No Syrian Muslims have been placed in Washington DC!
There isn’t much new and useful in this AP story from Saturday, but wanted to mention it only because once again the feds are telling concerned governors to go fly a kite—the UN/US State Dept. is speeding up the Syrian refugee processing in Jordan and Turkey. Governors are impotent to stop it is the message.
There is a little nugget here that I didn’t know about: Apparently the DEMOCRAT mayor of Roanoke, VA did not want Syrians resettled in an already refugee-overloaded city.
We’ve written a few times about Roanoke perhaps most famous for the refugee gang found guilty there for planning to kidnap and ransom some prominent women in the town, here in 2009. (Gee, I wonder if they were deported when they were released after their short prison sentence?)
Associated Press (at the Washington Post):
Dozens of Syrian refugees were settled in Maryland and Virginia in June, part of a sharp nationwide increase as the U.S. government scrambles to meet its goal of admitting 10,000 refugees in fiscal 2016.
The surge has come despite opposition from more than half of the nation’s governors, including Maryland’s Larry Hogan (R), all of whom say they are not satisfied with the federal government’s assurances that refugees are carefully vetted and screened.
[…..]
The pace of refugee resettlement has quickened in part because processing facilities in Istanbul and in Amman, Jordan, have been upgraded and more Department of Homeland Security teams have been deployed to interview refugees, a State Department official said.
“We pushed all those things together so they would happen sequentially and more quickly,” said Simon Henshaw, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.
In Maryland, 78 Syrians were settled in June – bringing the total to 115 since October. Sixty-seven arrived in Virginia last month, out of 87 resettled in the state this year. Fifteen of them have been placed in Roanoke, where the Democratic mayor attracted national controversy last fall for citing the internment of Japanese citizens as a reason to bar Syrian refugees.
No refugees have been brought to the District of Columbia, according to the State Department data. [No, of course not!—ed]
Continue reading here.
Photo: My reference to the Syrian charged with sexual assault refers to this story. And, here, Breitbart has Pamela Geller’s reaction to the latest refugee sex crime.
Regarding my title! In truth, Gov. Hogan and other of the governors concerned about the program could do something about it if they had the political will, but most don’t. It is easy to say they don’t like what is happening to satisfy voters, but quite another to put on the state’s rights fight that would be necessary.