President Obama is standing by his pledge to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees, even in the wake of the deadly Orlando terrorist attack and harsh criticism from Donald Trump that he is not taking the terrorist threat seriously.
A White House National Security Council spokesman told the Washington Examiner Monday evening that the U.S. “remains committed to the president’s plan to resettle refugees from around the world,” including the more than 8,000 of the 10,000 Syrian refugees Obama pledged to resettle in the U.S. by October but have yet to undergo the required screening.
“Refugees undergo by far the most rigorous level of security checks required of any traveler to the United States,” NSC spokesman Myles Caggins said in an email. “Syrian refugees are screened to an even higher standard.”
“These checks involve multiple U.S. agencies, including the Departments of State and Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, The National Counterterrorism Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community,” he added.
Caggins also noted that Omar Mateen, the shooter in the Orlando attack that killed 50 people including himself, was not an immigrant or a Syrian.
Syed Rizwan Farook, who was responsible for carrying out the San Bernardino massacre late last year with his Saudi immigrant wife, was a U.S. citizen born in Chicago.
Initial reports after the San Bernardino attack, which killed 14 people, said Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, helped radicalize him. But later reports, citing the FBI, said they were both radicalized before they met.
Solving the Syrian and Iraqi refugee crisis by allowing them to resettle in western countries has become a divisive issue in the U.S. as well as Europe, especially in the aftermath of a revelation that at least one of the terrorists responsible for the Paris attack in November entered Europe as a Syrian refugee.
Yet after each attack over the last eight months – in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels and now Orlando — Obama has made clear he has no plan to back off his promise to admit 10,000 displaced Syrians to the U.S. this year.
Republicans in Congress have warned about the danger of admitting Syrian refugees, and earlier this year passed legislation tightening the visa waiver laws so foreign fighters would have a harder time exploiting those laws to come to the U.S. and launch attacks.
Another House-passed bill barring Syrian refugees from resettling in the United States died in the Senate, and Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has repeatedly called for the Senate to resurrect it.
Trump has gone much further, stoking a fierce national debate over the nation’s immigration policies after calling for a blanket short-term ban on allowing all Muslims to enter the country, which he renewed following the Orlando attack.
Even though he has consistently stood by his Syrian refugee commitment, the White House last month acknowledged some serious challenges to meeting Obama’s goal of taking in the 10,000 refugees by the beginning of October.
By the end of April, the State Department had only resettled 1,734 Syrian refugees, less than one-fifth of its goal.
Still, the president has repeatedly stuck by his previous pledges. Obama in November of 2015 laid out a humanitarian rationale for admitting more Syrian refugees, arguing that those fleeing the war-torn country are the most harmed by terrorism, are the “most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife.”
“They are parents, they are children, they are orphans,” he said. “And it is very important … that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issues of refugees with the issue of terrorism …”
The president reiterated his pledge to resettle the Syrian refugees in an Easter weekend radio address in which he also vowed to decimate the Islamic State, or ISIL.
“We have to wield another weapon alongside our airstrikes, our military, our counterterrorism work, and our diplomacy,” Obama said. “And that’s the power of our example. Our openness to refugees fleeing ISIL’s violence. Our determination to win the battle against ISIL’s hateful and violent propaganda — a distorted view of Islam that aims to radicalize young Muslims to their cause.”
Within 24 hours of the Orlando mass shooting, the worst in U.S. history, Trump on Monday told NBC’s “Today” show that “a lot of people” think President Obama may be aiding terrorism by choosing “not to get it.”
Trump also questioned the president’s motives in an interview Monday morning on Fox News.
Obama has so far avoided attributing the Orlando attack at a gay club to radical Islamic terrorism. On Monday, the president said the shooting was a result of “homegrown extremism” and said Mateen was motivated by “extremist information distributed over the Internet.”
He also talked about the Islamic State’s “perversion of Islam” on the Internet and once again partly blamed the availability of guns in the U.S. for the attack.
