[Senate Hearing 114-543]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-543
THE IMPACT OF ISIS ON THE HOMELAND AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 19, 2015
__________
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
RAND PAUL, Kentucky JON TESTER, Montana
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey
JONI ERNST, Iowa GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
BEN SASSE, Nebraska
Keith B. Ashdown, Staff Director
Brooke N. Ericson, Deputy Chief Counsel for Homeland Security
Elizabeth McWhorter, Professional Staff Member
Jose J. Bautista, Professional Staff Member
Gabrielle A. Batkin, Minority Staff Director
John P. Kilvington, Minority Deputy Staff Director
Harlan C. Geer, Minority Senior Professional Staff Member
Holly A. Idelson, Minority Senior Counsel
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Benjamin C. Grazda, Hearing Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Johnson.............................................. 1
Senator Carper............................................... 3
Senator McCaskill............................................ 14
Senator Ayotte............................................... 15
Senator Tester............................................... 17
Senator Baldwin.............................................. 19
Senator Heitkamp............................................. 21
Senator Peters............................................... 23
Prepared statements:
Senator Johnson.............................................. 55
Senator Carper............................................... 57
WITNESS
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Hon. Anne C. Richard, Assistant Secretary for Population,
Refugees, and Migration, U.S. Department of State.............. 6
Hon. Leon Rodriguez, Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, U.S. Department of Homeland Security................. 7
Peter Bergen, Director, National Security Studies Program, New
America Foundation............................................. 28
Brian Michael Jenkins, Senior Advisor to the President, RAND
Corporation.................................................... 30
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.................................................... 32
Eric P. Schwartz, Dean, Humphrey School of Public Affairs,
University of Minnesota, and Former Assistant Secretary for
Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. Department of
State (2009-2011).............................................. 34
Lavinia Limon, President and Chief Executive Officer, U.S.
Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.......................... 35
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Bergen, Peter:
Testimony.................................................... 28
Prepared statement........................................... 73
Gartenstein-Ross, Daveed:
Testimony.................................................... 32
Prepared statement........................................... 101
Jenkins, Brian Michael:
Testimony.................................................... 30
Prepared statement........................................... 90
Limon, Lavinia:
Testimony.................................................... 35
Prepared statement........................................... 117
Richard, Hon. Anne C.:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 60
Rodriguez, Hon. Leon:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 64
Schwartz, Eric P.:
Testimony.................................................... 34
Prepared statement........................................... 110
APPENDIX
13-Step Vetting Process.......................................... 122
Acronym List submitted by Senator Johnson........................ 124
Statements submitted for the Record from:
Asian Americans Advancing Justice............................ 126
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimmination Committee............. 129
American Immigration Council................................. 135
American Immigration Lawyers Association..................... 143
Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach.................... 146
Christian Reformed Church.................................... 148
The Center for Victims of Torture............................ 149
Church World Service......................................... 152
Disciples Home Missions...................................... 153
Franciscan Action Network.................................... 154
Human Rights First........................................... 155
Gainesville Florida Interfaith Alliance for Immigrant Justice 161
International Rescue Committee............................... 162
Jesuit Refugee Service/USA................................... 165
Leadership Conference of Women Religious..................... 167
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service..................... 168
National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. 173
NAFSA Association of International Educators................. 174
National Council of Jewish Women............................. 177
Niskanen Center.............................................. 178
OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates......................... 183
Presbyterian Church.......................................... 186
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.................... 188
Refugee Solidarity Network................................... 189
Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign................................ 190
Syrian American Medical Society.............................. 192
Southeast Asia Resource Action Center........................ 195
T'ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights................... 198
United Methodist Church...................................... 200
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on
Migration.................................................. 202
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee..................... 214
We Belong Together........................................... 216
Welcoming America............................................ 217
Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from:
Ms. Richard.................................................. 218
Mr. Rodriguez................................................ 227
Mr. Bergen................................................... 233
THE IMPACT OF ISIS ON THE HOMELAND AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT
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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2015
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:14 p.m., in
room 342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Ron Johnson,
Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Johnson, Portman, Ayotte, Ernst, Sasse,
Carper, McCaskill, Tester, Baldwin, Heitkamp, Booker, and
Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON
Chairman Johnson. This hearing will come to order.
I think it is appropriate that we begin today with a moment
of silence out of respect for those individuals that have lost
their lives in Paris and in Beirut and in Egypt, over just the
last 3 weeks, as the result of the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS) barbaric activities. So, a moment of silence,
please.
[A moment of silence was observed.]
Thank you.
I welcome our Ranking Member.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. When I took over as Chairman of this
Committee, working with Senator Carper, we developed a rather
simple mission statement for the Committee. It is, simply, to
enhance the economic and national security of America. We have
committed ourselves to that.
The threat of ISIS, of Islamic terror, threatens both. I
mean, we have seen the tragic loss of life repeatedly.
Obviously, that threatens national security. But think of the
economic harm, as well, that these acts of terror result in.
So, it is fitting and appropriate that this Committee, the
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,
take up this very serious issue of the threats that ISIS poses
across the board.
Now, in speaking with Ms. Richard earlier, she acknowledged
that the topic, the primary topic, is really about the
administration's plan to allow about 10,000 refugees in from
Syria. We are a compassionate, humane society. And, so, we are
going to lay out the reality in terms of what the vetting
process will be to make sure that we maintain a secure Nation,
that we minimize, if not eliminate, the risk that any of those
refugees may cause America.
So, from our secure briefings I think we are going to hear
of a pretty robust vetting process, and so I really do
appreciate not only the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),
with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), with
Mr. Rodriguez, but also the State Department (DOS) sending Ms.
Richard here. I know this is very short notice, but I truly do
appreciate and I think everybody on this Committee appreciates
the fact that you are taking the time to lay out that reality
for the American public.
Refugees could pose a risk. But, I think, when we take a
look at what the vetting process will be and we consider all
the risks that ISIS poses to America, we may find there are far
greater risks. I think in our briefings, we have had questions
by members of our visa programs, whether it is the Visa Waiver
Program (VWP) or student visas or the whole panoply of visas
that we offer. What are the types of controls? What are the
types of vulnerabilities? How are we exposed because of the
openness of our society? I think all of these things are very
appropriate questions and I think they definitely need to be
explored.
But, if you really want to take a look at where we are most
vulnerable, this Committee has dedicated border security as one
of the priorities on the homeland security side of our
Committee. We have held 12 separate hearings on that problem,
trying to lay out the complexity, the difficult nature of that
problem. And the conclusion that certainly I have come to, I
think most Committee members have come to, is our borders are
not secure.
A few members, including Senator Carper and I, made a trip
down to Honduras and Guatemala a couple of weekends ago and
there was a new--apparently, it is not new, but it is the first
time I had heard this. I had always heard ``other than Mexico''
(OTM), and frequently described in our Committee hearings, this
would be frequently people from Central America.
But when we were down in, I believe it was Guatemala, I
heard a new term, Special Interest Aliens (SIAs). Now,
currently, most of those are Cubans coming in through Central
America, taking advantage of the dry foot policy in terms of
immigration law. But, we were also told that this includes
Syrians and Somalis and Pakistanis. This is a concern to us. I
believe there were five Syrians just apprehended in, it was
Honduras. We had some Syrians apprehended at the border. Now,
again, we do not know what threat level. I think it is being
reported that they were not a threat. But this is a serious
concern.
We have heard now the new government in Canada is going to
open up and potentially streamline their refugee program to
allow 25,000 Syrian refugees. We have certainly discovered in
this Committee that our border with Canada is far from secure.
Again, our border on the Southwest is very, very far from
secure. The one metric that stands out in my head proving how
unsecure our border is, General Barry McCaffrey testified that
we are only interdicting somewhere between five and 10 percent
of drugs coming in through our Southern border.
So, again, we have to look at all the vulnerabilities. We
will talk about the refugee and the vetting process, and it is
fitting and appropriate we do so. But, we really do need to
understand the threat that we face. It is real. It is growing.
