The U.S. State Department will not give official approval to any private evacuation flight from Afghanistan seeking to land in third countries, leaked emails obtained by Fox News show.
“No independent charters are allowed to land at [Al Udeid Air Base], the military airbase you mentioned in your communication with Samantha Power,” a State Department official said in a Sept. 1 email to Eric Montalvo, who organized a number of charter flights out of Afghanistan, Fox News reported.
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Afghan refugees are subject to security and health screening performed by Department of Homeland Security officials before they’re evacuated to the U.S. or a third country for additional processing, a Biden administration senior official said.
Afghans must clear biometric and biographic vetting including iris scans, palm and voice prints and photographs before they’re evacuated from the country, CNN reported. The refugees are also tested for COVID-19 and offered vaccinations before they’re released, the senior official said in a background press call on Aug. 24.
“That [security screening] process involves biometric and biographic security screenings conducted by our intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals who are working quite literally around the clock to vet all of these Afghans before they’re allowed into the United States,” the Biden administration senior official said on the call.
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Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, is best known as home to the Army’s tank division, the revered Old Ironsides military insignia and the country’s largest military-controlled airspace. But the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan is turning the vast installation into ground zero for the evacuation of Afghans who spent two decades helping the United States fight the war against terror.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn says the fort is preparing to receive 10,000 Afghan refugees, and military officials have hinted that number could reach much higher.
It’s the second major wave of civilian guests to be hosted at the fort, which began this spring helping the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments to house thousands of unaccompanied minor children who were brought across the border.
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A petition urging officials in a North Dakota county to ban sanctuary cities, illegal immigrants, and refugees gained around 5,000 signatures as of Tuesday, the Minot Daily News reported.
The Ward County Commission said they would uphold laws prohibiting illegal immigration and those supporting Second Amendment rights, though they asked petitioners to provide more specific language to be considered, according to the Minot Daily News. The petition asked the commission to ban illegal immigration and refugees from the county and to establish the region as a “gun sanctuary.”
Residents in Ward County started the petition “to ban sanctuary cities, illegal immigrants, aliens, refugees in Ward County, North Dakota, and add Ward County, North Dakota, as a Second Amendment gun sanctuary county,” the Minot Daily News reported.
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The Biden administration will admit more than 7,000 migrant refugees into the U.S. monthly as part of negotiations in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union over a Trump-era rule prohibiting migrants from obtaining asylum during the pandemic, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
Former President Donald Trump implemented public health order Title 42 which allowed border officials to rapidly expel migrants from the U.S. and prevented them from applying for asylum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AP reported. The Biden administration’s concessions would change how border officials rely on Title 42 and potentially allow more migrants to seek asylum in the U.S.
The Biden administration and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agreed to “a streamlined process for assessing and addressing exemption requests brought by particular vulnerable families and other individuals,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said, according to the AP.
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The Biden administration plans to announce on Thursday that it will increase the cap on the number of refugees to more than eight times the level at which the Trump administration left it.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce the move during a visit to the State Department. The Trump administration had drastically reduced the refugee admissions cap to only 15,000 for this fiscal year, the lowest since 1980, CNN reports.
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Around 27,000 children, many with parents who are affiliated with ISIS, remain in a refugee camp in northeastern Syria, the United Nations counterterrorism chief said, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
The thousands of children “remain stranded, abandoned to their fate” where they are exposed to ISIS and are “at risk of radicalization within the camp,” said Vladimir Voronkov, the undersecretary general for counter terrorism at the U.N., during an informal meeting on Friday, the AP reported. He added that there are children from 60 countries at the camps who need to be repatriated.
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The Trump administration said on Wednesday it intends to further slash the number of refugees the U.S accepts to resettle from 18,000 to 15,000 in the 2021 fiscal year, setting another record low in the history of the modern refugee program, ABC News reports.
The notice was sent to Congress late Wednesday, just 34 minutes before a statutory deadline to do so. The state department said the proposal reflected the Trump administration’s prioritizing of the “safety and well-being of Americans, especially in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.”
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When President George W. Bush launched the “War on Terror” in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, few could have predicted the campaign would entail US involvement in combat in 24 countries over the next two decades. But it did, and the resulting conflicts have come at enormous costs we are only now beginning to fully realize.
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President Donald Trump criticized presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s plans to allow 125,000 refugees admittance to the U.S. on an annual basis during a speech in Minnesota on Monday, the Associated Press reported.
