Refugee Screening Quotes

Anne Richard, a senior U.S. State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.

President Obama's own administration has publicly admitted that under the current framework, Syrian refugees cannot be vetted in a way that meets the rigorous security standards we rightfully expect.

President Obama has argued there isn't a threat of terrorism from the U.S. refugee program because for individuals who apply it takes two years, 'heavy vetting' and is a relatively long process. It doesn't matter. Jihad is patient, and as ISIS has pledged, it will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

We cannot continue to allow immigrants to come here illegally. And in this age of terrorism, we must not let in refugees whose intentions cannot be determined.

We have a very structured process for taking in refugees. It takes almost two years to transition from another country into the United States through the refugee process.

I believe we need to ensure there are no refugees placed in Arizona with connections to terrorist organizations.

Hillary and I will do immigration enforcement and we'll vet refugees based on whether they're dangerous or not. We won't do it based on discriminating against you from the country you come from or the religion that you practice.

I spent over 10 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, serving overseas, serving in the Middle East. And let me tell you, if you're a terrorist and you want to come to the United States, the worst possible way to do it is as a refugee. You'll go through a year and a half to two years of vetting.

My administration is going to stop the tens of thousands of people coming in from Syria. We have no idea who they are, where they come from. There's no documentation. There's no paperwork. It's going to end badly folks. It's going to end very, very badly.

Our laws were not designed to accommodate three or four thousand refugees coming here per day. Our laws were designed for people to be screened in a foreign country, carefully catalogued, and brought here a few at a time. This just didn't happen.

We don't need to set this up as we either take a bunch of refugees who will be infiltrated with terrorists, I guarantee you. For them not to be would be terrorist malpractice. And we need to - to choose the right choice, not these false choices.

President Trump has no higher priority than the safety and security of the American people. And he made it clear in this election, particularly in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris where individuals had used a refugee program to gain access to that country.

On the Gang of Eight bill, there was no provisions really for extra scrutiny or safety for refugees. At the time the bill came up, two Iraqi refugees came to my home town, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Their fingerprints were on a bomb from Iraq. They were in the database, but we didn't pick them up.

Our process inside the United States government has gotten much better at making sure we touch all possible source of information about a refugee. The interview process has gotten more robust, so we've gotten our act together in that respect. The challenge remains, especially with respect to folks coming from Syria, we're unlikely to have anything in our holdings. That is, with people coming from Iraq, the United States government was there for a very long period of time. We had biometrics, we had source information. We're unlikely to have that kind of picture about someone coming from Syria.

If your aim is to attack the United States, it is hard to imagine a more difficult way of getting here than by posing as a refugee.

In the case of the Syrian refugees, most of them are male. Most of them are of military age, and yes, it is a significant security issue in that a background check is only as good as the authorities have information on them.

President Trump talks about extreme vetting, and we actually do have extreme vetting when it comes to refugee resettlement. Refugee resettlement is the most thorough, cumbersome, multilayered vetting system we have for the admission of anyone to the country.

We need a very robust way of looking at people coming into the country... We're focused on the whole concept of the ideology and of the vetting.

I think we need to do two things - or three things. One is we need to put a stop on refugees until we can vet.

People are starting to think about let's let a lot of people come in from Syria, even though we know nothing about them, who they are, et cetera, et cetera. But they do have cellphones. And they do have ISIS flags on some of those cellphones. And you say, what are we doing? I don't know if you know but a lot of the cellphones had the ISIS flag on them. And we let them into our country.

The screening in the United States is the toughest screening of any country in the world in terms of refugees, that accepts refugees. And of course there are those that don't accept any, or ever have, no matter what kind they are.

The United States has already experienced the danger of flawed refugee vetting as well as the potential for refugees to be radicalized once they are here. In 2011, two Iraqi refugees were arrested in Kentucky for conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals abroad in support of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIL.

It is lunacy to be bringing refugees into this country who may be terrorists trying to murder Americans.

Donald Trump has called for extreme vetting for people coming into this country so that we don't bring people into the United States who are hostile to our bill of rights freedoms, who are hostile to the American way of life, but I will say, Donald Trump and I are committed to suspending the Syrian refugee program and programs on immigration from areas of the world that have been compromised by terrorism.

We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness. Rather, we will speak the truth. Border security is national security and we will not be admitting jihadists as refugees.