, when the Trump administration froze funding to the NGOs that passed the money for all this through to the sponsors, that simply knocked one key leg off the CHNV stool -- the rent, car payments, grocery bills, and so forth could no longer be paid. The Miami immigration attorney Morella Aguado in the CBS link misrepresents the situation:

Aguado pointed out this brings up other legal challenges: "People have lease agreements, legally speaking, the legal obligations of a lease agreement, or maybe a vehicle, all of these terms and legal contracts that we have now obligation switch, and what are they going to do with those contracts?"

I strongly suspect that the lease agreements and vehicle titles are not in the names of the individual Haitians or families; in the case of rentals, as we saw in Springfield, OH, multiple families occupied single residential units, while titles to Haitians' cars that were abandoned or damaged in wrecks were impossible to trace. The Haitians under the program were being supported by "sponsors"; they weren't self-sufficient and wouldn't normally have qualified for conventional rentals or financing.

In addition, the CHNV program was never indefinite:

CHNV parole status is for two years. During that time, a person can get working papers and seek asylum, which provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

That window to apply for a way to stay, though, doesn't match people's experience with the U.S. timetable for approving permissions.

Jean Marie Lauture, who was a high-ranking police official in Haiti, has been in the U.S. since Sept. 13, 2023. He has applied for asylum, but he hasn't been approved by the U.S. He said others who applied last year, like him, also haven't heard back.

So Mr Lauture had two years to formalize his status, but if he isn't successful, he will need to return to Haiti in September of this year no matter what. One can argue that it was never realistic to expect the Haitians to become legal within two years, but this was a problem for the Biden administration, which initiated the program. It simply isn't Trump's problem. As the CBS link put it,

CBS News first reported in early February that the Trump administration was planning to revoke the legal status of individuals who entered the U.S. under the CHNV process.

DHS said many of the people that came through this program were loosely vetted and it undercut American workers.

This would apply, for instance, to the Venezuelans settled in Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX. They were brought in as a group by "sponsors" who somehow didn't check whether some number were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, who promptly transferred their criminal activities to the US. It was in fact part of a package deal.

The problem for those who hope to reinstate the CHNV program through the courts is that whether the funding to the NGOs and sponsors can be restored, no one in the country under the program can stay longer than two years. So far, the Trump strategy has been effective, and many Haitians are already starting to self-deport.