ActRight

Criticism from major conservative donors.

On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order halting admission of refugees for 120 days and halting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia — for 90 days while the federal government undertakes a review of admission procedures. He has also imposed an annual cap of 50,000 refugees. The instant backlash, which has culminated in thousands of protesters creating chaos at the nation’s airports, is the result more of knee-jerk emotion than a sober assessment of Trump’s policy. It’s a well-documented fact that would-be terrorists are posing as refugees to obtain admission into Europe, and visa screenings have routinely failed to identify foreign nationals who later committed terrorist attacks in the United States. As the Islamic State continues its reign of terror across a large swath of the Middle East, it should be a matter of common sense that the U.S. needs to evaluate and strengthen its vetting. Trump’s executive order is an attempt — albeit, an ill-conceived attempt in several ways, about which more momentarily — to address this problem. Rhetoric about “open arms” aside, the United States. has been modest in its approach to refugees for the past two decades. During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. regularly admitted fewer than 50,000 refugees. Barack Obama’s tenure was little different — he increased the refugee cap to 70,000 at the beginning of his second term but normally admitted numbers on par with Bush’s — until he dramatically expanded the cap (to 110,000) for 2017. Trump’s order is, to this extent, a return to recent norms. Similar myths have dominated the public understanding of the Syrian-refugee program. Until ratcheting up the program in 2016, the Obama administration admitted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees between 2011 and 2015 — this at the time that the former president was dithering over his “red line.” The 13,000 Syrian refugees admitted during 2016, pursuant to President Obama’s expansion, still constitute an infinitesimal fraction of the refugee population, which is in the several millions, of that war-torn country. Trump has suspended that program temporarily, pending review. When that program comes back on-line, it will include a directive to prioritize Christians, Yazidis, and other persecuted religious minorities — against which the Obama administration effectively discriminated at the same time that it was declaring Christians to be victims of “genocide” at the hands of ISIS. Given the unique threats these groups face, moving them to the front of the line should be an obvious measure, and contrary to outraged claims otherwise, prioritizing religious minorities is in accordance with law; religion is already used as a criterion for evaluating refugee-status claims. Finally, there is recent precedent for Trump’s order. In 2011, the Obama administration halted refugee-processing from Iraq for six months in order to do exactly what the Trump administration is doing now: ensure that terrorists were not exploiting the program to enter the country. No one rushed to JFK International to protest. Also, the seven countries to which the order applies are taken from Obama-era precedents. All of this said, Trump’s order displays much of the amateurism that dominated his campaign. There seems to have been no guidance provided by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to the officials nationwide who would be responsible for executing the order; and on Saturday, as refugees were being detained at airports across the country, it was reported that local officials were struggling to contact Customs and DHS higher-ups. In 2011, the Obama administration halted refugee-processing from Iraq for six months in order to do exactly what the Trump administration is doing now. The confusion extended to the question of whether the executive order applied to green-card holders. It took DHS secretary John Kelly more than 24 hours to clarify that this is not the case. Similarly, the White House should stipulate that this policy does not apply to the many Iraqi refugees who have acted as aides and translators to Allied forces in the region. The order allows the relevant officials to intervene on a case-by-case basis to “issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked,” but this permission seems to have gone initially unnoticed. Kelly, who served in Iraq, should make sure that this power is used liberally. Most of this confusion could have been avoided if the White House had slowed down, taken time to brief the officials responsible for carrying out the order, and ensured that the legal details were airtight. Instead, it seems that White House political advisers overrode cautions from DHS lawyers and pushed the order forward, to their own detriment. The country is now embroiled, once again, in spectacular protests, and reasonable policy has been drowned in outrage. The White House’s approach here has probably damaged future efforts in this area. The United States needs to bolster its immigration policies across the board, and assessing whether our refugee-admitting procedures are adequately protecting American citizens is entirely reasonable. But President Trump has failed abjectly in the prudential considerations without which even good policy is often doomed. Refugees are not the only thing in need of more vetting.

When you step back and look at "global warming" it more resembles a religion and scam than it does an honest concern about the Earth's climate. Consulting: h...

"No one was marching in the streets..."

It’s now socially acceptable to punch people in the face if you disagree with them

The White House pulled back on part of Mr. Trump’s temporary ban on visitors from seven countries by saying that it would not apply to those with green cards.

Claimed 'Muslim Ban' Exempts Eighty-Seven Percent of Muslims

Seven Inconvenient Facts About Trump's Refugee Actions

The day before President Trump was inaugurated, a Democrat-controlled commission set new standards to protect the America’s life-sustaining electric grid that will leave the U.S. vulnerable to a devastating electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack from a hostile nation such as North Korea or Iran. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s directive, issued Jan. 19, will protect […]

Police arrested two suspects after the attack at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Center. Quebec's premier called it an act of terrorism.

The Obama State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months. The ban was effective even for those helped U.S. forces as intelligence officers

Saudi Arabia's King Salman, in a phone call on Sunday with U.S. President Donald Trump, agreed to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, a White House statement said.

Steve Harvey explores the intersectionality of beauty pageants and politics by asking Miss Kenya what she thought of Donald Trump's productive first week in ...

President Trump's counterterrorism executive order keeping out many refugees, immigrants, visitors, and even residents demonstrated how shoddy policymaking can have grave political, moral, and security consequences. Acting on Trump's new executive order, border officials on Saturday detained people at airports who had already been granted entry visas. They also detained some lawful permanent residents who unluckily booked their flights back home to the U.S. for the day after Trump's hasty rule. This is inhumane, unjust and irrational. Trump should put the rule on ice, go through the proper rule-making process and issue a sensible written rule with appropriate input from the nation's homeland security, law enforcement and counterterrorism officials. If he won't, congressional Republicans should intervene until, to borrow a phrase from the president, our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

Don't delete Uber, you idiot. Open for links ▸ ~ Follow me on Twitter! ▸ https://twitter.com/jschlattAlt Join my Discord server! ▸ https://discord.gg/7HWvMUU ~

Donald Trump has received much flak from Democrats and Republicans alike for his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S through executive authority. However, the past six presidents have all us

The 44th president of the United States promised to bring change but mostly drove the country deeper into a ditch.

The NY Times reports on Clinton's war leadership don't go far enough. Hillary's disaster in Libya should haunt her

After seven years of secrecy, the White House released a tally of civilians killed by drone strikes in nations where the U.S. is not officially at war.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just returned from a secret trip to Syria and told Jake Tapper in a CNN Exclusive said any reconciliation would have to involve S...

Fresh off of throwing the Democratic National Convention into turmoil after proving that party officials had conspired to sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced that he has some even more damaging material in his trove of hacked emails — this time involving Hillary Clinton pushing to arm jihadists in Syria, including ISIS.

(If you’ve found a spelling or transcription error, please notify us anonymously by selecting the misspelled text and then pressing Ctrl+Enter. Thank you!) Related posts: We Remade the Middle East – It’s Much Worse Now Than Before Refugee Crisis – …

Continue reading

The arc of history is long, but it won't ever judge the president's Syria policy kindly.

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy decisions when she was secretary of State, along with her choices while the senator of New York, were not and have not been

WASHINGTON – Kellyanne Conway doubled down on the White House’s war against the media, suggesting political pundits should be fired and newspapers should be gutted for dishonest coverage of the com…