Last week, as a majority of the nation’s governors came out against resettling Syrian refugees in their home states, some said they needed more information on the security screening process while others called for a comprehensive review of the procedures to determine whether U.S. officials can strengthen them.
This week, governors should be satisfied on both counts.
Not only do they have more information that they’ve been requesting, they should have confidence that the federal government is continually refining its screening procedures to account for new security threats. Even though the governors’ stances against resettling refugees are legally meaningless, they should rethink their unwelcoming posture toward people fleeing their war-torn homeland.
On Tuesday, the White House held a conference call with 34 governors to provide more details on security screening procedures. (Gov. Paul LePage didn’t participate, according to his office, since he was on his way to Las Vegas for the Republican Governors Association annual conference.) On Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson followed up with a five-page letter to governors outlining the entire process in detail — from the moment the United Nations refers refugees to the United States to the moment they resettle stateside.
The letter lays out an involved and, by design, redundant process for refugee screening during which the U.S. has many opportunities to decline refugees’ admission into the country. The State Department says the process takes 18-24 months.
Before the U.S. even starts to consider any refugee for resettlement here, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has already interviewed applicants and confirmed their need for protected status. Since 2013, the U.N. has referred more than 22,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. out of 4.3 million Syrians who have registered with the U.N. Refugees are fleeing persecution and danger in their homelands, and they have to prove the risk to them and their families if they stay behind or return home.
From there, the process involves multiple interviews to confirm biographical information and refugees’ reasons for seeking protection in the U.S. Highly trained interviewers from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are, along the way, looking for signs of fraudulent claims and other causes for suspicion.
U.S. officials run refugees’ fingerprints looking for matches in FBI and Department of Homeland Security databases. The background screening — aimed at detecting any criminal and terrorist activity or associations along with immigration history — involves checks of criminal, terrorist and immigration databases maintained by INTERPOL, the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI and others. And the screening happens more than once, allowing U.S. officials to detect any recent suspicious activity before giving refugees the greenlight.
The U.S. refined its refugee screening procedures after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 even though none of the 19 hijackers arrived as refugees; they arrived on tourist and student visas. It added new security protocols five years ago, and the government has added more measures since the flow of refugees from Syria has accelerated, including classified intelligence briefings for Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers so they can be better equipped to detect terrorist threats.
“[A]pplicants for refugee admission are screened more carefully than any other type of traveler to the United States,” Kerry and Johnson wrote in their letter to governors.
Many U.S. governors have rushed to judgment on a process whose problems they can’t identify. And they’ve cast aspersions on refugees and the U.S.’s screening process for no reason: none of the Paris attackers was a refugee; most were European nationals.
In the process, they’ve inspired fear among Americans and sent the message to the world that the U.S. is reluctant to do its part to address one of the world’s foremost humanitarian challenges.
