Obama still plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees despite Paris terrorist attacks
A top White House adviser said Sunday that President Obama still plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees even as Republicans insisted that it’s all but impossible to stop terrorists from hiding among the migrants.
“We’re still planning to take in Syrian refugees,” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said on “Fox News Sunday.”
One of the terrorists in Friday’s deadly attacks on Paris reportedly may have used a Syrian passport to enter Europe with a flood of refugees, but Mr. Rhodes expressed confidence in the background-check system.
“We have very robust vetting procedures for those refugees. It involves our intelligence community, our National Counterterrorism Center, extensive interviews, vetting them against all the available information,” Mr. Rhodes said.
Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who heads the House Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee, called that statement “untrue.”
“There’s virtually no vetting because there are no databases in Syria. There are no government records. We don’t know who these people are,” Mr. King said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And when you meet with the people doing the vetting, they tell us that.”
“They [the White House] are rolling the dice here, and we know that ISIS wants to bring in terrorists with these refugees,” Mr. King said.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is seeking the GOP’s presidential nomination, agreed that “the problem is not the background checks, the problem is that we can’t background-check them.”
“You can’t pick up the phone and call Syria, and that’s one of the reason I’ve said we won’t be able to take more refugees,” Mr. Rubio said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s that we can’t, because there’s no way to background-check someone that’s coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them?”
Mr. Rhodes cited the “tragic victims of this conflict,” saying “there are women and children, orphans of this war, and I think we need to do our part along with our allies to provide them with a safe haven.” The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has seized huge swaths of Iraq and Syria.
But Mr. Rubio argued that “you can have 1,000 refugees come in, and 999 are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence, but one of them is an ISIS fighter.”
“If that’s case, you have a problem,” Mr. Rubio said. “And there’s no way to vet them out. 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?”
Mr. King agreed that the White House should suspend its plans to bring in refugees “unless they can show 100 percent that a person is not involved with ISIS.”
“[R]ight now there is no responsible way to do the vetting, and that’s the reality. And why people like Ben Rhodes continue to say this is beyond me,” Mr. King said. “To me it’s as misguided as the president saying that he has contained ISIS.”
The day before the Paris terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama told ABC News that he believed ISIS had been “contained.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/15/obama-still-plans-to-accept-10000-syrian-refugees-/