And coming from a manufacturing background, I have done a
lot of problem solving, and the first step in solving any
problem is first laying out the reality, acknowledging that
reality, looking for the root cause. And let us be honest. The
root cause of this problem is that ISIS exists, that it was
able to rise from the ashes of what was a defeated al-Qaeda in
Iraq. And, so, what we need to do is address the root cause--
the refugee crisis, the flow into Europe, the fact that we are
even here today considering bringing in, on the basis of
compassion, refugees from Syria. That is a symptom of the
problem.
The root cause is ISIS, and so the solution is committing
this Nation, together with a coalition of the willing, of the
civilized world, to destroying, to defeating ISIS. That is a
goal that President Obama stated, degrade and ultimately defeat
ISIS. I would argue, ``ultimately'' ought to be very soon.
So, again, I want to thank the witnesses, not only this
panel but also the next panel for taking the time to testify
and for your thoughtful testimony. I look forward to the
questions.
Chairman Johnson. With that, I will turn it over to Senator
Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Let me just set aside my prepared remarks--I would ask
consent that they be submitted for the record\1\--and make a
couple of comments, if I can.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Carper appears in the
Appendix on page 57.
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A lot of attention paid to refugees coming from Syria to
the United States. In the last year, there have been about
2,000 refugees. It is not an easy process to go through, as my
colleagues know. It is a process that can take as much as 2
years. And, it starts with vetting by the United Nations
(U.N.), one of their high commands, and if folks make the cut
to get to the next step, then they go through a bunch of
screens, such as personal interviews and in-person interviews.
Data, to the extent that we have data files to check, we do all
those. The Department of Homeland Security does some of them.
We work with other countries with whom we are allied.
Out of the 2,000 that have come in as refugees in the last
year or two, about 2 percent were military-aged males--2
percent. And of the folks that have come to our country so far,
I am told, out of those 2,000, not one person has been
arrested. Not one person has been arrested.
It takes 2 years, and it is a process that if I were a bad
guy trying to get in, that is the last place I would try, the
last way I would try to get in. If I were a bad guy trying to
get in, I might try a Visa Waiver Program, a Visa Waiver
Program, and I might try just coming over as a student or as a
tourist.
The good news, I understand out of the four French
nationals who were killed in Paris, either three or all four of
them were folks who never would have been allowed to get on a
plane because we had them suitcased in terms of who they were.
They would never get on a plane to come to the United States.
One of the things, the challenges for us, I think, is to--
understand, we have had a hearing already this year on visa
waivers, I recall, and we need to go back and dust off the
books, see what we learned in terms of how we are strengthening
that program. A lot has been done. What started off as a travel
facilitation program has now become an information sharing
program with 38 other nations. In order for them to participate
in this program with us, they have to agree to provide access
to every kind of data file, intelligence file, that we ask for,
and if they do not, then they are not included as one of the
visa waiver countries.
One of the latest, one of the other developments not too
long ago, was if you want to be a Visa Waiver Country, of these
38 countries, you have to make sure that if somebody's passport
is stolen or lost, it is reported to Interpol. And that way,
when somebody shows up using, trying to use that passport to
come to the United States or some other place, they can be
stopped in their tracks.
The Preamble to our Constitution says, ``In order to form a
more perfect union.'' My guess is that as much as we are trying
to make the Visa Waiver Program better, it still is not perfect
and our goal should be perfection. We are going to work on it
every day, and I think there are some things we can do
legislatively, hopefully in this Committee, and to work with
some of our other colleagues in Committees of jurisdiction.
The last thing that I would say, we face a moral dilemma
here. The Pope was in town 2 months ago, spoke to all of us,
invoked the golden rule, treat other people the way we want to
be treated, invoked Matthew 25, the least of these, when I was
a stranger in your land, did you take me in, and everybody
stood up and applauded in our joint session--you may recall
that--when he said those words. And now, we are not so sure we
believe those words.
And the question is, we have a moral imperative to the
least of these, to treat other people the way we want to be
treated. We have an equally strong moral imperative, and I
think a duty by virtue of our oath of office, to make sure that
we do not meet the moral imperative, to the least of these, by
putting at risk the citizens of this country.
And the question for us is, can we do both? Can we do both?
I think we can, and I think, morally and just by common sense,
we need to do both, and our challenge is to figure out how to
do that and to thread the needle, build on the good work that
has been done, and to continue to go for it.
The last thing I will say is this: The Department of
Homeland Security is doing good work in communities where there
is heavy, a large Muslim population in this country, just to
try to make sure that we inoculate, we are inoculating, help
those communities
inoculate against the success--and the Chairman has mentioned
this--the success of efforts to use social media to radicalize
our own people. And, there is a request by the administration
to increase the funding for that program. It seems to be
working. And, I think as we consider the appropriations bills
in the near future, I hope we will keep in mind what works and
do more of that, including in this regard.
And, lastly, there is a fellow named Adam Szubin--Adam
Szubin--who was heavily involved in a leadership role when we
were trying to cutoff Iran's access to international financial
markets, when we were trying to cut off North Korea and their
access to international financial markets. And, I understand he
has been nominated at a very senior position within Treasury to
do that work, to lead that effort, including cutting off ISIS
financially, and there is obviously work that still needs to be
done.
Senator Heitkamp, is that nomination still pending in the
Banking Committee?
Senator Heitkamp. It is still pending. We held his hearing,
so the hearing has been completed, pending a vote in the
Banking Committee.
Senator Carper. Yes. This Committee has done great work in
making sure that the senior level of leadership in the
Department of Homeland Security, all those vacant positions a
year and a half ago, they have been filled, and we have done
very good work in that regard. This is another nomination that
could be very helpful in terms of the root cause, cutting off
ISIS's money. It is all well and good if we crush them on the
battlefield, but in terms of making sure that their money is
gone, this is a good way to do it, and we have a good guy who
is willing to serve. We need to get him done.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper. I also have an
opening statement that I would enter in the record,\1\ without
objection.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the
Appendix on page 55.
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A couple of housekeeping items. It is great we have such
strong attendance, so we are going to limit questions to 5
minutes.
I thought there might be a few acronyms being thrown
around, so I did have our staff publish a little acronym
glossary\2\ here to speed things along, as well as a 13-step
vetting process\3\ put out by the U.S. Committee for Refugees
and Immigrants, again, just to help the Committee as we are
asking questions.
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\2\ The acronym list referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the
Appendix on page 124.
\3\ The 13-step vetting process provided by U.S. Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants appears in the Appendix on page 122.
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Chairman Johnson. With that, it is the tradition of this
Committee to swear in witnesses, so if you will both rise and
raise your right hand.
Do you swear the testimony you will give before this
Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you, God?
Ms. Richard. I do.
Mr. Rodriguez. I do.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you. Please be seated.
Our first witness is Ann Richard. Ms. Richard is the
Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population,
Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. Department of State. Prior
to her appointment, Ms. Richard was the Vice President of
Government Relations and Advocacy for the International Rescue
Committee (IRC), an international aid agency that helps
refugees, internally displaced, and other victims of conflict.
Ms. Richard.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE ANNE C. RICHARD,\1\ ASSISTANT
SECRETARY FOR POPULATION, REFUGEES, AND MIGRATION, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Ms. Richard. Thank you very much, Senator Johnson, Senator
Carper, all the Senators on this important Committee, for
holding this hearing today on the impact of ISIS on the
homeland and refugee resettlement. I have provided some
testimony that talks about the humanitarian assistance we
provide overseas, that talks about our diplomacy in the
humanitarian area, working with other countries, but what I
would like to focus on right away is the refugee resettlement
process.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Richard appears in the Appendix
on page 60.
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I know the murderous attacks in Paris last Friday evening
have raised many questions about the spillover of not just
migrants to Europe, but also the spread of violence from war
zones in the Middle East to the streets of a major European
capital. Let me assure you that the entire executive branch,
and the State Department that I represent here today, has the
safety and security of Americans as our highest priority.
