White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller’s immoral wish to block as many refugees from the U.S. as possible hasn’t even spared refugees who’ve risked their own lives to assist U.S. military overseas. The New York Times reports that of the 4,000 slots reserved for Iraqis who’ve assisted U.S. military, only 161 were filled in the last fiscal year.
“Between endless red tape, slashed refugee admissions, and new ‘extreme vetting’ measures, the U.S. has made it all but impossible for its wartime partners to get the safe passage they were promised,” tweeted The International Refugee Assistance Project. “And the stakes couldn't be higher for those left behind.”
The Times reports that kind of extreme vetting has even targeted children, and refugees are being “asked to provide phone numbers and addresses dating back 10 years instead of five—no easy task for a family that may have been searching for a permanent residence for years, according to a report published this month by the International Refugee Assistance Project, or IRAP.”
One Iraqi man who was shot at and had his home bombed after he served as a translator for the U.S. military has been “waiting to clear security checks even after he was told to prepare to travel to the United States in 2017,” the Times continued. “Sam,” as he’s being identified, fled Iraq for Egypt following that attack in order to keep his family safe, but he has been left stranded by the new policies of the government he assisted.
“Even death is better than the situation I’m in,” he told the Times. “They took my integrity with all of this.” The Times reports that in fact the U.S. has broken its promises to as many 110,000 Iraqis. “Anyone who worked with U.S. forces had a scarlet letter,” former Army Capt. Allen Vaught, who was assisted by Sam overseas, said in the report. “They had a mark on their head. And the way they killed them was gruesome. One of my translators was burned alive.”
But this is an administration that does not care and has expelled thousands of asylum-seeking children from the southern border—in violation of anti-trafficking law—without a second thought. Miller’s fingerprints are all over that policy, just like they are all over the administration announcement seeking to slash refugees admitted to the U.S. in the next fiscal year to the lowest in the program’s history, from an average of 95,000 pre-Trump to just 15,000.
Meanwhile, his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, has pledged to set an annual refugee target of 125,000, higher than a 110,000 goal set by former President Barack Obama.
“Not only is Trump slashing refugee admissions levels to record lows, he's using the fact that the US expects ‘more than 290,000 asylum claims’ in the coming year as justification,” Amnesty International USA Americas Advocacy Director Charanya Krishnaswami tweeted. But the administration is using the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to also block those claims. The cruelty appears to be endless—but it doesn’t have to be.
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