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Tag: refugee crisis
Trump Administration Will Likely Face Legal Challenges For Ban On Refugees

Trump Administration Will Likely Face Legal Challenges For Ban On Refugees

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders starting on Wednesday that include a temporary ban on most refugees and a suspension of visas for citizens of Syria and six other Middle Eastern and African countries, say congressional aides and immigration experts briefed on the matter.

Trump, who tweeted that a “big day” was planned on national security on Wednesday, is expected to ban for several months the entry of refugees into the United States, except for religious minorities escaping persecution, until more aggressive vetting is in place.

Another order will block visas being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified.

In his tweet late on Tuesday, Trump said: “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

The border security measures probably include directing the construction of a border wall with Mexico and other actions to cut the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States.

The sources say the first of the orders will be signed on Wednesday. With Trump considering measures to tighten border security, he could turn his attention to the refugee issue later this week.

Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration, said the president had the authority to limit refugee admissions and the issuance of visas to specific countries if the administration determined it was in the public’s interest.

“From a legal standpoint, it would be exactly within his legal rights,” said Legomsky, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “But from a policy standpoint, it would be terrible idea because there is such an urgent humanitarian need right now for refugees.”

The Republican president, who took office last Friday, was expected to sign the first of the orders at the Department of Homeland Security, whose responsibilities include immigration and border security.

On the campaign trail, Trump initially proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, which he said would protect Americans from jihadist attacks.

Both Trump and his nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, have since said they would focus the restrictions on countries whose migrants could pose a threat, rather than a ban on those of a specific religion.

Many Trump supporters decried former President Barack Obama’s decision to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States over fears that those fleeing the country’s civil war would carry out attacks.

LEGAL CHALLENGES POSSIBLE

Detractors could launch legal challenges if all the countries subject to the ban are Muslim-majority nations, said immigration expert Hiroshi Motomura at UCLA School of Law.

Legal arguments could claim the executive orders discriminate against a particular religion, which would be unconstitutional, he said.

“His comments during the campaign and a number of people on his team focused very much on religion as the target,” Motomura said.

To block entry from the designated countries, Trump is likely to tell the State Department to stop issuing visas to people from those nations, according to sources familiar with the visa process. He could also instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection to stop any current visa holders from those countries from entering the United States.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Tuesday the State and Homeland Security Departments would work on the vetting process once Trump’s nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, is installed.

Other measures may include directing all agencies to finish work on a biometric identification system for non-citizens entering and exiting the United States and a crackdown on immigrants fraudulently receiving government benefits, according to the congressional aides and immigration experts.

To restrict illegal immigration, Trump has promised to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport illegal migrants living inside the United States.

Trump is also expected to take part in a ceremony installing his new secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, on Wednesday.

AUSTRALIA DEAL UNDER THREAT

Trump’s executive order threatens a refugee resettlement deal with Australia signed late last year, and could leave more than 1,000 asylum seekers in limbo.

The U.S. agreed to resettle an unspecified number of refugees being held in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the tiny South Pacific island nation of Nauru on Australia’s behalf, under a deal to be administered by the U.N. refugee agency.

“Any substantial delay in the relocation of refugees…would be highly concerning from a humanitarian perspective,” Catherine Stubberfield, a spokeswoman of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told Reuters by email.

“These men, women and children can no longer afford to wait.”

The deal followed agreement by Australia in September to join a U.S.-led program to resettle refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as part of its annual intake.

Australia’s tough border security laws mandate that asylum seekers intercepted trying to reach the country by boat go for processing to detention camps on PNG’s Manus island and Nauru.

Australia does not provide information on the nationalities of those held, but around a third of the 1,161 detainees were from countries covered by the executive orders, lawyers and refugee workers for the asylum seekers told Reuters.

“We already didn’t have much hope the U.S. would accept us,” Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee who has spent more than three years on Manus island, told Reuters.

“If they do not take us, Australia will have to.”

