Attorney General Loretta Lynch insisted on Tuesday that the Obama administration has the ability to run effective security screenings on Syrian refugees, despite testimony from the FBI last month indicating it may not be possible to run these security checks.
The issue of security checks on refugees was called into question by FBI Director James Comey in October, when he told a House committee that checking refugees against a database won’t do anything if the U.S. doesn’t have any data on these refugees.
“And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them,” Comey said.
Comey’s words were recalled over the last few days, when France confirmed that at least one of the terrorists in last week’s attacks in Paris entered that country disguised as a refugee.
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But at the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Lynch insisted that the U.S. will be able to process refugees safely. She first defended the current system of checking refugees against government databases.
“There is a screening process that has data from several different agencies, the FBI participates, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, National Counterterrorism Center and much information is vetted and queried,” she said.
Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., pressed her by saying in the case of Syria, it would be difficult for the U.S. to check with that government on the status of someone trying to enter as a refugee.
“Do you disagree with the FBI director when he says that vetting Syrian refugees is extremely difficult if not impossible?” Goodlatte asked.
Lynch replied by saying interviews and other forms of screening besides checking refugees against a database will be implemented.
“I’m not sure he said it was impossible,” Lynch said. “Certainly the Department of Justice, but all of our agencies will make every effort to vet every refugee coming into this country, from the databases to the interviews that those individuals are subject to, to the biometric screening as well.”
“Certainly there are challenges to that process, because of the situation in Syria,” she admitted. “But I would note, however, that we do have the benefit of having the significant and robust screening process in place, a process that Europe has not been able to set up, which renders them much more vulnerable.”
Goodlatte disagreed, reflecting the position of many other Republicans over the past few days since the Paris attacks.
“Well, I think we’ll be vulnerable too when it comes to people from Syria, when we can’t get access to those databases because the country is in disarray and we can’t even gather information,” Goodlatte said.
Tuesday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., announced he was setting up a task force aimed at examining legislation that might be pursued to slow down Obama’s plan to take in thousands of Syrian refugees.
