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It Begins: 1st Syrian ‘Refugees’ Arrive in S.C. Despite Governor’s Concerns -State Department: ‘Our Program is Continuing & It’s All Legal’
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Syrian refugees (Photo: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
By Leo Hohmann
South Carolina was one of the first states to protest President Obama’s plans to bring 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States for permanent resettlement, but those refugees have now started to arrive despite the absence of an official welcome mat.
The uprising grew so intense this past summer that Secretary of State John Kerry dispatched his top refugee official, Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard, to Spartanburg to quell the backlash against Muslim migrants.
Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, who initially supported the resettlements in her state, changed her mind after the attack on Paris that killed 130 people in November. Those attacks were carried out by eight Islamic terrorists, including one who entered Europe as a “refugee.” Haley joined more than two dozen other governors who told the Obama administration they didn’t want any Syrian refugees.
But none of that protest has stopped Obama’s plans from going forward. The Syrians continue to arrive not only in South Carolina but nationwide, Richard said.
A pair of Syrians were secretly planted last week in Midlands, near the state capital of Columbia, without even the governor’s office being notified. And more Syrians are on their way to the Palmetto State, the South Carolina Department of Social Services confirmed to WND.
The Syrians are being resettled in South Carolina by Lutheran Services Carolinas, a private agency affiliated with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine contractors who receive hundreds of millions in federal taxpayer money to resettle foreign refugees in the U.S.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., did not take kindly to the furtive action by the federal government, which works with the United Nations to distribute up to 85,000 foreign refugees annually into more than 180 U.S. cities and towns.
Mulvaney got into a heated exchange last week in a committee hearing with Richard over the unapproved distribution of Syrian refugees into South Carolina.
Mulvaney said his office found out about the placement of the first two Syrians by reading it in the local media.
This despite the fact that Mulvaney said he and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., had met previously with State Department officials to discuss security concerns about the refugees.
“I found out yesterday in the media that your group has placed some refugees this month in South Carolina, and I’d like to ask you about that,” he told Richard. “…But our governor had reached out to you and asked you not to do this. And when we had met previously, you said one of the things your organization considers when looking at placing folks is whether or not they’re going to areas where you feel like they would be welcomed to the point where they would be easier to assimilate. And I suggest to you that maybe the governor’s letter to you might send a message that now is not the right time to send Syrian refugees to South Carolina, so why did you do it anyway? And why didn’t you tell the governor you were gonna do it?”
Richard said she wasn’t aware that any Syrians had been sent to South Carolina.
“How is that possible?” Mulvaney asked.
“I don’t track all of the (thousands of) refugees coming to the United States. … Our program is continuing, and it’s continuing across the United States. And it’s all legal,” Richard told Mulvaney.
Watch full exchange between Rep. Mick Mulvaney and Anne Richard, assistant secretary of state for population refugees and migration:
Mulvaney said he agreed it was “legal” for the feds to send the refugees but that’s not what he was talking about. He wanted to know about the “welcoming” aspect of sending refugees into cities where they could possibly be unwelcome.
The refugees are sent to 180 cities and towns in 49 states under the authority of the Refugee Act of 1980, apparently with little to no oversight required by Congress or even acquiescence from the states, according to Richard’s testimony.
But some of the South Carolina activists thought Mulvaney’s response to Richard was weak. They believe he bowed to the contested theory that Obama can continue to send refugees to states even without their permission.
“Congressman Mulvaney calls the migrants ‘citizens’ and forgets that our own state, of which he was a member only 5 years ago, did pass into law an opt-out method that permits counties to decline the federal pass-through funding for resettlement,” said Christina Jeffrey, a Spartanburg resident, political science professor and activist against Syrian refugees.
Jeffrey said Mulvaney should have contested Richard’s claim that the resettlements were legal:
“Mulvaney has undermined our efforts to encourage use of this option in a number of ways including his failure to refute, or rather his full-throated support for Richard’s insistence that there is nothing the state can do to resist the forced welcoming of potentially dangerous refugees (due to a whole host of social and health issues besides the national security ones), is very disappointing. Furthermore, his complete surrender of any role for Congress other than personal appeals to the sovereign administration, is pathetic and sad.”
An Exclusive You Have To See: The Last Frontier of Free Press Is Here! No More Censorship, Unlike YouTube and Others!
View video and remaining article at WND here:
“A pair of Syrians were secretly planted last week in Midlands”
If America is worried about being conquered by a syrian couple,then I will personally send another pair from,let’s say,Iran…and one more from Oman.
woowww,this seems to be an invasion!
A bunch of eunuchs! Obama laughs at us all!
Your anti-Semitic srate is going to be sooooooooo COOL!
Your government must REALLY REALLY like bombing anti-semitic populations I guess.
Put the confederate flag back up to scare the immigrants ‘soldiers’ off!