Most people would say that number one job of a government is protecting its citizens, but not the Obama administration. Judicial Watch has discovered that the administration granted asylum to 1,519 previously “inadmissible” foreigners embroiled in terrorism. The explanation, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is that these people committed crimes against humanity “while under duress.” In short, the devil made them do it.
It used to be a law that foreigners who supported terrorist causes would automatically be denied entrance to the country, but Obama changed the law just a bit to give the Secretary of Homeland Security “discretionary authority” to waive certain grounds of inadmissibility relating to terrorism. Part of that discretion was to eliminate the”zero tolerance policy for granting asylum or residency to individuals who have provided any sort of terrorism-related support.”
Judicial Watch obtained the numbers from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’s (USCIS) annual report to Congress on the DHS secretary’s application of discretionary authority.
The biggest chunk of exemptions was processed for refugee applicants and lawful permanent resident status, with 806 and 614 respectively. The rest were processed under other DHS programs such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), asylum and relief through a Justice Department initiative. The bottom line is that the U.S. government is allowing them all to stay in the country with rights and benefits afforded to legal residents despite their terrorist connections and associations.
More than half of the candidates rewarded by DHS last year provided material support to terrorist organizations, according to the DHS report. The others received military-type training from a terrorist organization, voluntarily provided medical care to members of a terrorist group, and solicited funds or individuals for membership in a terrorist organization. After a case-by-case review, Obama’s DHS secretary saw no problem welcoming them to our shores.
This effort was officially launched last year when the administration quietly changed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INS), implemented decades ago to govern immigration and citizenship in the United States. The law includes a ban on admitting refugees and asylum seekers who may have provided terrorists with any sort of material support, even the kind that may be considered trivial by some. In other words, the federal law rightfully had a zero tolerance for any kind of involvement with terrorist elements.
But thanks to the change in the law, DHS and the State Department now allow “an alien who provided limited material support” to a terrorist organization to stay in the U.S. if the powers that be in our government believe the person poses no threat.
The administration seems to have a soft spot for terrorists. A few months after the INS change was exposed, a frustrated U.S. senator revealed that the administration appears to have a terrorist “hands off” list that permits individuals with extremist ties to enter the country. The lawmaker obtained the information from internal DHS documents that include communication between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asking whether to admit an individual with ties to various terrorist groups. The suspect had scheduled an upcoming flight into the U.S. and was believed to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close associate and supporter Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Thirty-five years ago Ronald Reagan asked if you were better off today than you were four years earlier. In the 2016 presidential race, whoever wins the GOP nomination should ask a more pertinent question in these dangerous times: “Do you feel safer than you did eight years ago?”
Cross-posted at The Lid