As an essential, fundamental part of the U.S. Refugee
Admissions Program (USRAP), we screen applicants rigorously and
carefully in an effort to ensure that no one who poses a threat
to the safety and security of Americans is able to enter our
country. All refugees of all nationalities considered for
admission to the United States undergo intensive security
screening involving multiple Federal agencies. These are
intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies, including
the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI's) Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), and
the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Defense (DOD).
Consequently, resettlement is a deliberate process that can
take 18 to 24 months, as you mentioned earlier.
Applicants to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP)
are currently subject to the highest level of security checks
of any category of traveler to the United States. These
safeguards include biometric, or fingerprint, and biographic
checks and lengthy in-person overseas interviews by specially
trained DHS officers, who scrutinize the applicant's
explanation of individual circumstances to ensure the applicant
is a bona fide refugee and is not known to present security
concerns to the United States. These DHS interviewers report to
Director Rodriguez as part of his leadership of USCIS, so he is
really the expert on this.
What I would like to say is that the vast majority of the
three million refugees who have been admitted to the United
States, including from some of the most troubled regions in the
world, have proven to be hardworking and productive residents.
They pay taxes, send their children to school, and after 5
years, many take the test to become citizens. Some serve in the
U.S. military and undertake other forms of service for their
communities and our country.
I am happy to answer any questions you have about any part
of my testimony that I did not get into, but I think the hot
issue today is the security aspects of our program and,
therefore, I am very pleased to be here today to answer any
questions. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Ms. Richard.
Our next witness is Leon Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez is the
Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which plays a key role in
the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Prior to this position,
Mr. Rodriguez served as the Director of the Office for Civil
Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and
Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the
Department of Justice (DOJ). Mr. Rodriguez.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE LEON RODRIGUEZ,\1\ DIRECTOR, U.S.
CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITY
Mr. Rodriguez. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Ranking
Member. Thank you, Members of the Committee. And thank you in
particular for convening this very timely hearing.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Rodriguez appears in the Appendix
on page 64.
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I am going to use the time that I have to do something
which I think is really critical at this juncture, which is to
lay out with some care how the refugee screening process works,
what its structure is, what its redundancies are, and what the
resources are that are utilized as part of that process.
Most refugees, the overwhelming majority in the case of
Syrians who enter the U.S. screening process, are first
encountered in refugee camps. In the case of Syrians, the
majority of those will be either in Turkey, Jordan, or Lebanon.
Their first encounter is with the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where they register their
claim for refugee status. Some are referred to the United
States. Others are referred to other countries that have also
expressed a willingness to the United Nations to receive
refugees.
The United Nations conducts an interview. It explores
possible inadmissibilities that may apply, either in the case
of the United States or in other countries. It also makes a
determination of priority based on particular vulnerabilities
of populations.
Once those determinations are made, if, in fact, there is a
cognizable claim and there do not appear to be significant
inadmissibilities, at that point, the U.N. refers that
individual or that case--because very typically, these come to
us not as single individuals, but rather as family units that
are traveling together--to whatever country it is, in our case,
to the State Department, where a series of things occur.
At that point, a second interview is conducted by Ms.
Richard's staff and a set of biographic checks, and this is a
very important element of the process, are conducted at that
point. The checks conducted include query holdings, State
Department holdings, including databases that are of an
intelligence nature, Security Advisory Opinions (SAOs) in a
large number of the cases, which is a database hosted by the
FBI, and very critically for our discussion here, what is
called the interagency check, which is a network of queries
hosted by the National Counterterrorism Center of a broad swath
of intelligence and law enforcement holdings.
I know we have talked a lot about the comparison between
this case and Iraq. The fact is, when we talk about Syria, we
are talking about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL), we are talking about al-Nusra, we are talking about the
Syrian government itself, all of which have interests and
desires very much adverse to those of the United States.
There is a constant process of gathering information about
what is going on in those places, and as a result, in several
cases, or in a number of cases, our queries of those databases,
at that phase, have registered hits. Those hits have been the
basis either to deny outright admission to individuals or to
place people on hold.
If the individual clears the State Department process, they
are then referred to USCIS. We have the benefit of all the work
that has been done prior--the State Department interview, the
U.N. interview, and the fruits of those background checks. We
place in particular those officers who work in environments
like Syria or others through a particularly rigorous battery of
both training and pre-deployment briefing, as well as
apprenticeship while they are out in the field. With that
briefing, they then conduct very intensive interviews of the
individuals to identify credibility issues, possible
inadmissibility issues, or possible other derogatory admission.
At the same time, the individuals are fingerprinted, and
those fingerprints are run against U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol (CBP) holdings, FBI holdings, and Department of Defense
holdings.
Only after they clear that process and after their cases
are carefully analyzed, do they move on. If there are concerns
identified, then, at that point, they move into what is called
the Controlled Application Resolution and Review Process, which
is a joint undertaking of my Refugee Affairs Division and my
Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, in which
those cases are subjected to an even more intense analysis of
what is going on. In fact, the number of cases--going back a
while now, hundreds of them, in fact--are on hold because of
concerns identified during the process.
Only after an individual or a family unit has cleared that
entire process is the decision made, in fact, to have stamped
approved on that file, which allows that individual then to
make plans for both cultural orientation, medical examination,
and then planning to move to the United States.
I also underscore that when I talked about the biographic
checks earlier, that is a recurrent process, meaning that even
though we do it before the interview that system is constantly
queried now. That is a recent improvement to the manner in
which we do our work, which means that if new derogatory
information arises about that individual, then we will be
notified of that information in order to take appropriate
action with respect to that case.
I look forward to the questions, which I think will give me
further opportunity to elucidate this process. Thank you,
Chairman and Ranking Member.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez.
I want to start out, because we have been told this in
briefings, the fact that only 2 percent of the 1,869 Syrian
refugees that have been allowed into the country over the last
year were men of military age, 21 to 30. But that is a little
more narrow than that, is it not, because I am looking at
figures that there really were 994 men and 875 women out of
that 1,869. So, Ms. Richard, can you tell us the difference,
the distinction there?
Ms. Richard. Yes. Thanks for bringing that up. There have
been 2,000 Syrians resettled to the United States since the
start of the crisis 4\1/2\ years ago, and 1,700 came last year.
And of all the ones that have come, 2 percent are young,
single, military-age males who are not with a family or do not
have a family connection in the United States, so truly on
their own. The number of males, the percentage of males is a
little over half. But that includes boys to grandpas.
Chairman Johnson. Right. OK. I just kind of want to set the
record straight there.
My concern is where are the vulnerabilities? Where are the
holes in the system? And in briefings, I think what people are
very concerned about, OK, you are checking databases,
watchlists. My first question is, what does it take to get in a
database or on a watchlist, and how do you avoid it? I mean,
what people would not be on there that then you are going to
completely rely on interviews?
So, let us first start here. How do you get on a watchlist
and how do you stay off it?
Mr. Rodriguez. Some of the specifics about how that works
are things that we would need to address in a classified
briefing----
Chairman Johnson. OK.
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. But suffice it to say, if there
is a heightened level of concern that somebody is a terrorist
or otherwise an actor who would be seeking to harm the United
States, that would be the basis of either nomination to one of
the databases I described before, watchlisting. Again, I think
in a classified briefing, we could probably go into detail as
to how that happens.
Chairman Johnson. So they would have had to do something or
be associated with somebody that is nefarious, correct?
Mr. Rodriguez. Those are at least two ways----
Chairman Johnson. So, let us say they are a citizen of
Syria or a citizen of France that really did not travel, or
maybe a citizen of France that snuck into Syria, never had the
passport stamped, was able to sneak back. There would be no
reason for them to be on a watchlist or in a database, correct?
And then during the interview process, they would really be
able to answer all the questions and not come across as
particularly suspicious, right?
Mr. Rodriguez. I go back to what I said at the beginning.
