Free Republic

President Trump, in just eight months in office, has succeeded in upending U.S. refugee policy, cutting by more than half the 110,000-refugee target that the Obama administration had bequeathed him and dramatically shifting the demographics of who is accepted. Gone is President Obama’s overwhelming focus on Muslims, and particularly on Syrians fleeing a civil war that his administration facilitated. Under Mr. Trump, the rate of Syrian refugees has been cut by more than 80 percent, and Christians have overtaken Muslims in total refugees resettled. “It’s impossible to escape the clear message that there’s a new sheriff in town,” said Matthew...

During US president Donald Trump’s first month in office, the Department of Homeland Security saw a 40% drop in “apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons” at crossings between the border of Mexico and the US; after the Trump administration threatened to separate children from their parents at the border, the number of parents and children apprehended at crossings dropped by 93%. Up to this point, many of the people who had been trying to illegally enter the US at the southern border in recent years were not Mexicans, but refugees from other Latin American countries passing through Mexico....

The Trump administration plans to stop accepting refugee applications from children with U.S.-based parents from three violence-riddled Central American countries — El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — according to the summary of a presentation the State Department made recently to refugee organizations. .....CAM admissions had already dwindled to a trickle. In August, 19 Central American refugees were admitted. By comparison, 160 were admitted last December, the single highest month. Over the history of the program, 1,627 refugees entered the U.S. through CAM, the overwhelming majority of them from El Salvador. In August, the Trump administration terminated a program that served...

Nine hundred and thirteen refugees were admitted to the United States during August, the first time the monthly intake has dropped below one thousand in 15 years, and the smallest number of monthly admissions since October 2002. August’s arrivals followed a pattern evident since the start of the Trump administration – a declining proportion of Muslims in comparison to Christians and adherents of other faiths. Of the 913 refugees admitted during the month, 551 (60.3 percent) were Christians, with the biggest groups including 185 Pentecostalists from Ukraine and 53 Baptists, also from Ukraine. A significantly smaller group, 220 (24.1 percent)...

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has said there are at least 380,000 people that are seeking refuge in Europe every year, and the European Union should work to take in more migrants. Currently, the EU is increasing the number of asylum seekers it takes in through legal channels at a rate of 20,000 per year, but the UNHCR said the increase is not enough. The group has called for a double-digit increase in numbers and said the new proposal to accept migrants in Africa could facilitate a growth in numbers, Austrian newspaper Kurier reports. Ruth Schöffl, a spokesman for...

(Full Title: Review of Obama’s Refugee Resettlement Program: Magnet for Middle East Refugees, Lucrative for U.S. Agencies) Look what Obama did. He actively worked to destroy this country. Actively. The last points in the list are very revealing of how American taxpayers are being abused. –The program is rife with fraud and corruption at all levels. UN personnel often sell access to the program and once here refugees make false claims of family relationship in order to facilitate wider immigration. Government grant fraud is common among local refugee service providers. –The refugee program has a significant impact on U.S. foreign...

Yemen is urging the U.S. government to take in dozens of Yemenis who traveled to Malaysia in recent months expecting to immigrate to the United States, only to find themselves stranded by President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban. The Supreme Court ruling sharply limited the number of people affected by the ban. Largely unreported has been the fate of one group - thousands of citizens of the six countries who won a randomized U.S. government lottery last year that enabled them to apply for a so-called green card granting them permanent residence in the United States. In a stroke of...

The European Union on Wednesday moved ahead with legal action against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to comply with a controversial E.U. scheme to redistribute refugees and migrants for resettlement across the bloc. Hungary’s conservative government has labeled it the “George Soros plan” after the Hungarian-American financier who last year pledged to invest $500 million in support of European migrant resettlement. The E.U.’s executive Commission announced it was moving to the next stage of its “infringement procedure” — the three eastern European countries have a month to respond to a formal request to comply and if their...

The mainstream media was inundated this week with reports of a gypsy invasion of California, Pennsylvania. California is a small, sleepy, college town in southwestern Pennsylvania, in all-American coal mining country, where people still work for a living, where rolling hills and clean fields dominate the landscape in every direction. According to the Blaze.. Residents in California have said they are outraged after the federal government moved 40 Romanian “gypsies” into the town of 7,000 as part of the government’s Alternative to Detention program. On Thursday, more than 150 residents attended a community meeting about the immigrants, who residents say...