A spokeswoman for Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley; Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg; Additional reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney; Editing by Leslie Adler and Clarence Fernandez)

IMAGE: Syrian refugees wait to board a Jordanian army vehicle after crossing into Jordanian territory with their families, in Al Ruqban border area, near the northeastern Jordanian border with Syria, and Iraq, near the town of Ruwaished, 240 km (149 miles) east of Amman September 10, 2015. Picture taken September 10, 2015. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed

Danziger: Out Of Control

Danziger: Out Of Control

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings, syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He served in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, earning a Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Hit the Road, Toad. No Different People Wanted

Hit the Road, Toad. No Different People Wanted

Most of the refugees from Syria do not look like us. They do not look Western. They look different.

And we live in a world today where different can be dangerous.

On Thursday, two bombs killed 43 people in Beirut. It got scant attention compared with the bombs and guns that killed 129 people in Paris the next day. One reason had nothing to do with numbers.

Beirut is part of the Middle East, and Paris is part of the West, and we care more about the killing of Westerners.

We don’t like to say this.

Remember the picture of that little boy whose dead body washed ashore in Turkey? It really tugged at your heart.

His name was Aylan Kurdi, and he was 3 years old. He drowned and washed onto the beach like a piece of debris.

His brother, Galip, age 5, also drowned, as did their mother, Rehan. They were Kurdish refugees from Syria.

Part of the reason our reaction to little Aylan was so strong is that he looked so Western. He was dressed in Western-style sports clothing — a red top, blue pants and sneakers with Velcro straps. You could just imagine how much he loved strapping on those shoes every morning.

The boys were trying to get to Canada but probably would have been delighted to make it to the United States — where at least 31 of our states would not be delighted with them.

More than half our country wants to ban Syrian refugees, though some states are willing to take Christian ones.

Why? Because Christians are more like us than Muslims, even though we are supposed to be a nation where all religions are treated equally.

(Muslim terrorists do kill Westerners. But we are supposed to be better than the terrorists. That’s how people are supposed to be able to tell us apart.)

Marco Rubio, who brags in every speech about how his father fled Cuba, once was considered a champion of immigrants, but not anymore.

“You can have 1,000 people come in, and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence,” Rubio said, “but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that’s the case, you have a problem.”

“There’s no way to vet that out,” he continued. “There’s no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out, because who do you call in Syria to background check them?”

Ted Cruz was born in Canada of a Cuban father and — luckily for Cruz’s presidential hopes — a mother from Delaware. Cruz, too, gets all choked up when he talks about his father’s fleeing Fidel Castro’s tyranny.

But what about those fleeing tyranny today? Well, according to Cruz, it depends on their religion. No Muslim refugees should be allowed in America today, only Christian ones, because, says Cruz, “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”

All this reminds me of the bitter chant from the ’60s: “If you’re white, all right. If you’re black, get back.” Today it’s religion instead of race. But it’s the same old hatred.

Barack Obama’s reaction to this has been shame and disgust.

He said Monday: “When I hear folks say that ‘well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,’ when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are.”

But it is who we may become if one of these anti-immigrant jokers is elected president.

Take Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor talked to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, and Hewitt asked about those poor tiny refugee kids. Couldn’t we let them in?

“What if they were orphans under the age of 5?” Hewitt asked.

“You know, Hugh, we could come up with 18 different scenarios,” Christie said. “The fact is that we need appropriate vetting, and I don’t think orphans under 5 are being, you know, should be admitted into the United States at this point. … We need to put the safety and security of the American people first.”

On a whim, I decided to check up on the religion of those Americans who fought and died to protect the safety and security of American citizens and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

There are at least 61 different symbols on the graves at Arlington that recognize numerous branches of Christianity, plus Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Native American religions, as well as atheism, secular humanism, and Wicca.

So non-Christians are free to give their lives for America. We just don’t want any more of them here. Not even toddlers.

Wizened rich guy Rupert Murdoch, who became an American citizen at age 54 so that he could own TV stations here, tweeted this Monday night:

“Obama facing enormous opposition in accepting refugees. Maybe make special exception for proven Christians.”

Proven Christians? We are raising the bar? Simply saying you are a Christian will no longer be enough. You will have to prove you are a Christian.

Murdoch, by the way, claims he is a Christian. And in America, we don’t make anybody submit baptismal forms or church records to prove it as they did, say, in Nazi Germany.

But we could test people. For example, who said the following?

“But whoever has this world’s goods and sees his brother in need and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?”

Yep, you got it. That was Jesus of Nazareth, a proven Christian.

But he was from the Mideast and older than a toddler. So we might not let him into America today — even if he wanted to come.

