By A.P. Dillon
From the instant the news broke there was an attack going on in Paris, I knew it was them. Everyone in the world knew it was them.
Whereas I and the rest of the world seem to be able to say the words, Islamic Terrorist’, the 2016 Democratic candidates and President Obama refuse to. And this is a big part of why the world is where it is today with regard to ISIS.
The President says he has a strategy and, like a petulant child, told the world he won’t change it. He was more than petulant actually, at the G-20, Obama was visibly disdainful that anyone would question him about it at all as he described Paris as a “terrible and sickening setback“.
It’s now known that at least one of the ISIS terrorists was using a phony passport that allowed him to slip into Greece and then on to Paris. The terrorist hid in plain sight, entering the country among Syrian refugees.
President Obama has ordered that the United States now take in 10,000 of these refugees. That’s up from 2,000 earlier this year. How many ISIS terrorists will be hiding among them?
Some states are not willing to find out. Yesterday, over half of the states requested the President stop sending refugees to their respective states. Only seven states have stated they will continue to take these Syrian refugees.
My home state of North Carolina was among those requesting President Obama stop sending Syrian refugees to the state.
Governor McCrory said yesterday, “My primary duty as governor is to protect the citizens of North Carolina, which is why I am taking the steps I have outlined today.” If only we had a President who reassured the people that they were his primary duty.
Governor McCrory made it clear that the federal government was not sharing information about these refugees, including who they are, where they are residing and how they are vetted. McCrory said that North Carolina had received 59 refugees so far and “do date, we have received little or not security information about those refugees… on their backgrounds and even possibly their names in certain circumstances.”
What was interesting and frankly frightening about Governor McCrory’s press conference wasn’t the revelation the federal government was withholding details about the refugee vetting process, but rather how easily state governments are being nearly entirely circumvented.
McCrory broke it down a bit in the Q&A of the press conference and said that the refugees are brought in by the U.S. government, handed off to a non-profit in a given state and then the state only finds out about them when the non-profits bills the state for services.
Do you see the horror here? The Governor’s can request all they want from the Obama administration but unless his administration agrees to halt, the program continues and the governors are powerless.
The only thing that will truly stop refugees from flooding into the states is if they are stopped at the federal level — because the states apparently don’t have the legal authority to do so. The Refugee Act of 1980 gives Obama, or any president for that matter, the ability to do this.
Do people fully understand what this means? The states have no control over who is being sent to them nor can they stop it. If that doesn’t scare the Holy Hell out of you, nothing will. Given the current situation, this is a suicide note written by the Fed for the States.
The states will likely have to sue to get this administration to stop it, which will take too much time to be a viable option. Another way is for Congress to cut the funding to the program. A letter from Florida’s Governor Scott to Paul Ryan asks for just that very thing to happen.
But let’s get real, we all know how good Congress is at cutting funding. Obama is fond of doing all he can without Congress, perhaps it’s time the states tried that too.
The states shouldn’t wait for Congress; they should refuse to cooperate and pull the plug on their end. If they are getting billed for these refugees by non-profits, it’s time to reverse engineer the process: find out who they are, where they are and then refuse to be a pass through for the bills.
ISIS scares me, but the idea that the states are now actively having to protect themselves from the potential of terrorism because of the actions of our own federal government? Well, that scares me more.
Quick side note: Next Thursday is Thankgiving and I will give thanks in a final article, which comes just past my two-year anniversary at Da Tech Guy as a member of his Magnificent Seven.
A.P. Dillon resides in the Triangle area of North Carolina and is the founder of LadyLiberty1885.com.
Her current and past writing can also be found at IJ Review, StopCommonCoreNC.org, Heartland.org and Watchdog Wire NC.
Catch her on Twitter: @LadyLiberty1885
“Do people fully understand what this means? The states have no control over who is being sent to them nor can they stop it. If that doesn’t scare the Holy Hell out of you, nothing will.”
