The head of the FBI said “there’s no risk-free process” when it comes to ensuring that no members of the Islamic State will sneak into the U.S. among the 10,000 refugees expected to come here next year.
During a Wednesday hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., asked FBI Director James Comey what the U.S. is doing to make sure adversaries don’t exploit the plan to take in refugees.
“We’ve got a group known as ISIS … who want to come to this country, who’ve said they’ll exploit this refugee program to come to this country,” Duncan said. “Mr. Comey, what can I tell folks in South Carolina about our vetting of these refugees?”
Comey replied: “The good news is we’re much better at doing this than we were eight years ago. The bad news is, there’s no risk-free process.”
“I just want to encourage you … to rethink the resettlement of refugees in this country, especially in the numbers that I’m hearing,” Duncan said.
Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson tried to defend the vetting process for refugees, which he said included an interview process and a background check. “It involves consulting a number of different agencies, law enforcement and intelligence, and the information that they have regarding each individual applicant. It is a more robust process than it used to be,” Johnson said.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, also expressed concerns about those who were seeking refugee status. “Traditionally, refugees have been members of families, and yet the typical profile of the Syrian refugee, I am told, is that most are young, single males, as opposed to family members. To me, that would raise a red flag,” he said.
The topic came among Comey’s dire warnings about the terrorism threat facing the U.S.
“The core al Qaeda tumor has been reduced, but the cancer has metastasized,” Comey said. “The progeny of al Qaeda, including [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula], al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIS] have become our focus.”
China’s commercial espionage
Members also questioned the U.S. response to commercial espionage emanating out of China. Rep. Curt Clawson, R-Fla., said the U.S. was losing manufacturing jobs to China at the same time its trade secrets were being stolen, and he questioned why the U.S. wasn’t doing more to punish the country.
“While I watch our manufacturing structure get decimated, and these folks hacking us, you’re there with the administration. I just wonder why we don’t use the obvious leverage that we have,” Clawson said to Johnson.
“I would refer you to other agencies of our government for that,” Johnson said.
Replied Clawson: “The American worker doesn’t want to get referred to other agencies. Our folks that get their technology stolen don’t want to get referred to other agencies. They want leadership. We’re getting taken to the cleaners … we don’t want to get referred to an outside study. We want leadership for American jobs and American technology.”
President Obama reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sept. 25 that the countries would work to eliminate commercial hacking. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said this week that it found evidence China violated the agreement by hacking several Fortune 500 companies afterward, beginning the very next day.
Johnson did not acknowledge the CrowdStrike report, but repeated the administration’s refrain that more time was needed to find out whether the Chinese would honor the agreement.
“The Chinese government agreed that economic espionage and theft of commercial information … was wrong and was a crime,” Johnson said. “Time will tell if they live up to that agreement. It was significant in the sense in that they publicly, out of the mouth of their president, committed to that.”
