Thursday, October 22, 2015

How refugees from terror strongholds could bring tragedy to the homeland

State Department and Homeland Security officials are putting American lives at risk by ignoring the fact that violent extremists will exploit the U.S.’s compassionate immigration policies and infiltrate refugee camps within the nation’s borders.
That’s according to a letter sent to Secretary of State John Kerry and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson Wednesday by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rep. Randy Weaver (R-Va.).
The Republican duo acknowledged that the U.S. “is a compassionate country and has a role to play” in alleviating the refugee crises sparked by violence in the Middle East. But the lawmakers added that U.S. officials can’t let that compassion put American lives in danger.
“We must be aware that groups like ISIS will infiltrate refugee camps and try to seek admittance into the United States. As you move forward with the process of admitting more refugees into this country, it is critical that rigorous background checks and security measures are in place,” they wrote.
Kerry, in September, announced, “The United States will significantly increase our numbers for refugee resettlement in the course of this year and the year after … We are going to go up to 85,000 with at least, and I underscore the ‘at least’ — it is not a ceiling, it’s a floor — 10, 000 over the next year from Syria specifically even as we also receive more refugees from other areas.”
Kerry added that State Department officials are aiming to bring in excess of 100,000 refugees into the nation’s borders during the next fiscal year.
Lankford and Weaver said that in addition to conducting rigorous background checks on refugee applicants, the federal government should prioritize applications from members of religious minority groups — such as Yazidis and Christians — most at risk of persecution by ISIS in conflict-torn regions Middle East.
Despite the lawmakers’ recommendations, it isn’t likely that the government is going to do a better job vetting refugees any time soon. Top officials have admitted that decisions to let more refugees into the nation have been made without consideration of limitations in the vetting process.
Kerry, who directed State officials to open the refugee floodgates over the next year and a half, recently admitted that there’s no way the vetting process can keep up with the onslaught of refugees.
“We have new [post-9-11] laws and new requirements with respect to security background checks and vetting, so it takes longer than one would like and we cannot cut corners with respect to security requirements.”
Even if federal officials don’t “cut corners” in vetting refugees flowing into the country from terror hotbeds, many will still never have their backgrounds, affiliations and beliefs scrutinized because they don’t already exist in government databases.
FBI director James Comey said as much during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing Wednesday.
“We can only query against that which we have collected,” Comey told lawmakers Wednesday.
“And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them,” he added.

No comments:

Post a Comment