There is no question that ISIL, al-Nusra, the Syrian
government, itself, are our enemies. There is, therefore, a
constant process of looking for information about those
entities, about their activities, about where they operate,
about who they are, that, in turn, becomes--and, again, without
describing the techniques as to how that occurs--information
that is available to us through these various databases that I
described. Therefore, this can become a reason either directly
or through association, in some cases, to, at a minimum, hold a
case and subject that case to further scrutiny.
Chairman Johnson. But, again, if you had a clean record and
you are from Syria or you are one of those citizens from
Europe, you may not be in those databases and you would have to
have a pretty good interviewer to potentially catch that.
What is the current--and, hopefully, you can talk about
this in open session--what is the current estimate of the
number of foreign fighters that are European citizens or
citizens--let us put it this way--citizens of a country that
has the Visa Waiver Program in place with the United States?
How many of those foreign fighters are we aware of that have
gone to Syria, possibly come back?
Mr. Rodriguez. I apologize, Chairman. I believe that that
sort of analysis exists. I do not have it at my fingertips.
Chairman Johnson. Ms. Richard, do you know?
Ms. Richard. No, sir.
Chairman Johnson. OK, because I think that is, I think, one
of our greater vulnerabilities. So, I think as other people ask
questions, we are going to see a pretty robust vetting process
for refugees and probably a less robust process for other forms
of visa waivers or visas coming into this country, and I think
that is part of the vulnerabilities we need to explore.
With that, I will turn it over to Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Again, we appreciate very much your
being here with us today.
Just given what we have talked about here today and what we
have learned in the last several days about the rigor of the
refugee program, the screening process in the refugee program,
if--these guys are not stupid that we are dealing with, the bad
guys. I cannot imagine why they would want to spend 2 years
going through a refugee screening process when they could try
to get to this country, or any other country, with a tourist
waiver, tourist visa, rather, with a student visa, come through
the visa waiver process we have with 38 other countries.
So, we are going to continue to focus on the refugee
process for folks to get over here, whether it is 2,000 this
year, 10,000 next year. It is hard to imagine, if I am trying
to get over here to do mischief, I am going to wait 2 years to
go through that process, knowing that at any step of the way, I
could be bumped out and probably would be detected. OK.
I think where we need to, as a Committee, focus our
attention is on the Visa Waiver Program, and I might be
mistaken. We have a lot of hearings in this Committee, as my
colleagues know, but I believe we had one in the last year or
so on the visa waiver situation and it was good. And we learned
there had been--was it perfect? No, it was not. Has it been
made better? Yes, it has. And are there things that we can do
to make it better still? There probably are.
And, I do not know, Mr. Rodriguez, if you could just talk
to us about--this may be outside of your lane, the Visa Waiver
Program, but we need to hear from somebody who can talk to us--
--
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes----
Senator Carper [continuing]. And give us some advice as to
what legislatively we can do to strengthen it further.
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. I confess that it is outside of my
lane, although the individual that runs that lane does not sit
too far away from me, and that would be the Customs and
Border----
Senator Carper. Is there anybody here with you from DHS?
Mr. Rodriguez. No, but we certainly could work with the
Committee to arrange a briefing or a hearing, as the case might
be, to discuss those issues.
Senator Carper. All right. Good.
You said something in your testimony, Mr. Rodriguez, about
I think the term you used was recurring process, going over,
monitoring and reexamining as new information comes to the
fore, and that could be used in terms of either denying or
revisiting someone's ability to come here, to stay here. Would
you talk a little bit more about that.
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. So, I talked before about the
interagency check, which is essentially an electronic query of
a number of different law enforcement and intelligence
databases. We have now upgraded our approach to those checks to
have the system advise us if further information is entered
into that system about an individual about who there has been
previously a query.
So, if we had queried during the initial phases of the--
rather, sort of the intermediate phases of the screening
process, an individual, and if new information arises about
that individual, then we would be notified about the existence
of that new information, and that occurs right up until the
very moment of arrival in the United States. That query process
continues to occur right up until that point.
The other thing that I might say, if I may, Senator, about
the interview process, my training is as a State and Federal
prosecutor. I have spent a lot of my life around law
enforcement of all types: State, local, and Federal. And I have
conducted and observed thousands of interviews. I have taken
the opportunity to observe my officers in action. I was with
them in Turkey this June. And I can tell you that the quality
of the interviewing that they were conducting was as good as
any I have seen in my professional career.
Senator Carper. OK. Would you talk to us a little bit about
whether or not we need to examine more closely--we have talked
about the process--the refugee process of getting here and the
visa waiver process of getting here. How about student and
tourist visa process of getting here? I am told that 40 percent
of the people that are here, if there are 12--we will say there
are 12 million people here undocumented in this country. I
think about 40 percent of them came here in a legal status,
maybe using a tourist visa or a student visa. But, are there
any things that we should be mindful of, thinking about the
rigor of those processes?
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. I think the main thing to----
Senator Carper. And the vetting of those people coming
under those----
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. Note about that, and I am going
to try to say it in 5 seconds, is that those processes also
involve both law enforcement and national security database
checks. So, the fact that those are outside of the refugee
process does not mean that we are not undertaking some of the
same rigor that we apply to the refugee screening process.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks so much.
Chairman Johnson. Senator Portman.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
holding another hearing on this topic. We were here last month
talking with the Secretary of Homeland Security, your boss, and
also talking to the FBI Director and the counterterrorism folks
about this very topic. And, I think it is clear that we live in
a dangerous world and it is something we have to be concerned
about, not just in the refugee program, but all these various
entry points.
One, of course, is the Visa Waiver Program. We talked about
the fact that there are 5,000 foreign fighters who come from
these 38 countries with which we have a visa waiver
arrangement. That is a huge risk, and I think it is appropriate
that this Committee focus on tightening up those standards. I
know there are a couple of legislative proposals floating out
there now and we would love to have your input on that today.
We also, of course, have to worry about visas. I mean, the
9/11 terrorists came here, overstayed their visas. We did not
know who they were, where they were. That is an immigration
reform issue.
Legal immigrants--we have foreign fighters ourselves, and
we have had some that have come back to my home State of Ohio.
One came back to Columbus, Ohio, and plotted to commit
terrorist acts in the United States and was arrested for it. It
is happening.
We, of course, have the issue of illegal entry. This
morning, we hear about the five individuals who were stopped in
Honduras with fake Syrian passports, and then we have
apparently a couple families on the Mexican border this
morning. And, this is a problem and this goes to our need to
have a secure border, not just for immigration purposes, but
for money, guns, drugs, and certainly for terrorism.
And then homegrown terrorists. My hometown of Cincinnati,
we have one person currently incarcerated, under arrest, for
wanting to come to this capital to blow us up here. And in
Akron, this month, we had a homegrown terrorist arrested. This
is in Ohio, the heartland.
So, this is a very real issue, but I do not think we should
ignore the refugee side of it, either. Let me tell you a story,
and maybe you can tell me that this is something that could
never happen under the current program. But there were a couple
of brothers who were brought in as refugees from Iraq--not
Syria, but from Iraq--and they were in the heartland, right
across the river from where I live, in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Recently, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed their
conviction for terrorist activities, including providing
assistance to al-Qaeda in Iraq. They also were taped saying
that they wanted to build a bomb in the United States to kill a
U.S. Army captain in the United States, and they were quoted as
saying, quote, ``many things should take place and it should be
huge.'' These were refugees.
And, so, this notion that, somehow, we need to worry about
all these other issues but it is OK in the refugee program, of
course, we need to know who is coming in, and we need to be
sure we not only know who they are, but also what their
intentions are.
And with regard to these Iraqi refugees who came in, they
had been fingerprinted at the border in Syria, because they had
to go through Syria to come from Iraq. They had been entered
into a biometric database maintained by U.S. intelligence. Yet,
when they applied for refugee status and were checked by DHS,
your department, FBI and the Department of Defense, they came
in clean and were admitted to the United States. So, later they
bragged about what they had done to attack and kill U.S.
soldiers in Iraq. They were not picked up.
