As the Biden administration moves to ship tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into American communities to live, there is growing concern that the vetting process to weed out “known or suspected terrorists,” including those involved in IED attacks on American troops, failed.
At issue is a newly released Pentagon inspector general’s report that highlighted the dozens of refugees who slipped through the process and are suspected of being dangerous.
The report was mentioned in some earlier stories about the problems with the vetting process but is now getting much more attention as the Department of Homeland Security eyes suburban neighborhoods, including Loudoun County’s posh Lansdowne, to cycle refugees through.
For example, the Center for Immigration Studies highlighted the inspector general’s finding that 50 of some 80,000 refugees were brought to the United States even though officials in Afghanistan singled them out due to “significant security concerns.”
“Fifty out of 80,000-plus might not seem like a large number (although of course, it is only an interim result), but even one terrorist is one too many,” said Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge and fellow with CIS.
He added of the IG report, “review of the report as a whole reveals that there were large numbers of Afghan evacuees (possibly most) who had no connection to the United States before they were brought to those foreign [staging areas] and sent on to safe havens in this country.”
Security concerns were raised last month in Loudoun over the DHS plan to filter up to 60,000 refugees through a conference center in the middle of a suburban neighborhood that houses two schools.
The top county supervisor, a Democrat, said she was confident in DHS security, but the county sheriff raised significant concerns about security.
In the IG report, it was revealed that not all critical security databases were checked when Afghans were selected to come into the U.S.
“The United States faces potential security risks if individuals with derogatory information are allowed to stay in the country,” the report said.
In highlighting the security concerns of the 50 refugees with notable blemishes on their record, a footnote to the report on page 10 explained, “Significant security concerns include individuals whose latent fingerprints have been found on improvised explosive devices and known or suspected terrorists …”
The report also noted, as reported by the Washington Examiner’s Pentagon correspondent, Mike Brest, that a handful of refugees with security flags have disappeared.
“The ‘potential security risks’ created by the vetting failures in the IG report still exist. That report is unclassified, and therefore there is no way to determine what derogatory information prompted [National Ground Intelligence Center] to flag the 50 Afghan evacuees it had identified as of November 2, but it does not appear that any of the missing ones had been found by the time that the IG issued the report,” said Arthur.
He added, “Legal and official immigration channels exist for a reason — to keep inadmissible aliens, and in particular, aliens who are inadmissible on criminal grounds out of the United States. In bypassing those official immigration channels and simply evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans to lily pads and safe havens, the Biden administration has created an unacceptable risk for the American people.”
Judicial Watch said that the government is lax on when refugees can leave the security facilities, such as military bases, where they were initially housed.
“Of tremendous concern, the audit discloses that Afghan parolees have the right to leave U.S. military bases, officially known as ‘safe havens,’ after receiving required vaccinations and tuberculosis testing,” said the conservative legal watchdog.
The group added, “This may seem like a joke, considering Afghanistan is a terrorist sanctuary and the refugees are so poorly screened by the U.S.”
