Trump says Obama banned refugees too. He’s wrong.
Shortly after President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning all refugees and all nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, there was a curious reaction from some members of the conservative press: President Obama had the same thing. You heard it everywhere, from the august pages of National Review to the considerably less august virtual pages of Breitbart.
Even Trump endorsed this idea in a statement Sunday afternoon.
“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months,” he said, echoing the arguments in conservative publications almost word for word. “The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”
This is wrong in every particular. Obama’s Iraqi visa policy in 2011 did not ban Iraqis from entering the country. Obama’s immigration policy did not treat people with passports from the seven countries as unusually dangerous terrorism threats. And Obama’s policies never approached anything like the breadth, cynicism, and incompetence of Trump’s executive order.
But the way in which the “Obama did it first” defense has been taken up by conservatives is extremely telling. By making this issue about the liberal media smearing Trump, they are normalizing him — making this a standard left-right fight rather than something extraordinary. By providing Trump cover, these conservatives — some of whom once identified as NeverTrumpers — are aiding and abetting Trump’s assault on America’s historic status as a welcoming safe harbor for immigrants and refugees.
In May 2011, two Iraqi refugees were arrested in Kentucky on terrorism charges, the only two Iraqi refugees ever linked to terror. The FBI found something worrying: fingerprints from one of the arrested refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan, on a roadside bomb in Iraq.
This suggested there was a very specific flaw in America’s refugee screening process: Databases of fingerprints from Iraqi militants Iraq were not well-integrated into the broader State Department–run refugee admissions process. As a result, the Obama administration initiated a new review of all roughly 57,000 Iraqis refugees who had been recently admitted into the United States.
According to congressional testimony given in September 2011 by then–Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, all of these admitted refugees were “revetted against all of the DHS databases, all of the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Center] databases and the Department of Defense’s biometric databases.” Going forward, Napolitano explained, new Iraqi refugees who wanted to enter the United States would be subjected to the same scrutiny.
Getting all of this in place was extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the rate of Iraqi refugee entry into the United States slowed dramatically for the six months it took to finish the review.
This made life hell for a lot of Iraqis who wished to flee to the United States, especially the many translators who had worked with the US military and feared that they or their families would be targeted by militants. Beginning in 2006, Congress passed specific legislation designed to make it easier for Iraqi and Afghan individuals who worked with the US military in their countries to enter the United States. Obama’s review slowed their flight to safety.
The review also had some serious implementation problems. At least 1,000 Iraqis who were affected by the review were only informed after they had bought plane tickets to America.
But — and this is the crucial bit — it was not a ban on Iraqi refugees entering the United States. Not even a little bit.
“While the flow of Iraqi refugees slowed significantly during the Obama administration’s review, refugees continued to be admitted to the United States during that time, and there was not a single month in which no Iraqis arrived here,” Jon Finer, an Obama administration official who worked on national security, writes at Foreign Policy.
Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s top foreign policy aides, took a similar line.
“There was no ban on Iraqis in 2011,” Rhodes tweeted. “Anyone pushing that line is hiding behind a lie because they can't defend the EO.”
Finer and Rhodes’s account is backed up by two fact-checkers who looked into the issue, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely. Both concluded, in lengthy investigations that I encourage you to read, that Obama’s policy was not a six-month ban on Iraqi refugees.
Just to make this crystal clear, let’s place Obama’s policy and Trump’s policy side by side:
- Obama: imposes new security checks on Iraqi refugees in response to a specific flaw in the security screening for people from that country, which slows down the admission rate of Iraqi refugees for six months but does not eliminate it.
- Trump: Bans all refugees, from every country on Earth, for four months, with no evidence of a specific flaw in the refugee screening process, at a time when there are at least 60 percent more refugees worldwide than there were in 2011.
One of these policies was narrowly tailored to fixing a specific vulnerability in America’s security screening system, while the other only makes sense if you assume that every refugee — especially if they happen to come from Muslim-majority countries — is a potential threat to the United States. There’s an ocean of difference.
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