My concern, which was something that came forward in our
last hearing here on October 8, in this room, where again we
had your boss, the FBI Director and counterterrorism officials.
They told us, point blank, we do not have the intelligence in
Syria to be able to do the appropriate background checks. Here
is the quote from Director Comey, the FBI Director, in response
to asking about our gaps in intelligence collection and the
sharing process that posed great risk, he said, ``Senator, to
me, there is a risk associated with bringing anybody in from
the outside, but especially from a conflict zone like that. My
concern there is that there are certain gaps, I do not want to
talk about publicly, in the data that is available to us,'' end
quote.
You said something similar this morning. You cannot talk in
open session about the gaps we have. But, obviously, we do not
have intelligence on the ground there. We have just spent 50
special forces there. That is great. They are not there to
collect data on refugees.
So, I do think it is a concern and I do think we have to
tighten it up and I think if we do not, we are ignoring one of
the--agreed, many other threats, some of which may be greater
threats in the sense of numbers of people, but for us to stand
here and say we are somehow against refugees because we think
there ought to be proper checks in place, that is ridiculous.
We are the most generous country in the world, and thank God we
are. And I, along with my colleagues, I think, on both sides of
the aisle, are strongly in support of the U.S. Refugee
Resettlement Program. But let us be darned sure that we do not
have another situation, as we had in Bowling Green, Kentucky,
in a case where, unfortunately, because we do not have
intelligence on the ground, we had even less information than
we did with regard to the Iraqis.
Your response.
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. Since the Bowling Green case, a lot has
been done to upgrade the security check system. I have heard it
certainly said by others that those individuals would have, in
fact, been picked up under the kind of biographic screening
that we do now.
Nothing of what I am saying should be seen as contrary to
what either Secretary Johnson or Director Comey said. There is,
in fact, risk in what we do. What I am saying is that we engage
in the sort of process with redundancies, with abundant
resources and with highly trained officers, to keep those risks
to an absolute, absolute minimum.
Chairman Johnson. Thanks, Senator Portman.
Just out of respect to all of our Members here, I will be
using the gavel here to keep the question and answer period as
close to 5 minutes as possible. So, with that, Senator
McCaskill.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR MCCASKILL
Senator McCaskill. Thank you both for being here. I will
not ask you to take the time to identify all the different ways
that foreigners can come to our country, but I think it is
obvious, and it has already been stated today and many times
over the last few days, that these radical jihadists are all
over the world. They are in our country. They are in many
countries. And, if you look at the number of refugees that have
been brought in from other countries, there are a number of
countries on that list where we have brought in many more than
Syria, like Somalia, Iran, and Yemen. And, we have intelligence
gaps everywhere. There are intelligence gaps.
So, the question I have for you is, if you were a
terrorist--well, maybe this is not a good question because we
do not want to tell terrorists this. Let me ask it this way.
[Laughter.]
Let me ask it this way. Which way, of all the ways to get
into this country, are you subjected to the most scrutiny?
Mr. Rodriguez. I can say with great confidence that
applicants for refugee status, and in particular refugees from
Syria, are subjected to the most scrutiny of any traveler, of
any kind, for any purpose, to the United States.
Senator McCaskill. So, my biggest concern is, listen, let
me acknowledge, America is on edge. People I love are on edge.
We are worried and we are angry, worried and angry. And what I
would like us to do on a bipartisan basis is to calmly come
together as a country, Democrats and Republicans, and figure
out what we can do that enhances the security in all of the
categories. But it seems to me we have gotten distracted by the
shiny object of refugees because of this image of people
swarming our borders without any checks, not realizing that
this, of course, is not like Europe, where all they saw at the
border of France is ``Welcome to France.'' That is it. I mean,
once they got into Europe, they had free access around those
countries.
So, what I would like you to tell us, both of you, is if
you were going to spend time and energy crafting better
policies to keep America safe from those people who want to
come here, where would you focus attention?
Mr. Rodriguez. For me, that is an operational question as
much as a policy question, and it is an operational question
that we ask ourselves every single day in what we do, which is,
to the extent that we are screening, be they refugees or the
other example that was given was individual student visas, what
are we doing to plug up risks that we identify in those
processes. So, even though I have identified what I think is a
very rigorous process, we are constantly looking for
opportunities to upgrade that process, to improve the scope of
information that we access, to deepen the training and
understanding of our officers.
One example, actually, is to the extent that we talk about
increasing admissions, our officers learn a lot from the
refugees that they interview.
Senator McCaskill. Right.
Mr. Rodriguez. That actually----
Senator McCaskill. And all that goes into our process.
Mr. Rodriguez. That is correct, and that deepens their
ability to be able to screen the people that----
Senator McCaskill. What about students?
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. They encounter as part of the
process.
Senator McCaskill. Are we doing this for students? Are we
checking them in all the databases?
Mr. Rodriguez. In many cases, depending on where they come
from and the circumstances in which they come--we are certainly
checking in the databases. We do that for just about every
immigration category that we operate. The configurations are
different depending on the categories, but we basically do a
national security check and a criminal justice check for just
about every applicant for immigration benefit or other sort of
immigration consideration who we encounter.
Senator McCaskill. And what about biometrics for all of the
38 countries that we have Visa Waiver Programs with? How many
of them now do not have the facial recognition and the
fingerprint recognition and the chip-embedded passports that we
think now should be standard? How many of those countries do
not have that as a bare minimum?
Mr. Rodriguez. Senator, I am going to respectfully defer to
my Customs and Border Protection colleagues. They really are
the experts on the operation of the Visa Waiver Program.
Senator McCaskill. Well, I would like us to get that
information because if we are crafting legislation, I think it
is a big mistake not to use this as a moment of leverage with
our visa waiver partners, to insist on the same kind of
biometric protections that we have in our passports for those
passports, since I believe, the foreign fighters in those
countries pose much more of a risk to us than the small number
of refugees who have gone through a great amount of vetting.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator McCaskill. Senator
Ayotte.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AYOTTE
Senator Ayotte. I want to thank the Chairman.
Director Rodriguez, just to be clear, following up on
Senator Portman's question about the current program and the
refugee program, Director Comey, not only did he testify before
this Committee with what he told Senator Portman, but also, I
think, what has concerned many of us is the testimony that he
gave before the House Committee on October 21, 2015 and in
which he basically said that the U.S. Government may not have
the ability to vet thoroughly all the Syrian refugees coming
into the United States.
He explained that if a Syrian person is not already in the
FBI's database, that person is unknown to the agency, leaving
an inadequate basis for the person's background to be screened
for terrorism risk. He said, quote, ``We can only query against
that which we have collected.'' He cautioned--he also said,
``So, if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria,
in a way that would get their identity or interests reflected
in our database, we can query our database until the cows come
home, but we are not going
to--there will be nothing because we have no record on that
person.''
So, I guess my question is, I understand all the multiple
steps that you are taking, but is not one of our big gaps here
that we do not have the kind of intelligence we had in Iraq,
where we actually had, because we had many representatives on
the ground, we had men and women who fought there, we had
diplomatic representatives that we do not have in Syria, that
this presents a different challenge to us?
Mr. Rodriguez. There is no question that in Iraq, we had a
unique level of intelligence saturation. To what I think was
Senator McCaskill's point, though----
Senator Ayotte. But I am asking this question----
Mr. Rodriguez. No----
Senator Ayotte. So, are there greater challenges, and how
do we reconcile what Director Comey has said about these gaps
with concerns that our constituents have, that I think are very
legitimate, about this vetting process based on a gap in
information?
Mr. Rodriguez. No, I am trying to explain. So, this is not
the first time, by far, that we have been vetting individuals
coming from a country that was a zone of conflict where we were
not participants, where we did not have the intelligence
gathering ability that we had in Iraq. The fact is that we are
gathering intelligence around the world----
Senator Ayotte. OK, so just a simple question. Do you
diminish at all the concerns raised by the FBI Director to the
Congress?