“He [Biden] would overwhelm Minnesota with refugees, from terror hotspots, depleting public services, burdening schools, and straining city budgets,” Trump said during a speech on a tarmac in Minnesota, the AP reported.
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A prominent conservative organization has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a case involving Tennessee’s participation in the federal refugee resettlement program.
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Breitbart reports, “American taxpayers are billed up to $133,000 per refugee resettled in the United States over the course of a lifetime, a new study reveals.”
In a recent report on the costs to U.S. citizens for its welcoming immigration and refugee policies, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that each refugee resettled in the U.S. especially those in the United States illegally, and use social welfare programs cost American taxpayers anywhere on average between $60,000 and $133,000 over the course of a lifetime.
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Ohio Republican Party Chairwoman Jane Timken wrote an error-riddled apologetics letter sent by email on Thursday to party members defending Gov. Mike DeWine’s refugee resettlement policy.
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Western Europe stands before an immigration crisis that neither its immigration-enthusiastic governments nor any electoral majority in these countries seem interested in addressing. Consider these numbers:
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Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, defended his governor’s decision to not accept refugees in 2020, noting that Texas has done more for refugees than any other state.
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During the show, Leahy went into detail about the two factors that are directly influencing the rise of a conservative populism movement. He noted that recent threats to second amendment rights in Virginia and the refugee resettlement issue in Tennessee are fueling the anti-big government push back.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo Friday that the Lone Star State would not be taking in any refugees.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) accused Beltrami County of “denying refugees a chance at a better life” after it voted to opt out of refugee resettlement.
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According to a new study, the hometowns of the four leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020 have collectively taken in less than half-a-percent of all refugees resettled over the last decade, as Breitbart reports.
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Gov. Mike DeWine’s Christmas gift to Ohio residents was a letter to the U.S. Department of State inviting refugees to keep on coming in, including from countries with “high burdens” of tuberculosis.
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Refugee resettlement in Ohio is up 22 percent under Gov. Mike DeWine, including hundreds from countries with “high burdens” of tuberculosis.
DeWine is one of more than 30 governors who have agreed to accept more refugees under a plan put forth by President Donald Trump in which a governor has to opt in for resettlement, the Associated Press reported.
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Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther pitched in with several other mayors in voicing a willingness to accept refugees.
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Breitbart reports, “nearly 100 mayors across the United States are begging President Trump to import as many refugees to the country as possible in order to “bring cultural vibrancy and diversity” to American communities.”
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Ohio is ranked sixth in the nation in the number of refugees who came here between October 1, 2018 and September 30, 2019. States which accepted more refugees than Ohio include Texas, Washington, New York, California and Kentucky. Kentucky resettled 1,427 people to Ohio’s 1,426.
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President Trump has again lowered the maximum amount of refugees allowed into the United States, bringing it to yet another record low, according to The Hill.
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Former Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, once told a crowd of frustrated residents to “find another state” if they weren’t happy with Minnesota. The comments were made during an October 2015 forum in St. Cloud hosted by the local chapter of the NAACP. Dayton was responding to concerns…
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by Jason Hopkins The United States is no longer the top destination for the world’s refugees, falling from its number one position for the first time in nearly 40 years. In what appears to be a historical turnaround, Canada surpassed the U.S. in the number of refugees it accepted…
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Filmmaker Jeffrey Newman, told The Columbus Dispatch last week that a film being produced by Rich Street Productions, featuring Columbus’s diverse immigrant population, “…is about reclaiming our identity as Americans.” He went on to say, You tell the story of Columbus through people who live here. The diversity is rich.…
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by Joshua Gill Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday that the U.S. will take only 30,000 refugees over the next fiscal year — the fewest since the 1980 Refugee Act. The cap on refugees decreased from the 45,000 cap set for the current fiscal year and is the…
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During the first eleven months of FY 2018, from October 1, 2017 to August 31, 2018, 1,301 refugees were resettled in Ohio by the federal government, more than were resettled in any other state except Texas, which saw 1,467 refugees resettled. A total of 19,889 refugees were resettled in all…
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by Hanna Bogorowski Several top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration are making a push to drastically reduce the number of immigrants coming legally and illegally into the United States, as well as significantly lowering the cap of refugees admitted. The administration ultimately settled on a 45,000 cap for refugees…
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