It’s been more than three weeks since Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers in Las Vegas, Nevada, killing nearly 60 Americans and injuring over 500 others. According to Mother Jones, more than half of all mass shootings since 1982 have been committed by white men. But that fact doesn’t fit in this racist administration’s white supremacist narrative, which is why Reuters reports that the Trump regime is instead considering taking more steps to make it even more difficult for refugees to come to the U.S.
Refugees are already among the most vetted group of individuals entering the U.S., so the administration’s red tape is intentional. “When you put in additional security checks you can basically halt the system,” said Robert Carey, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under Obama:
The administration also may expand the use of intensive security checks by multiple federal agencies, called “security advisory opinions” (SAO) to apply to women from countries designated as high-risk by the U.S. government. Currently there are usually only mandatory SAOs, as they are called, for men from those countries, the sources said.
The administration could pause the visa issuing process for “following-to-join” spouses and children of refugees who have already made it to the United States, known as V93 cases, the sources said. In 2015, just 3 percent of the nearly 70,000 refugee arrivals were those types of beneficiaries, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“Reports on the type of vetting measures being considered for our refugee resettlement program are disturbing,” said Hans Van de Weerd, the Vice President of U.S. Programs at the International Rescue Committee.
They amount “to a desertion of victims of war and heinous persecution, who have done everything asked of them as they prepare to arrive to the US,” he said.
Refugees currently undergo differing levels of security checks when applying for admission to the United States in a process that can take 18-24 months.
The administration’s refugee ban—this is separate from his repeatedly failed Muslim bans—is set to expire within hours, and the sources tell Reuters that new measures could be announced soon after that. Already, Donald Trump has plans to admit only 45,000 refugees in 2018, “the lowest number in decades.”
Of course, this is being done under the guise of public safety, yet as even the libertarian Cato Institute noted last year, “no person accepted to the United States as a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, has been implicated in a major fatal terrorist attack since the Refugee Act of 1980.” Meanwhile, 93 Americans are killed on an average day due to gun violence.