Mr. Rodriguez. No. I think I was very clear that what we do
is not without risk. What I am saying is that we are using
multiple intelligence resources----
Senator Ayotte. I understand that. Just a simple yes or no.
Do you disagree or do you have any quarrel with the comments
that he has testified to in the House Committee?
Mr. Rodriguez. I do not have quarrel with what he said. I
think there is context that is critical.
Senator Ayotte. OK. I appreciate it. I just wanted to
understand.
So, I want to understand, of all the individuals involved
in the Paris attacks, can either of you answer the question of
how many were on our ``no fly'' list?
Mr. Rodriguez. I know that I am not in a position, in an
open hearing, to discuss that information.
Senator Ayotte. OK. And, can either of you answer the
question of how many were on our terrorist watchlist, or is
that something we cannot answer in an open session?
Mr. Rodriguez. Again, in an open session, I do not believe
I can answer.
Senator Ayotte. So, I would agree with Senator McCaskill
that I think there are allies that we, on this Visa Waiver
Program, which this Committee actually has been focusing on for
a while-- a number of hearings related, even prior to this, on
the Visa Waiver Program--that we do need to understand what
information and what gaps were on that, based on whether those
individuals, who are engaged and are the perpetrators of the
attacks in Paris, were on our list, No. 1. I think that we have
all received some briefing on that in a classified setting.
But, this is something we have to have an open discussion
about, as well.
Where are those gaps that need to be fixed, because if they
cannot get on our no fly list and they are not on our no fly
list, this is a real issue on the Visa Waiver Program, because
that means, potentially, they can come here. And, so, that is
something that needs to be addressed.
So, I do not think that it is mutually exclusive that we
address these gaps in the Visa Waiver Program that need to be
addressed and gaps in refugee resettlement programs. Obviously,
there are legitimate and important reasons for people to travel
to the United States of America, but we need to make sure that
we address that issue, as well.
But, I think many of us are concerned, based on what we are
hearing from some of our top intelligence officials and the
Director of the FBI, that the gaps we have do not allow us to
fully know what we need to know on some of the individuals who
are coming, potentially, to our country.
Finally, I just want to say that if we do not address ISIS
with what they are doing in Syria and Iraq, then we are not
going to be in a position--if we do not work together with our
allies to defeat ISIS, then the refugee problem is going to
continue because these individuals will not have a home, and I
hope that is something that we all work ontogether on a
bipartisan basis. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Senator Tester.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR TESTER
Senator Tester. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for
holding this hearing, and thanks to both of the people who
testified for coming today.
If a refugee's application for admittance is denied, is
there a tag put on that form, on that record?
Mr. Rodriguez. In other words, if we see the individual
again? I assume that is the essence of your question, Senator.
Senator Tester. That is the next question, yes.
Mr. Rodriguez. OK. I mean, we certainly make sure that we
know who that individual is.
Senator Tester. OK.
Mr. Rodriguez. It is also if, critically, if future cases
demonstrate some connection to that denied individual, that is
something that we are able to identify.
Senator Tester. OK.
Mr. Rodriguez. We are always looking at networks of people,
family networks and networks of associations as part of our
vetting.
Senator Tester. OK. So, is it fair to say that refugees
that have been denied acceptance, none of them have tried to
reapply and none of them have received? Once been denied, they
are out?
Mr. Rodriguez. I cannot say whether that is unheard of,
Senator----
Senator Tester. What would cause----
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. We can certainly get you an
answer to that question.
Senator Tester. Can you tell me what would cause a denied
application to become one that would be accepted at a later
date?
Mr. Rodriguez. I suppose if it was a situation where it
turned out that the individual was able to effectively refute--
--
Senator Tester. OK.
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. The basis of the denial----
Senator Tester. Got you.
Mr. Rodriguez. That would be a pretty high bar. I should
just underscore that.
Senator Tester. Could you give me an idea on how many
refugee applications are received and how many are accepted?
Mr. Rodriguez. In any given year, we admit--this past
year----
Senator Tester. What I am talking about is, you applied,
you are turned away or you are accepted. Can you give me the
difference between applications and acceptance? I know how many
people have come in already.
Mr. Rodriguez. Umm----
Senator Tester. If you cannot answer that, you can get back
to me.
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. I will get you that back----
Senator Tester. Let me ask a little bit about the process
for screening that you went through, and I appreciate that, by
the way. You said that the refugees were continually queried
through databases for additional information. Is that while the
vetting process is going on, or does that even occur after they
are admitted into the country?
Mr. Rodriguez. That occurs right up until the time of their
admission into the country, from the time that the check is
first run, during the intermediate portions of the screening,
essentially, the State Department leg of the screening, and
that occurs right up until the time of their admission.
Senator Tester. OK. Without getting into the specifics, and
we have talked about VWP, we potentially will talk about
political refugees and the difference. We could talk about
different ways of getting into this country. Is your Department
putting together a list of things as an ask of Congress to give
you additional tools to make sure that the vetting process is
where you believe it needs to be--if any are required? Are you
willing to give us your suggestions on what needs to be done,
not only with refugees, but with the entire overlay, political
refugees and others?
Mr. Rodriguez. Sure----
Senator Tester. Visa waivers and others?
Mr. Rodriguez. Sure. No, we are always willing to work with
the Congress on those issues. I think it is important to
understand that my agency is a fee-funded agency.
Senator Tester. Yes.
Mr. Rodriguez. The fees paid by most of our fee payers
subsidize the refugee. So, they do not pay an application fee,
but that is subsidized by other fee payers, other USCIS fee
payers.
Senator Tester. OK.
Mr. Rodriguez. So, it is not from tax revenue.
Senator Tester. I have you, but that is not the question.
The question is, if we need to tighten up VWP, for example, or
if we need to tighten up political refugees and the regimen
that they have to go through to get accepted into this country,
are you guys willing to put forth those recommendations to us?
And, I am not saying there are any needed, but it would be nice
to deal with the folks who deal directly on where the gaps are.
You know them better than I.
Mr. Rodriguez. Senator, we are absolutely willing to work
with this body at any time to refine the way we do our work.
Absolutely.
Senator Tester. OK. Let me see. What else is there? That is
probably about it. I just want to say thank you for your work.
I think that there is not anybody that serves in Congress that
does not want to make sure this country is as secure and as
safe as it can be. I think what happened in France rattled
people to their soul. And, so, we need to make sure that the
work you are doing fits the risk. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Senator, before you yield back your time,
let me just share something. At our briefing yesterday, and in
some discussion at our lunch today, there was some mention of a
program, I think it is funded within DHS, the number $45
million per year sticks in my mind, and the money is used to
combat radicalization in this country. Could you just take,
like, 20 seconds and just tell us about that, because we heard
yesterday that that is something we should do more of. It has
worked. We should do more of that. It goes to the root causes
that the Chairman was talking about.
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes. Secretary Johnson has assembled at a
high level in the Department something called the Office of
Community Partnerships, the purpose of which is to engage in
the activity we call countering violent extremism. And that is
a series of engagements at a national, State, and local level,
at a community level, with youth and with nongovernmental
organizations, to really identify the root causes of
radicalization and to use smart approaches to, in fact,
interrupt the process of radicalization.
Chairman Johnson. Senator Baldwin.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BALDWIN
Senator Baldwin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Like my colleagues, I certainly am hearing from the public
in Wisconsin with sincerely held concerns and fears about an
attack, such as the horrific attack we saw in Paris, happening
here in the United States. So, I was grateful to hear your
response to Senator McCaskill's question about which of the
methods of entry into the United States would set up or provide
the greatest amount of scrutiny, and I think I heard you say
fairly specifically that the refugee path, especially if you
are a refugee from Syria, would provoke, prompt, the most
intense scrutiny. Is that correct?