Since 2005, Americans have been warned about microscopic border crossers carried in with refugees and illegal immigrants, bringing diseases previously eradicated or rarely seen here. When not simply ignored by media and health officials, physicians and others sounding the alarm have been attacked as xenophobes. Now we’re seeing these prescient predictions come true, most prominently in Germany, since 2015 when Angela Merkel began allowing more than 2 million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to flood into her country. U.S. and German citizens are put at significant risk by the politically correct acceptance of unscreened immigrants from countries...

FRESNO, Calif. — The police responded to a call about a loud party on East San Ramon Avenue, but it wasn’t just any party: A sheep was reportedly being slaughtered in a backyard. “Muslim refugees were unaware that slaughtering sheep is not allowed in the city,” the police wrote afterward in their report, which also stated that those involved “were advised to clean up the blood and mess” and warned that in the future “they could be cited.” The animal, actually a goat, was killed by a Syrian refugee who later skinned, roasted and shared it with his Syrian neighbors...

Christian refugee admissions increase during the first five months of Trump presidency. After declaring that Christians have “been horribly treated” by the refugee program under former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump has reversed the Obama administration’s disgraceful discrimination against Christian refugees.  According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department refugee data, during the period from January 21, 2017 - President Trump’s first full day in office - through June 30, “9,598 Christian refugees arrived in the U.S., compared with 7,250 Muslim refugees. Christians made up 50% of all refugee arrivals in this period, compared with 38% who are Muslim.”...

CALIFORNIA, Pa — Residents in California Borough will pack a council meeting Thursday evening, protesting what they call repulsive behavior by Romanian immigrants who moved into town during the last two months. They describe acts of littering, defecating in public, speeding and beheading chickens. There's even a petition protesting the lifestyle of the immigrants, and it has been signed by more than 600 residents. "What I've seen is men and children -- never usually the women -- the men and the children dropping their pants in the middle of the street, defecating, pulling their pants up and going on their...

A leaked White House proposal to move key parts of the federal refugee bureaucracy from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security is ruffling the feathers of CNN, a former Obama State Department official, and other Obama era bureaucrats still embedded in the Deep State. “The White House is considering a proposal to move both the State Department bureau of Consular Affairs and its bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration to the Department of Homeland Security, a senior White House official tells CNN,” CNN reported on Wednesday in an article written by Jake Tapper, Ethan Cohen, and Justin...

The number of refugees admitted to the United States was cut by nearly half in the first three months of the Trump administration compared with the final three months of the Obama presidency, reflecting the new president's skepticism toward immigration. Government statistics released Friday showed that more than 25,000 refugees were permitted to enter and reside in the United States at the end of the Obama administration. In the initial months under President Trump, the number fell to 13,000.

Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs. Federal officials refused even to guess at the true scope of the problem, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they can give only small snapshots of what they see. But they said the devastation on communities across the country is clear: killings and chaos, particularly among other immigrants — both legal and illegal. The Border Patrol identified...

Summary: The deal to resettle Australia's unwanted refugees in the United States, made between the outgoing Obama administration and Malcolm Turnbull's government over six months ago, is being carried out by the Trump administration. The process is well underway for refugees being detained at Australia's offshore detention centers on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru. There are currently a total of some 1,250 asylum seekers (mainly men from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan) detained on the islands.

A judge sentenced three Muslim refugee boys in the sexual assault of a 5-year-old girl in Idaho, but nobody knows the length or terms of the sentence because the judge has barred everyone in the courtroom, including the victim’s own parents, from speaking about the case. Mathew Staver, chairman and co-founder of the nonprofit legal assistance agency Liberty Counsel, told WND that Judge Borresen was completely out of line in issuing a gag order after the fact in a criminal case. “It’s unconstitutional for the judge to do that. There are gag orders that can be put on people during...

Despite a court order halting most of his extreme vetting policy, President Trump’s administration has quietly been working toward his goal of a drastic cut in the number of refugees the U.S. will accept this fiscal year. President Obama had set a target of up to 110,000 on his way out the door, but Mr. Trump tried to reset that number to 50,000. If the pace continues, the final tally is likely to be about 60,000 when the fiscal year ends in September — well below the level Mr. Obama wanted to lock in....

[snip] In his now-stalled immigration executive orders, Trump also wanted to halt for 90 days the entry of almost all citizens from six terror-prone countries – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Although that provision applied to most citizens of those countries rather than to refugees specifically, since Trump took office the six countries have accounted for 4,478 refugee arrivals in the U.S. – 1,655 from Somalia, 1,603 from Syria, 779 from Iran, 425 from Sudan, 16 from Yemen, and none from Libya. All but two of the Somali refugees are Muslims, as are about three-quarters of the Sudanese...