State Department sets new single-day record for Muslim migrant approvals

MAY 25, 2016 10:49 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER

“Officials insisted they’re moving faster because they’re getting better at screening.” This is impossible. How can they get better at screening when the Islamic State has told its operatives to appear moderate and secular, and when they deliberately recruit people who don’t have criminal records, so that they don’t show up in databases? How can they get better at screening out Islamic jihadis when they don’t even admit that there are Islamic jihadis?

“Refugees are victims, not perpetrators, of terrorism.” Really? Ahmad al-Mohammed and one other of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. And on May 10, 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s DGSI internal intelligence agency, said that the Islamic State was using migrant routes through the Balkans to get jihadis into Europe.




“State Department sets new single-day record for Syrian refugee approvals,” by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times,
May 24, 2016:


The State Department admitted 80 Syrian refugees on Tuesday and 225 on Monday, setting a new single-day record as President Obama surges to try to meet his target of 10,000 approvals this year — sparking renewed fears among security experts who say corners are being cut to meet a political goal.

Officials insisted they’re moving faster because they’re getting better at screening, and say they’re still running all the traps on applicants.

But the new spike in numbers is stunning, with more people accepted on Monday alone than were approved in the entire months of January or February.

“The Obama administration is on full throttle to admit as many people as possible before the time clock runs out on them,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is the classic scenario when political expediency trumps prudence, and someone slips through who shouldn’t have, and tragedy ensues.”

Powerless to stop the civil war in Syria, Mr. Obama has instead offered the U.S. as a safe haven for those fleeing the conflict, promising to accept 10,000 refugees between Oct. 1 and Sept. 30. As of Tuesday evening, he’d approved 2,540 — an average of about 10 applications a day.

To meet the 10,000 goal, that pace will have to spike to nearly 60 approvals a day.

Officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency charged with vetting the applications, and at the State Department, which gives final approval, insisted they can meet Mr. Obama’s goal without sacrificing security.

From February to April, the administration deployed extra staff to Jordan, where some 12,000 applicants referred by the U.N. were interviewed. Interviews of Syrians were also being held in Lebanon and Iraq, and both USCIS and the State Department said everything is going according to plan, with enough interviews completed that they can bring in 7,000 more refugees by the end of September.

“Increases in processing capacity have improved our capacity to meet the 10,000 target for Syrian refugee admissions for this fiscal year. As such, we expect Syrian refugee arrivals to the U.S. to increase steadily throughout the fiscal year,” a State Department officialsaid.

The department says refugees undergo the most checks of anyone applying to enter the U.S., and Syrians are getting as much scrutiny as possible.

But pressure to speed up the process is growing. Last week Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, fired off a letter saying other countries are approving refugees at a quicker pace, and demanding the administration catch up.

“Refugees are victims, not perpetrators, of terrorism,” the Democrats wrote in their letter….

State Department sets new single-day record for Muslim migrant approvals