Mr. Rodriguez. Yes, that is correct. That is absolutely
correct. I mean, I know what we do and across all lines of
business and that is absolutely the most scrutiny to which we
subject----
Senator Baldwin. So, I wanted to follow-up, because a
number of the Governors in the United States have come forward
to try to cut off that path in terms of announcing some sort of
refusal to participate in a Refugee Resettlement Program that
is a national program. Governor Walker from the State of
Wisconsin, my State that I represent, was among those
Governors, and I just wanted to share what he communicated in
terms of raising concerns.
He said that ``there are not proper security procedures in
place to appropriately background and accurately ascertain the
identities of those entering our country through the Syrian
refugee program,'' end quote, and additionally that, quote,
``this deficiency in the program poses a threat to the safety
and security of our people,'' end quote.
Can you respond to those concerns?
Mr. Rodriguez. Sure. There have been refugee populations
that, because they come from conflict zones, because they are
running from their house, have not presented a lot of
documentation when we have encountered them. That has not
generally been true of the Syrian refugee population.
I would also point out that our officers, as part of their
rigorous training, are trained in identifying fraudulent
documents, to the extent that that is something we are always
looking for as a concern.
It is also a critical part of the vetting process from end
to end, in other words, what UNHCR does, what Assistant
Secretary Richard's folks do and what we do, to really drill
into the identity and associations of these individuals. So, I
do have a high level of confidence that when we stamp a case
``approved,'' we know whose case we approved. We know the
identity of that individual.
Senator Baldwin. Thank you.
Ms. Richard, my next question has to do with the
implications on funding that flows from the Federal Government
in support of Refugee Resettlement Programs, generally, if a
State were to announce that it was not going to participate in
that program. I know that you work in partnership with the
Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee
Resettlement in all of this. But, let me just ask, do you think
these State decisions jeopardize this funding stream and a
series of programs that back up refugee resettlement, such as
medical assistance, social services, and housing? And, I am
particularly concerned about refugees who may have settled in
our States from other places in the world aside from Syria.
Ms. Richard. Thank you for your question, Senator. Three
departments of the Federal Government are the ones who help run
the process, although as you have heard, a lot of law
enforcement and national security intelligence agencies are
involved in the vetting process. But in terms of running the
process, the State Department is responsible for working with
UNHCR. UNHCR refers refugees to us. We have staff in centers
around the world who help the refugees put their case together
to tell their story and collect their documents. The essential
decision over whether they are coming or not rests with DHS.
The vetting process is complicated, as you have heard, and
then we also are responsible for getting them to the United
States, working with partner organizations to have them met at
the airport, and getting them settled here in the first 3
months of their new lives in the United States.
At that point, the Department of Health and Human Services
has a program to provide assistance through the State
Governments to give additional support to refugees. They will
have refugee-specific programs. It varies from State to State.
So, in the past, there has been at least one Governor who
said, ``I do not like refugees coming here. I am not going to
accept this money.'' And a Member of Congress from that State
told him, ``Please accept the money. I worked very hard up here
in Washington to get assistance for our State to help with
these kinds of tests.'' And this is a Federal program. The
Governors do not have the ability to block the resettlement of
refugees, but, more important than that is, this program
depends very much on the support of the American people.
It is run at the community level. There are a lot of
community organizations, of volunteers, churches, faith-based
groups and temples involved. A lot of the things that help a
refugee family get started once they get here are furnished by
charity. I have been to places in Miami where recently arrived
Cuban refugees get furniture from a furniture store where the
founder was a Cuban refugee. And, so, these contributions are a
big part of this program. It is a public-private partnership.
It only works if people at the community level support it.
So, I am less concerned about the legal ramifications of
the Governors' actions and much more concerned about the
message it is sending to the American citizens, that we would
at all be running a program that is dangerous. We have no
desire to do that. And we also need public officials and
Senators and Members of Congress to help us--the responsibility
is mine, but I can use the help--educate people about what this
program is and why we do it and why it is in the best interests
of our Nation to honor this tradition of bringing refugees to
the United States. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Senator Heitkamp.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HEITKAMP
Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
A couple of things. First off, just because I know you guys
have deferred a number of times on the Visa Waiver Program, I
am not going to ask you specifics. But I do want for the record
to acknowledge that 20 million people last year in 38
countries--and I am not saying they all traveled to the United
States--used the Visa Waiver Program. And we know very many of
those 38 countries do not have the same level of scrutiny, do
not have the same level of biometrics, not even looking at
eVerified passports, that we have allowed in the interest of
commerce and certainly with allied countries, maybe not being
as enforcement-minded as what we are. So, I think that this is
a huge part of what we need to be concerned about.
But, we are here talking about the refugee program, and so
I am going to just ask a simple question. Do you think it is
legitimate for the American public to today ask you to provide
answers to their questions about this program, but also for you
to take a look at this program and analyze whether, in fact,
there are any gaps, things that we could be doing better,
choices that we could be making?
Let us say, Mr. Rodriguez, for example, we have someone
that we know nothing about, compelling story, but we know
nothing about him. Another compelling story over here, we know
a lot about that person. Given the competition for resettlement
in this country, do you not think it makes sense for us to
prioritize those folks that have compelling stories but that we
know a lot about?
Mr. Rodriguez. I am accountable to the American people,
first and foremost. So, whatever questions they have are
questions that I am fully prepared, at all times, to answer,
and I think their questions are about how we conduct this
process and how we prioritize within this process.
The basic design of the refugee referral process is to
prioritize individuals in the most need. And, at that point, it
starts what is a very rigorous process of screening and a lot
of information is gathered from everybody that we encounter.
And if we cannot get that information, we do not clear them. We
do not approve their cases and they either go on hold or they
are outright denied.
Senator Heitkamp. And I think that is something that has
been missed in this discussion today, because a lot of people
are saying ``you know nothing about them,'' as the FBI Director
has said. And what you are saying now is if you cannot really
find out enough about them, if there is not any third-party
verifiable information, that person may not, in fact probably
will not, make it into this country.
Mr. Rodriguez. Well, or----
Senator Heitkamp. Is that what you are saying?
Mr. Rodriguez. Not entirely. In other words, the individual
has to give us enough information that matches other
information that we know about what is going on----
Senator Heitkamp. Would that not be third-party
verifiable----
Mr. Rodriguez. I guess you are right, Senator. That is
third-party information.
Senator Heitkamp. I think it is really--that is an
important question, about how you prioritize, because no one
here is suggesting that there is not a need or there are not
compelling stories. But there are a lot of compelling stories,
and maybe we prioritize those where we actually have a higher
level of assurance.
I do not have a lot of time and I want to get to this issue
of the Northern border, because, obviously, we have a fairly
open border with Canada. I can attest to that, and I think the
Ranking Member, who has flown over the Canadian border, can
also attest to that. And I know the Chairman mentioned the
Northern border during his opening statement. Canada's goals--
and Canada's goals regarding Syrian refugees.
I think border security remains a critical priority for
this country. I think we also have to include the Northern
border, which I have been beating the drum for on this
Committee since I have been on this Committee. So, we have to
make smart investments on the Northern border.
One of the issues or questions that I have regarding the
refugee program, especially as it relates to Canada, are there
any issues with how the Canadians vet their refugees, any
suggestions that you have made to expand their vetting process
or improve their vetting process, and can you speak to what
would occur if someone was admitted into Canada as a refugee
and that person later tried to legally cross the border to the
United States. Would that person, even though they may not have
passed the rigor in our country, be allowed entry through
Canada?
Mr. Rodriguez. And I will ask Assistant Secretary Richard
to add what I miss. We are in constant consultation, in
particular with the other English-speaking countries, on how we
conduct our refugee screening process. The Canadians have been
in this business for a long time. They do conduct at least sort
of--the basic outline of their system, which is what I am
familiar with, is also quite rigorous. But we are in a constant
state of dialogue with them to make sure that we are learning
from one another.
Senator Heitkamp. Is the Canadian system as rigorous as
ours?
