I haven’t seen anyone find the definitive answer yet. Have you?
Andy McCarthy, here, further elaborates on their ‘Palestinian’ origins, and tells us the family came when Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez was an infant. He was born in 1990.
We take very few ‘Palestinian’ refugees (I’ve remarked many times that the Palestinian problem is never solved by the UN because they need to continue the thorn in Israel’s side, but that is a story for another day).
I hate to speculate, but will anyway. There is a chance that this family was very likely among those being expelled from Kuwait (to Jordan) at the time of the first Gulf War. The father is reportedly a Palestinian who could very well have been a successful asylum seeker just as had been the father of the Tsarnaev Boston Bomber family. In the Tsarnaev case the father got into the US on his own and then asked for asylum. Once granted political refugee status he then brought the rest of the family over.
By the way, we wouldn’t be speculating if the US State Department and its resettlement agencies in Tennessee would talk!
ORR Annual reports to Congress hold much information
I went back to the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress to see what we were doing in the early 1990’s in Jordan and Kuwait. For those of you doing research, these are a treasure-trove of information.
In the first half of the 1990’s we took no refugees from either Kuwait or Jordan, however, much to my surprise the reports in the early 1990’s included the nationalities of successful asylum seekers. Unfortunately by the 1995 report this feature was dropped from subsequent reports.
However…
Go here to the Annual Report for 1994 and see Table 14 on Page A-24.
From 1990-1994 we accepted 85 asylum seekers from Kuwait and 66 from Jordan. Could this be how the Abdulazeez family gained legal immigrant status in the US?
Again, we don’t know yet, or at least I haven’t seen reports yet on how exactly this family gained access to a legal life in Tennessee, but, this gave me an opportunity to mention the Annual Reports to all of you concerned activist citizens who are researching what has been done to your states.
Completely changing the subject….I was interested to see (in that same 1994 report) a table on the distribution of ‘unaccompanied minors’ that year. We distributed 8,416 of those ‘unaccompanied minors’ to your towns as early as 1994.