A Syrian family turned away by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence arrived in Connecticut Wednesday, and there, they got a personal greeting from Gov. Dannel Malloy.
"I have to say they were absolutely wonderful and charming folks," Malloy said at a news conference. "I told them that people in the United States are generous and good people but sometimes things happen elsewhere that cause people to forget about their generosity, forget about their native warmth and spirit." [...]
Malloy said he felt the need to tell the couple they were coming to a country where most of the population came from another place. He said told them about how his own family originally came to the U.S. from Ireland about 100 years ago.
"They know that they've been diverted. They know that they were unwelcomed in another state," Malloy said. "We're not in the position to take everybody from Syria, but Connecticut should take its share."
The executive director of Exodus International, the charity that was working to place the married couple and their five-year-old son, said she would have liked to fight it out with Indiana that “this is not constitutional, that refugees can go to any state that they want because they're admitted to the U.S., not into a state,” but made the decision to protect the refugee family from “more scrutiny or drama.” A second Syrian refugee family was slated to arrive in Indiana in December, and Catholic Charities, the organization placing that family, is working on solutions for them.
Malloy is one of a handful of Democratic governors who have insisted that, as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee put it, “we also have to win the moral battle. And that's a battle of hope and a vision for the future where we can live together. And I think this is part of that.”