US officials on Monday reached its goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees by October 1.
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“While refugee admissions are only a small part of our broader humanitarian efforts in Syria and the region, the president understood the important message this decision would send, not just to the Syrian people but to the broader worldwide community”, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said in a statement. 12,000 have been accepted so far, the report said.
Obama would like to see a “ramping up of those efforts” but is realistic about how quickly that could happen, he said.
The U.S. on Monday was to accept its 10,000th refugee from Syria, described by the White House as an achievement reached ahead of schedule and “without cutting any corners”.
The government had pledged to admit at least 10,000 displaced Syrians during the current fiscal year, which wraps up at the end of September.
And while we are on not-true refugee facts, a full 60 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted this year are under the age of 18, completely debunking the conspiracy theory that we are admitting strong, able-bodied terrorists rather than those fleeing for their lives. She called for admitting 65,000 Syrian refugees in a 2015 interview.
“Thousands of families from Syria have found safety on our shores, and that is a wonderful thing”, Tarah Demant, senior director of the US branch of Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Republican lawmakers remain concerned.
President Obama made no official statement on the 11th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in US history which claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people. They attempted to pass a requirement for Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence chiefs to sign off on every refugee, but the Democrats filibustered the bill, which led to its demise.
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Indeed one of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s main talking points has been that the Obama administration’s policy of importing these so-called refugees is risky because there is no way to screen them for terror ties. Germany has accepted hundreds of thousands, while Canada admitted nearly 30,000 between November 2015 and May 2016, according to Al Jazeera.
