Refugees stealthily housed at Hyatt in swanky D.C. suburb for months; customer reviews tell story

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Fox News host Laura Ingraham and her staff are raising concerns over Afghan refugees whom they have learned are being housed in an upscale Hyatt Regency hotel that sits just miles from Capitol Hill in Bethesda, Maryland.

At issue, she explained in-depth on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” late Thursday, is that the refugees are being housed there secretly and without any transparency.

“Unbeknownst to local residents, the hotel is being used as housing for Afghan refugees. A tenant who shares the building told ‘The Ingram Angle’ exclusively that hundreds of Afghan nationals have been housed there for over two months,” she said.

“The tenant also told us that older Afghan children living there have already been enrolled in local schools using the hotel as their permanent address.”

To see for herself, she sent a show producer to the hotel to speak with the general manager, but he was “evasive about it.” She also tried contacting both the State Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. Both offered “no real response.”

Last but not least, she reached out to Hyatt, but they replied with “a weaselly statement about care and empathy that avoided our questions,” she said.

“In today’s world, leading with care and empathy is more important than ever, which is why we place Hyatt’s purpose of care at the forefront of our business strategy and goals,” part of the statement reads.

The Fox News host and her staff were at a dead end until they discovered the smoking gun on Tripadvisor, a website that allows guests to leave reviews for the hotels where they stay. It just so happened that the reviews for the hotel told the real story:

(Source: TripAdvisor)

“Beautiful hotel but to our surprise after checking our U13 and U14 girls travel soccer teams in that we were placed on floors and rooms along with refugees. Their were around the clock government staff sitting outside rooms, doctors in and out, marines….little overwhelming for our 12&13 year old girls. Transparency prior to checking-in would have been nice,” one review from November reads.

More telling is the response that Hyatt posted.

“[W]e sincerely apologize for not letting you know about this prior to checking-in. Thank you for reaching out to us about this and we’ll take steps to ensure you and other guests are made fully aware in the future,” it reads.

(Source: Tripadvisor)

Ingraham wasn’t surprised.

“We need transparency all right. Where else is this happening across the country? It’s time for answers!” she said.

Since the Biden administration refuses to offer any, she turned to director of research Dr. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“So remember, 124,000 [refugees] is what we flew out of the country on an emergency basis without a lot of vetting. So we must clearly have dozens of places around the country like this hotel,” he told her.

To make matters worse, the vast majority of these refugees haven’t even been vetted.

“Only a few thousand actually qualify for special immigrant visas. The rest, they’re not even qualified to be refugees or don’t have refugee status. We’re paroling them,” he explained.

So the U.S. government — the Biden administration, to be exact — is spending untold sums of money to house unvetted refugees.

“Congress has allocated $7 billion dollars so far, or about $56,000 per Afghan, in the United States. That’s how come they can afford to put them up in a hotel like that, or in dozens of hotels across the country,” Camarota added.

And the Biden administration is doing all this without any input from the communities they are affecting.

“The question remains, what is a community’s ability to absorb people, assimilate people? Communities just don’t have any rights to say, you know what, we can’t handle anymore, anything like that. It’s really the refugee resettlement agencies that make that decision,” he said.

Not every Republican governor has followed Logan’s lead in allowing refugees to flood their states.

“South Dakota is one of four states, along with the District of Columbia, that won’t be resettling any of the nearly 37,000 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. during the final days of its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last month,” the Associated Press reported in September.

“Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota, which is the state’s refugee resettlement agency, decided not to accept any Afghans after weighing local conditions and its ability to resettle them.”

The resettlement agency’s chief operating officer, Rebecca Kiesow-Knudsen, said in a statement at the time that they had “really significant concerns about our ability to provide the level of support to help make that integration successful.”

Vivek Saxena

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