Either that, or it means you have at least a cursory knowledge of immigration law and the U.S. Constitution, both of which have made immigration an exclusively federal matter from the git-go. We had a big debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists lost.
No , what it means is I’m well aware of clauses 3 and 4 of Article 1’s section 8 which deals with immigration.
How it is being used by this administration is not how it was intended.
What I mainly referred to here is the Refugee Act.
I do believe that within that act, the Fed is supposed to at least consult with the states on these activities. Obama is not doing that as we can see clearly from the Governor’s statements they that they get no details.
Congress is going to have to actually move their rear ends on this. The states have little to nothing they can do beyond refusing to pass through the payments the non-profits bill them with.
The Refugee Act merely requires the federal government to consult with the states (it has) and to take state recommendations into account in determining where to place them (it either will or won’t, too early to say).
The Refugee Act does not give any state a veto power over anything, nor does it require the federal government even to consider state arguments against admitting the refugees into the country AT ALL. States have absolutely no say on that matter, and the grandstanding governors know that.
That may be true, however it’s not grandstanding.
Go look at the immigration data. The amount of refugees taken in is in the neighborhood for 70,000 a year. Refugees from Syria in the past have been very small in number, with most coming from places like Iraq, Iran and Somalia. The ‘process’ taking around 18 months. This administration won’t give the ‘process’ details to the governors.
Are you contending POTUS is going to wait that long in this case? The governors do not and neither do many Americans.
It certainly is grandstanding when governors claim they’re not going to let any more refugees in, knowing full well they have no authority to do that. I am not contending that the federal government will abide by any law in the future, as I have no crystal ball for that. I am not aware of any evidence the administration has acted in contravention of the Refugee Act to date or threatened to do so in the future. Are you? Most of the objection I’ve seen has been to the idea of letting in the refugees *at all,* often accompanied by false representations that the Refugee Act itself is flawed or even that other past terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez and even Nidal Hasan came in as refugees themselves.
Meanwhile, I can’t help noticing that while you’ve engaged me (good), you’ve let the other comment go, in which “thisobamanation” falsely accuses the administration of treason, and calls for acts in retaliation which really would constitute treason as defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Doesn’t that bother you?
What you call grandstanding, I would call displaying a spine and standing up for one’s state. So we can agree to disagree there.
Yes, I am contending this administration does not intend to wait with this batch of refugees.
Most objection I have seen has been about the current situation, given what we know about the Paris attacks. Delaying or pausing the intake of refugees at this time would be prudent for security. Obama knows this. He paused the program in the past.
No, the other comment doesn’t bother me. They’re free to hold that opinion. They also didn’t ask a question. You did.
My second comment included a question; the first one did not. Again, I’m not objecting to you responding to it of course; it just seems more than a little odd that the other commenter’s advocacy of actual treason and murder was just another “opinion” and allowed to stand without comment. Whatever.
And yeah, flexing your nonexistent muscles and pretending to exercise a power you *know* you don’t have is about as every bit as grandstandy as the City of Berkeley having a foreign policy of its own, as it has been known to do in the past.
If you have any evidence that the current administration or anyone seeking to replace it in 2017 intends to short-circuit the Refugee Act and allow anyone through under procedures other than the very effective ones we’ve had in place since 1980, I’d be keen to see it.
I think we agree in some areas and disagree in others.
Again – Your comments asked a question about the piece, the other did not so I didn’t see a need to address them. Whatever you want to infer from my lack of response is up to you. Whatever.
Again – I’ll agree to disagree with you on calling it grandstanding. I think it’s called a spine and it was long over due for the states to stand up to this president.
I have no evidence other than this administration has not and does not follow by the rules. After 7 years of watching this man stir the pot, I hardly think it is beyond him to expedite Syrian refugee applications. He’s paused them before with the Iraqi refugees, he can certainly expedite them.
We need to hold Obama and his political accomplishes criminally and civilly responsible for knowingly and willfully placing American lives at risk.
Once a few of them have been arrested, tried, and hung for treason, the rest of them should catch on rather quickly.