Obama’s administration is leading the jihadi invasion
If you agree with GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump that the Obama administration’s refugee resettlement policies are leaving the U.S. vulnerable to a terror attack, these recent developments are bad news.
Top Obama officials say they plan to resettle more than 100,000 refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East to the United States over the course of the next year. And the administration is forging ahead with the plan despite repeated admissions that there’sno way for government officials to thoroughly vet or keep track of all the new guests to the country from terror strongholds.
If you didn’t think the plan could get any worse, think again.
A top Department of Homeland Security official just admitted to members of Congress that the agency has already let refugees from terror hotbeds into the United States — and it doesn’t know many.
“How many Syrian refugees have entered the U.S. in the last year” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked Kelli Ann Burriesci, a deputy assistant secretary in DHS’s office of policy, during a recent hearing.
“Sorry, I didn’t bring any of the refugee numbers with me,” she responded.
Lawmakers had requested that the DHS’s top official, Jeh Johnson, brief lawmakers on the issue. But the DHS opted to send Burriesci instead, saying she was the expert on issues pertaining to the refugee resettlements.
She was also asked, “How many visa waiver program overstays are there currently in the U.S.?”
Burriesci told lawmakers that she didn’t have that information either.
“We’re talking about the refugee issue and the Visa Waiver Program issue and you can’t give us numbers on either program?” a frustrated Jordan asked.
She couldn’t.
That gives you an idea of how little the Obama administration is concerned with keeping Americans safe as it continues to refuse to budge on its refugee resettlement policies.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) underscored how serious the problem is, noting that the last time Congress received accurate information about the number of people in the U.S. on expired visas was more than two decades ago.
“If we’re looking at visa overstays, and sitting here debating a visa waiver program, and yet, the very instance of visa overstays and the potential terrorist threat that accompanies that, you’re tracking that, yet the last information Congress got was 1994,” Meadows said. “Do you not see a problem with that?”
Not only does DHS not know how many refugees are in the country to date, the agency refuses to take even the simplest steps to make sure that ISIS sympathizers aren’t being relocated to U.S. cities.
Last year, Johnson refused to allow DHS officials and immigration agents to review visa applicants’ social media accounts for signs of terror ties because he feared the move would be bad for “public relations.”
John Cohen, a former under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis, recently explained on ABC: “Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement.”
But Johnson and other Obama officials refused to budge on the issue.
If they had bothered to look, recent news out of Europe hints at what U.S. security officials may have found.
In Norway, security officials overburdened by the number of refugees their nation has agreed to take on are conducting the very kind of investigations U.S. officials have refused to take on by searching asylum seekers’ phones and social media accounts.
The Norwegian Nettavisen newspaper reports that the investigations have uncovered “photos and videos of executions and brutal punishments, such as images of people holding up severed heads or hands” and “found flags, symbols and characters that can be linked to … ISIS, as well as other terrorist groups.”
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