CASA de Maryland: The Illegals’ ACORN

[ilbegone]

So far:

Paulette Faulkner has been a benefits administrator for most of her professional career. In 2009, she took a job with Montgomery County’s Office of Child Support Enforcement. Paulette is a lifelong Democrat.

Her job was to ensure compliance with child-support laws and thus had to approve all applications for welfare. Applicants are required to provide a Social Security card, picture ID and birth certificates for children.

September 2009 she wrote an e-mail to Governor O’Malley.

On October 2nd Faulkner met with DHR Deputy Secretary Stacy Rodgers. (Rodgers sits on the Governor’s Council for New Americans along with Gustavo Torres). Rodgers told Faulkner not to contact the Governor, adding that it was not her place to call ICE, and she must accept any ID with a picture on it.

Faulkner asked, “What about a CASA ID with no expiration date?” Rodgers responded that the CASA ID was a proper credential.
Faulkner informed her superiors that she would not aid and abet illegal activity. They accused her of insubordination.

On October 22nd she was called into Child Support Enforcement Director John Castellano’s office. The Director accused her of failing to inform them that she had a website for her Central Committee campaign listing her office phone. He threatened punitive action. In Faulkner’s words:

I asked Mr. Castellano if this was in relation to me sending the information regarding the applications of illegal immigrants being approved, he said to me “well did you think about the repercussions before you did that?” I told him that it should not be any repercussions because what we were doing was illegal [sic].

On November 2nd she appealed to the Department of Human Resources. On the 5th she filed a complaint with the Maryland Department of Budget Management for whistleblower retaliation and a complaint with the EEOC.

No Maryland legislator would help.

On November 9th, Faulkner sent another letter to O’Malley, this time to express her disgust. It read, in part:

This termination was blatant retaliation for me contacting your office… How can you as Governor continue to condone this type of behavior…? Nepotism, racism, and manipulation of power are so prevalent in this agency… This is wrong, and I should not have been fired. I’m asking you to step in to correct this wrong…

O’Malley did nothing. On November 18th she was denied unemployment benefits. On December 7th she went to the DHR hearing with union representation. Still no.

Don't have time to continue, but will do some more. This was all in the original article, I missed it in part because paragraphs crammed together in a run on fashion are hard for me to read, and reading from a screen rather than paper is more of a chore.