Free Republic

An Iraqi man admitted to immigration fraud last week, saying he cheated America’s refugee system by lying about his past as a member of an Iranian-funded Shiite militia in order to win asylum in the U.S. Chasib Hafedh Saadoon Al Fawadi entered the U.S. in 2016, when then-President Obama was pushing to resettle tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East amid accusations that the system wasn’t able to properly vet them. As the U.S. opens its arms to tens of thousands of Afghans, Al Fawadi’s case raises questions anew about the ability of federal authorities to vet applications...

The government’s new system that grants citizenship has “alarming” security breaches, including allowing immigrants to be approved without a full FBI background check, the Homeland Security inspector general said Monday in an “urgent” warning telling the government to put everything on hold. Inspector General John Roth said he got wind that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was about to take the troubled system online later this month, and said he was compelled to issue the extraordinary alert to try to prevent a massive mistake. He said that as of Jan. 11, about 175 citizenship applications were approved despite never having...

In a private 2013 speech, Hillary Clinton worried about the risk of “jihadists” entering Jordan with “legitimate refugees” because “they can’t possibly vet all those refugees.” Clinton today wants to increase the amount of Syrian refugees the United States takes in by 55,000 annually. She believes that the U.S. refugee screening process is comprehensive enough to catch potential jihadists trying to enter the country, though FBI Director James Comey has said that the vetting process is severely limited by a lack of available data. “So I think you’re right to have gone to the places that you visited because there’s...

The United States runs the names of potential refugees through terrorism and law enforcement databases and conducts health screenings — but makes no effort to learn whether they harbor extremist views, an administration official acknowledged Wednesday. Simon Henshaw, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, made the admission during testimony at a Senate hearing on President Obama’s Syrian refugee program. Republicans on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest have expressed concerns that Obama’s decision to admit more than 10,000 Syrian refugees over the past 12 months and his plan to increase that...

One hot-button issue in the first Presidential debate will be the Syrian and other refugees that are allowed into the country. The vetting process of asylum seekers for resettlement in the United States usually takes between 18 to 24 months. But to meet President Obama’s goal of bringing in “at least 10,000” more Syrian refugees by the end of 2016, the process was cut to 3 months. And on August 29, White House spokesman Josh Earnest announced, “this goal that was met a month ahead of schedule.”