news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/100615-774413-no-databases-exist-to-vet-syrian-refugees.htmDHS Confesses: No Databases Exist To Vet Syrian Refugees
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10/06/2015 06:47 PM ET
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Immigration: As the White House prepares to dump another 10,000 Syrian refugees on U.S. cities, it assures us these mostly Muslim men undergo a "robust screening" process. Not so, admits the agency responsible for such vetting.
Under grilling from GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, head of the Senate subcommittee on immigration, the Homeland Security official in charge of vetting Syrian and other foreign Muslim refugees confessed that no police or intelligence databases exist to check the backgrounds of incoming refugees against criminal and terrorist records.
"Does Syria have any?" Sessions asked. "The government does not, no sir," answered Matthew Emrich, associate director for fraud detection and national security at DHS' U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Sessions further inquired: "You don't have their criminal records, you don't have the computer database that you can check?" Confessed Emrich: "In many countries the U.S. accepts refugees from, the country did not have extensive data holdings."
While a startling admission, it confirms previous reporting. Senior FBI officials recently testified that they have no idea who these people are, and they can't find out what type of backgrounds they have — criminal, terrorist or otherwise — because there are no vetting opportunities in those war-torn countries.
Syria and Iraq, along with Somalia and Sudan, are failed states where police records aren't even kept. Agents can't vet somebody if they don't have documentation and don't even have the criminal databases to screen applicants.
So the truth is, we are not vetting these Muslim refugees at all. And as GOP presidential front-runners duly note, it's a huge gamble to let people from hostile nations enter the U.S. without any meaningful background check. It's a safer bet just to limit, if not stop, their immigration.
"If I win, they're going back," Donald Trump vowed. "They could be ISIS. This (mass Syrian immigration) could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time."
Ben Carson, for his part, said that he would bar refugees from Syria because they are "infiltrated" with terrorists seeking to harm America. "To bring into this country groups infiltrated with jihadists makes no sense," Carson asserted. "Why would you do something like that?"
The Obama regime claims to have no evidence of terrorist or even extremist infiltration. But Sessions made public a list of 72 recent Muslim immigrants arrested just over the past year who were charged with terrorist activity.
The list doesn't include the Boston Marathon bombers, who emigrated from Chechnya as asylum seekers. Or the several dozen suspected terrorist bomb-makers brought into the U.S. as Iraq war refugees.
They included two al-Qaida in Iraq terrorists mistakenly resettled as refugees in Bowling Green, Ky. Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi were sent to Bowling Green even though they had been detained by authorities in Iraq for killing U.S. soldiers.
Alwan had crossed the border into Syria. Still, both passed background checks and were declared "clean." They were then placed in U.S. public housing and afforded other welfare benefits.
While here, the two refugees plotted to obtain Stinger missiles and attack homeland targets. The FBI caught up to them before they could carry out their plans. They are now serving 40 years in federal prison.
Yet the administration has agreed to admit tens of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis over the next two years. The media are writing off Carson's and Trump's fears of terrorist "infiltrators" as xenophobic. But they're well-founded.
Lest anybody forget, Syria has been been on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1979. It remains blacklisted on the State Department website, even as diplomats trip over themselves to work with the United Nations to settle Syrians here — with virtually no security screening, as it turns out.
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