Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin on Wednesday said the Obama administration isn’t yet doing enough to take in Syrian refugees, and said it needs to allow ten times the number of refugees that the White House has suggested.
“What the administration has posed is modest: 10,000,” Durbin said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “Too modest, as far as I am concerned. I believe we should be prepared to accept 100,000 Syrian refugees.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest has said that the U.S. will accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees during the 2016 fiscal year that starts in October. So far, the U.S. has taken in about 1,500 refugees since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011.
Durbin’s remarks come on the heels of a letter signed last week by 72 House Democrats, who also called on the White House to accept 100,000 refugees instead of just 10,000.
In his Senate speech, Durbin also mentioned a trip to the Chicago area in which he met with Syrian families who resettled there. He visited the Syrian refugee camp in Kilis, Turkey, on the Syrian border in 2012.
“The people I have met in Chicago, the refugees there, are just desperate people, trying to find a roof over their head, trying to find some little work to do to keep what remains of their family together. … We shouldn’t be afraid when people who are desperate for some refuge find our shores and say, ‘may we come and join you?,'” Durbin said.
Since 2011, nearly 12 million people, equivalent to half of the Syrian population, have been displaced by the conflict.