Roger Simon is Politico‘s chief political columnist. His new e-book, Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America, can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes. To find out more about Roger Simon and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

A volunteer lifeguard carries a baby as a half-sunken catamaran carrying around 150 refugees, most of them Syrians, arrives after crossing part of the Aegean sea from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, October 30, 2015. REUTERS/Giorgos Moutafis

The Reality Of Refugee Admissions: Yes, The Government Vets Them

The Reality Of Refugee Admissions: Yes, The Government Vets Them

The political panic over the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, has unleashed a wave of fear-mongering, bolstered by a notion being propagated by the right wing, that Americans couldn’t possibly know who is being let into our country. Thirty-one U.S. governors have said they won’t accept any Syrian refugees into their state, many of them claiming there’s a large inherent risk in doing so.

Of course, there’s a serious fallacy at work here: By the time any Syrian refugee actually arrives in the United States, we do know who that person is. Very well.

There is a clear difference between refugees in the United States and refugees in Europe, namely that refugees can’t simply walk or use small boats in order to get to the U.S. By contrast, Europe has a flood of humanity getting displaced into their borders, who may enter one of the countries without getting screened — thus creating the danger that even one ISIS terrorist can disguise himself among the people fleeing his cohorts, as French officials believe did occur with at least one attacker.

But the U.S. actually has the advantages of distance and time to pick and choose before anyone from such a faraway land can set foot over here.

That process involves a multitude of complex steps, starting with an initial screening by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which possibly leads to a referral to the United States and a gauntlet of security checks, personal interviews, medical screening, and matching with a sponsor agency in the U.S. itself. It is far from the mysterious influx of unknown people that the many governors and Republican presidential candidates are making it sound like.

As noted by defense policy researcher Josh Hampson in The Hill: “In fact, there have been no recorded terrorist attacks committed by refugees. The U.S. has admitted 1.5 million refugees from the Middle East since September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks that have occurred since 9/11 have been committed either by American natives or non-refugee immigrants.”

A State Department spokesperson told The National Memo in a emailed statement:

The United States remains deeply committed to safeguarding the American public from terrorists, just as we are committed to providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people. We do not believe these goals are mutually exclusive, or that either has to be pursued at the expense of the other. To that end the refugee security screening and vetting process has been significantly enhanced over the past few years. Today, all refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States, including the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. All refugees, including Syrians, are admitted only after successful completion of this stringent security screening regime.

On a conference call Tuesday, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed to the press that the average time for processing a person through that entire gamut of interviews and background checks takes an average of 18 to 24 months. “As you know, we are trying to look at the process and see if we can make it more efficient without cutting corners on security.”

And yet at a congressional hearing Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch still had to explain to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — who had seized upon recent comments by FBI Director James Comey about the difficulties of the vetting process — that the Justice Department and others in the government do have a “significant and robust screening process in place,” which Europe has not been able to set up.

On Tuesday, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump posted a message to Instagram, with The Donald shouting to the camera with his typical bombast: “Refugees are pouring into our great country from Syria! We don’t even know who they are! They could be ISIS, they could be anybody! What’s our president doing — is he insane?”

What is our President doing?

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on

And in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter is running this ad — complete with clips of panic in the streets of Paris — ahead of the election this weekend: “One of the Paris ISIS terrorists entered France posing as a Syrian refugee. Now, Obama’s sending Syrian refugees to Louisiana.”

Newly-crowned House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is trying to be a bit more low-key, although catering to the same doubts, as he told reporters Tuesday: “This is a moment where it is better to be safe than sorry. So we think the prudent, the responsible thing is to take a pause in this particular aspect of this refugee program in order to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee population.”

One can perhaps “forgive” Trump for being utterly clueless, and simply expect that Vitter, in the homestretch phase of his campaign, would act like a demagogue. But shouldn’t the Speaker of the House act like he already knows the government has vigorous vetting procedures in place? And for that matter, what does a “pause” even mean when it comes to admitting in refugees who have taken up to two years to be screened?

Refugees, most of them Syrians, struggle to leave a half-sunken catamaran carrying around 150 refugees as it arrives on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing part of the Aegean sea from Turkey, October 30, 2015. REUTERS/Giorgos Moutafis