President Trump is set to sign an executive order that allows for most aspects of the refugee admissions process to resume while requesting an additional review of the vetting procedures for applicants from 11 “high-risk” countries, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
The administration will take 90 days to assess the threats posed by applicants from the 11 countries, which the senior administration officials declined to identify, citing “law enforcement sensitivities.”
Officials will also make changes to existing vetting procedures to bolster national security, such as forward-deploying more immigration officers to certain areas in order to screen refugees and training those officers more thoroughly on how to assess the authenticity of refugees’ claims.
“We expect that the processing time may be slow as we implement the new vetting procedures,” a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.
An administration official said refugees with explicitly anti-American views would “very likely” fail the security screening process.
“It’s not in our interest to bring people in with views that are hostile to the United States,” the official said.
Tuesday marked the deadline for the Trump administration to release the findings of the 120-day review Trump requested under his original “travel ban” executive order after that order faced a series of legal delays.
Two versions of Trump’s travel ban order — which temporarily suspended entry for refugees from a handful of Middle Eastern countries — stalled amid lawsuits from opponents of the policy, who accused Trump of discriminating against Muslims.
But a judge ruled in June that the section of the travel ban that called for a 120-day review of vetting procedures could proceed, setting the administration up for the deadline this week to describe them.
The State Department, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will be involved in the review of screening processes for refugees from the 11 targeted countries.
Admissions for refugees from those countries could be significantly slower than those for other refugees while the administration considers whether new restrictions should be applied to the 11 high-risk nations.
Administration officials would not say Tuesday whether a complete ban on admissions for refugees from any of the targeted countries was under consideration.
The end of Trump’s travel ban caps off months of controversy over a policy critics described as a thinly-disguised codification of the Muslim ban Trump proposed on one occasion during the presidential race.
But Trump has long contended that unchecked refugee resettlement from countries where records on immigrants are scarce or unreliable can put the U.S. at risk for accepting terrorists.
Last month, the administration announced that it would slash the Obama-era annual refugee cap from 110,000 to just 45,000.
