The New Observer
November 19, 2015
Individual US state governors who seek to block the resettlement of “Syrian refugees” are engaging in an elaborate hoax as they must be aware that they have no power at all to stop the process, a leading constitutional lawyer has said.
The lawyer, who wished to remain anonymous to protect himself against leftist retaliation, pointed out that the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is exclusively a federal mandate, and overrides any state abilities to halt it.
“The USRAP process, as laid down in law, states very clearly that the ability to grant refugees asylum in the US is controlled by the Executive Branch, and no one else,” the lawyer said.
This means that the determination is drafted by the president and his advisors alone, and Obama has already signified his intention to admit as many as he can.
“A Presidential Determination establishes the admissions levels and, importantly, the regional allocations of all refugees, and there is nothing that any state can do about this,” he said.
“Frankly, any governor who does not know this is astonishingly stupid, woefully uninformed, or just being deliberately malicious in presenting an elaborate hoax as a public front for voters,” he continued.
So far, the states of Alabama, Michigan, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin have announced opposition to the plan to bring in Syrian refugees.
* Republican Party presidential candidate front-runner Donald Trump told a 10,000-strong crowd in Knoxville, Tennessee, that if elected president, he would not allow any “Syrian refugees” to enter the US.
“We have a president that wants to take hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people and move them into our country,” he said, while the crowd booed in disapproval.
Trump also called German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow “refugees” into her country “a disgrace.”
Instead, he said, he would build a safe zone for refugees in Syria: “In Syria, take a big swatch of land, which believe me, you get for the right price, OK? You take a big swatch and you don’t destroy all of Europe.
“What I like is build a safe zone, it’s here, build a big beautiful safe zone and you have whatever it is so people can live.”
Trump also criticized gun control, saying that France had some of the strictest gun controls anywhere, which meant that the citizenry was unprotected against attackers like the Paris terrorists.
Had they been allowed to be armed, he said, “it would’ve been a totally different story, folks. There would have been a shootout at the OK corral, right? And you would have had death, but if would have been their [the terrorists’] death.”