After Obama’s Announcement, Republicans Try to Stagnate Refugee Resettlement

Sana Mustafa, 24, has not seen her dad, Ali, in 1,451 days. He was detained by Bashar al-Assad’s security forces in Damascus, Syria, while Sana was attending a summer course at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

“When I received the Facebook message from my sister, I collapsed. I was not there. I felt guilty, sad, and upset and mad. I wanted to scream.”, Ms. Mustafa said in a documentary aired by Elite Daily in March.

Hours later after the arrest, Ms. Mustafa’s mom –Lamia– and her two sisters –Wafa and Ghena– fled Masyaf, their hometown. They traveled 300 miles north and crossed the border to Mersin, Southeastern Turkey. By that time, Mustafa could not return home and filed an asylum request to stay in the U.S.

Her asylum request was granted a year later by U.S. authorities.

Ms. Mustafa has waited over three years for her sisters and mom to be resettled in the U.S. with her. “My family’s life is on hold”, she said. But, her wait can become even longer.

On September 15, 37 Republican representatives signed a letter addressed to House leaders expressing their “concerns about the continuous threat of terrorism and to urge that the Congress exercise greater oversight and authority over the refugee resettlement programs.” The letter was sent only a day after President Obama announced that the U.S. will welcome 110,000 refugees in FY2017, a 30 percent increase in comparison to the 80,000 that were resettled during FY2016.

“They (the Republicans) have little knowledge on how the program works”, says Erol Kekic, executive director at Church World Services, one of the largest nine agencies assigned to work on the refugee resettlement program. Mr. Kekic’s office has helped nearly 200 refugees to resettle in New Jersey during 2016, a task that has gotten harder since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who ran for the Republican nomination for president, officially announced his state’s withdrawal from the program in April 7.

From that date on, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement was forced to work with private non-profits instead of New Jersey’s state-managed social services institutions. “They are making the process much more complicated, much more difficult, and much more expensive at the cost of tax payers”, Mr. Kekic says.

Besides complicating the agencies’ work, the Republican anti-refugee actions have also influenced on the rise of groups such a Refugee Resettlement Watch, an organization opposing refugee resettlement in the U.S. and whose website accounts 5,567,540 hits up to date. Kekic says that his staff has been threatened with anonymous phone calls and that protests had occurred in front of their offices in New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania. He believes that groups such as Refugee Resettlement Watch could be behind these actions.

“We’ve had to start thinking about our own security and the staff in the field, out there, because once it gets out of hands it will really get out of hands”, Mr. Kekic states.

Church World Services is one of the six resettlement agencies in the U.S. that are linked with a certain religious denomination. Their work is intertwined with communities and local churches to repeal the misconceptions of refugee resettlement as an easy path to lawfully admit “terrorists” into the U.S.

One case is Akram Hussein, a 32-year old Iraqi-born that fled from in Northern Iraq to Turkey in 2009. “There was no option”, he says. Just like him, nearly 3.4 million Iraqis have fled their cities, been internally displaced or crossed the border to neighboring countries for assistance as of 2016. His hometown, Mosul, has been occupied by ISIS since June 2014.

Contrary to what Republicans claim, Hussein went under a rigorous security screening by UNHCR, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and also by their federal counterterrorism offices. Today, he works as a case manager for Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, a New York-based refugee organization tied to the Episcopal Migration Ministries, another of the six faith-based national resettlement agencies.

“When I was a client at International Refugee & Immigrant Services they had a program called Cultural Companion. They arranged two people at that time. One of them was a Christian and the other was Jewish. And as a Muslim, I was thinking maybe ‘there will be some misunderstandings’ between each other. But after that, we became very, very friends, and we were loving each other”, Mr. Hussein says.

Expectations for the next year are quite high. Not only the Obama administration raised the refugee admission quota up to 110,000, but also requested to a Republican-controlled Congress the approval of $1,544.2 million to fund the resettlement program in 2017, a 9 percent of increase in comparison to 2016.