90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Number of Refugees Into U.S. Drops 83 Percent Under Trump

During his presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump had promised to “stop the massive inflow of refugees” in order to safeguard the country from terrorists. Chalk up one campaign promise fulfilled.

According to Fox News, only 3,108 refugees came to the U.S. in October and November. In the same period last year, under Barack Obama's reign, 18,300 refugees were admitted. That's a jaw-dropping decline of 83 percent.

Trump restarted the refugee resettlement program in October after a four-month moratorium. A month earlier, he had lowered the annual refugee admission cap from 110,000 to 45,000, the lowest on record.

"The president's strategy on refugees is guided first and foremost by the safety and security of the American people,” Trump administration spokeswoman Helen Aguirre Ferré told Fox News. “The United States can also help a larger number of refugees by resettling them in their home region and enabling their eventual safe return home.”

Not only is there a steep drop in refugee admissions, but fewer Muslims are reportedly among them -- only 10 percent, as opposed to about 40 percent in November 2016 under Obama.

Not only that, but the administration said it is backing out of the Global Compact on Migration, a United Nations initiative established in 2016 that called for two years of negotiations focused on organized and safe migration of the world’s displaced people.

U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, said over the weekend that "The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty. No country has done more than the United States, and our generosity will continue. But our decisions on immigration policies must always...

Some members of Congress are threatening to block government funding unless Congress provides amnesty to so-called Dreamers—the illegal aliens included in President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Donald Trump is ending.

Responsible members of Congress should not give in.

Such an effort would be fundamentally flawed and would only encourage even more illegal immigration—just as the 1986 amnesty in the Immigration Reform and Control Act did.

Democrats portray the DACA program as only benefitting those who were a few years old when they came to the U.S. illegally, leaving them unable to speak their native language and ignorant of their countries’ cultural norms. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it would be a hardship to return them to the countries where they were born.

Obama himself gave this rationale when he said DACA beneficiaries were “brought to this country by their parents” as infants and face “deportation to a country that [they] know nothing about, with a language” they don’t even speak.

While this may be true of a small portion of the DACA population, it certainly is not true of all of the aliens who received administrative amnesty. In fact, illegal aliens were eligible as long as they came to the U.S. before their 16th birthday and were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012.

DACA also required that beneficiaries enroll in school, graduate from high school, obtain a GED certificate, or receive an honorable discharge from the military; have no conviction for a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors; and not pose a threat to national security or public safety.

However, the Obama administration appeared to routinely waive the education (or its equivalent) requirement as long as the illegal alien was enrolled in some kind of program. Only 49 percent of DACA beneficiaries have a high school education—despite the fact that a majority of them are adults.

How thorough was Homeland Security vetting? In February 2017, after the arrest of a DACA beneficiary for gang membership, the Department of Homeland Security admitted that at least 1,500 DACA beneficiaries had their eligibility terminated “due to a criminal conviction, gang affiliation, or a criminal conviction related to gang affiliation.”

By August 2017, that number had surged to 2,139.

In fact, based on documents obtained by Judicial Watch, it is apparent that the Obama administration used a “lean and light” system of background checks in which only a few, randomly selected DACA applicants were ever actually vetted.

Additionally, DACA only excluded individuals for convictions. Thus, even if a Homeland Security background investigation—which apparently was almost never done—produced substantial evidence that an illegal alien might have committed multiple crimes, the alien would still be eligible for DACA unless Homeland Security referred the violation to...