Democratic Lawmakers Call for Faster Refugee Screening

Wall Street Journal

By Felicia Schwartz

October 9, 2015

Democratic Lawmakers Call for Faster Refugee Screening 

More than 80 Democratic lawmakers called on the Obama administration to speed up refugee screening processes Friday.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and more than 80 congressional Democrats urged the U.S. to boost refugee screening by expanding a priority program for relatives of refugees already in the U.S. and improving interagency coordination to move whole families through the screening process more efficiently. They said these steps wouldn’t require additional resources.

“We appreciate the administration’s plan to accept a larger number of Syrian refugees, as well as overall refugees, in the next fiscal year,” the letter says. “Yet, increasing the number of refugees we welcome is insufficient as a response, if we do not have the expanded capacity to screen and effectively resettle refugees within our borders.”

The Obama administration said last month it would accept 85,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016, which began Oct. 1, including 10,000 Syrian refugees. In 2017 it will take in a total of 100,000 refugees.

Some lawmakers and some administration officials are wary of letting in more Middle East refugees. Intelligence officials fear that Islamic State extremists could pretend to be refugees to seek admission to the U.S. Some lawmakers believe that refugees are a drain on U.S. resources and efforts should be focused on helping them to resettle in the Middle East.

During a Thursday Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, FBI Director James Comey said there are “gaps” in the U.S. ability to screen Syrian refugees.

“There is risk associated of bringing anybody in from the outside, but specifically from a conflict zone like that,” Mr. Comey said.

Expanding the priority program, called the P-3 program, would allow more relatives of refugees to skip going through the U.N. refugee agency’s screening process and go straight to the U.S. refugee admissions program screening, which takes 18-24 months. The U.N. refugee agency aims to assess which cases are a priority to the U.S., but refugees with relatives already here would likely be included in this category, according to the letter.

“The program not only enables the relatives of Americans to be resettled more rapidly, it also frees up United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees resources to focus on other applicants,” the letter says.

The lawmakers want the program to be expanded to include relatives of Americans who are in the U.S. through a legal path other than a refugee of asylum application.

Another way to speed refugee processing would be to improve coordination among the agencies involved in screening refugees, including Homeland Security and the intelligence community, among others, the letter says. Refugees go through multiple screenings, each only valid for a limited time period. This can cause delays as family members have screenings expire before all members’ checks are complete. State Department officials have said that the U.S. has made improvements that should “make it a little bit easier to get everybody synced up at once.”

Beyond these changes the lawmakers say will speed U.S. refugee processing, the lawmakers also urged Messrs. Kerry and Johnson to create a process to inform families if only some but not all members have been cleared to come to the U.S.

The letter’s signers also urged the administration to work with Congress through the budgets and appropriations process to allocate necessary resources to increase the number of refugees screened for resettlement.

On Thursday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D.,Vt.) and 2016 Republican candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) introduced a $1 billion emergency spending bill to boost the administration’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Messrs. Graham and Leahy are the chairman and ranking Democrat of the State and Foreign Operations appropriations subcommittee.

Dozens of Senate Democrats also signed a letter to the chairmen and top Democrats of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the foreign operations panel by Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) calling for an emergency spending bill earlier this week.

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