Mr. Rodriguez. I cannot say. It appears to me to be, again,
from where I have been watching-----
Senator Heitkamp. That is something that you can get back
to me on----
Mr. Rodriguez. Certainly.
Senator Heitkamp [continuing]. And I have used up my time
and the Chairman has offered to gavel us down if we go too far
over. So, this is a dialogue that I think we need to continue.
Ms. Richard. Senator, I am meeting with a Canadian official
tomorrow, so if you give me some questions, I will get answers
for you.
Chairman Johnson. I like fear being a motivating factor. I
appreciate the discipline. Senator Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
our panelists for your testimony today.
This has been an interesting hearing, one that I am sure we
are going to be continuing to discuss for some time. But it is
of particular importance to me and the folks in the State of
Michigan. As I think both of you are aware, we have one of the
largest Middle Eastern populations, outside of the Middle East,
in primarily the Detroit metropolitan area. We are the home to
many refugees from around the world, but particularly from the
Middle East, who come to the Detroit area.
I have had an opportunity to work with refugee resettlement
groups, with the religious community, and got to get to know
many refugees who have come to this country, who contribute to
the country. They are, for the most part--well, I should not
say the most part. The refugees that I talk to are patriots.
They are so excited to be in the United States because they are
away from a very hazardous situation where their life was in
jeopardy and this country opened up their borders and opened up
our hearts to bring them here. They are store owners. They are
entrepreneurs. They are physicians. They are engineers,
contributing folks to our country. And, basically, this is what
this country has been about since its founding, that we are
about folks that come from around the world who want to pursue
the American dream and be patriots.
But, I think it is also important for us, as we know that,
I think the context as we are discussing this is also that we
are dealing with a humanitarian crisis of proportions I do not
believe we have seen since World War II. We have literally
millions of people who have been displaced from Syria, and they
are displaced because thousands and thousands of Syrians were
murdered and they left because they fear for their safety, for
their families and their loved ones.
I was in, just about 2 months ago, in a Syrian refugee camp
in Jordan. I had the chance to visit Zaatari, the largest
refugee camp there. At the time I was there, there were about
85,000 individuals crammed in a camp in the desert not far from
the Syrian border, in not the best of conditions to live in.
They were receiving food allowance that was equal to 50 cents a
day, is what they were living on. You cannot buy a whole lot of
food for 50 cents a day. You have one propane bottle for your
family to cook from. You cannot do a whole lot of cooking.
But what was certainly most impactful to me was the
conversations that I had with those refugees who just had a
sense of hopelessness, that they had been there for a long
time. You usually think you go to a refugee camp, you are there
for 6 months, and you are back in your country. That is not the
case. These folks had been there for 4 years, a lot that I
talked to, with no idea what the future held for them. And
their children were there and had to work and had difficulties
surviving, not getting an education.
I asked them, I said, where do you want to go? I mean,
obviously, you are in this camp. You do not know what your
future is. Where do you want to go, to the United States? Do
you want to go to Europe? And every one of the refugees that I
had a chance to talk to, they had the same answer. They said,
we just want to go home. We just want to go home. We do not
want to go to a foreign country. We do not want to have another
language. We do not want to do that. We just want to go home. I
think everybody here, certainly everybody in this room today,
if we were in that situation, we would just want to go home.
So, obviously, the most important thing is we have to
stabilize the region. We have to deal with ISIS. We have to
have a credible government there. We have to have a strategy to
make sure that folks can go back and be comfortable. But we
also know in the meantime that that is going to take some time.
It is not going to happen overnight.
And in the meantime, you have folks, not just in Zaatari,
where I visited, but the millions of other folks who were not
in camps and are in Jordan. Jordan has taken on an incredible
responsibility, opening up and saying, we are going to help
these folks who are displaced, these people who are hurting,
these people who are running away from the bad guys. These are
folks who are running away from war. They are running away from
violence and trying to find a place for peace where they can
raise their children.
Now, the United Nations was at that camp. I know they were
looking at folks to prioritize. I want to get a sense of how
they get screened. You talked about the prioritization that the
U.N. has as to how they determine which families should be in
this program. And I think another important number, if both of
you could respond to it, is that my understanding is about
20,000 folks have been referred to the United States from the
United Nations as potential refugees, roughly. Out of that
number, I understand we have looked at about 7,000--you can
correct me on these numbers, but around 7,000--and that we
admitted less than 2,000. So, already, the U.N. has done some
screening, prioritizing, probably those who are in the most
need, who have been there a long time, but I would like to know
what that is, how we can continue to screen down.
So, I think those numbers alone show how robust the system
is, and I think we heard some folks discuss here, if you are a
terrorist wanting to get into this country, you are going to
take the path of least resistance. I look at this process--this
is far from the path of least resistance. You have to be in a
refugee camp for a while before you are even looked at by the
U.N. I mean, this is a multi-year process that folks go
through, and from seeing it firsthand, it is horrible
conditions that oftentimes these folks find themselves in, and
there is not anybody in this room that would want to be in that
position, and they would want someone to say, we have some
compassion. We know you can be a valuable contribution when you
come here, as well.
If you could talk about that, please, the priorities and
why we have moved those numbers down so much.
Ms. Richard. So, UNHCR works with us all around the world
and refers refugees to us, and they know that we would like to
take the people who are the most vulnerable and could most
benefit from the safety and the economic prosperity that
America offers. And, so, they send us some of the most
vulnerable people.
And, my experience has been like yours, Senator, that most
of the refugees you meet want to go home again, and so the
resettlement sort of tears families apart in some ways. But,
the people who we offer resettlement to, then, are widows with
children, sometimes of an older generation, as well, people who
have been victims of torture, trauma, people who have seen
terrible things happen in front of them for whom there really
is no going home ever again. We also give a home to people who
are persecuted religious minorities, people who are lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT), and we also--anyone
who--perhaps people who feel that there would be a death threat
on them if they went home again.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Peters.
Just a couple quick questions and then I will give you each
a chance to kind of wrap up if you have some closing comments.
Mr. Rodriguez, we are going from 70,000 to 85,000 refugees
total. That is a 21 percent increase in fiscal year (FY) 2016.
A goal of going from 70,000 to 100,000, that is a 43 percent
increase in 2017. Do you have the resources to take on that
large of an increase?
Mr. Rodriguez. We do. It requires us to look for
efficiencies in our process. I have often said that when
organizations are challenged in this way, it actually becomes
an opportunity to improve themselves. That is how we are
treating this challenge. But, it does require us to move some
resources around. It requires us to improve our processes where
we can. Keep in mind, we are a $3 billion a year organization,
so the challenge is an operational one more than a financial
one. But, we are rising to that challenge.
Chairman Johnson. How many Syrians are currently in the
hopper that are being reviewed?
Mr. Rodriguez. Currently in review--I thought I had this
information--you know what? I will need to get back to you----
Chairman Johnson. OK, that is fine.
Mr. Rodriguez [continuing]. With that information.
Chairman Johnson. My final comment, the House just passed
the American SAFE Act of 2015. I have introduced the Senate
companion bill. It basically says that no refugee may be
admitted until the Director of the FBI certifies to the
Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of National
Intelligence that each refugee has, quote, ``received a
background investigation that is sufficient to determine
whether the refugee is a threat to the security of the United
States.'' Then the refugees may only be admitted to the United
States after the Secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security and the Director of the FBI and the Director of
National Intelligence certifies to Congress that the refugee is
not a threat to the security of the United States.
Now, that passed on a pretty strong bipartisan basis, 289
to 137. That seems like a pretty reasonable way to assure that
these checks, that this robust process that you have been
describing,
is carried out. Under Sarbanes-Oxley, Chief Executive Officers
(CEOs) have to certify that their financial statements are
accurate. Do you think that is a pretty reasonable response?
Mr. Rodriguez. I think you saw that the White House took a
position indicating that its view was that it did not add that
much. I will say that the process that we engage in is
essentially equivalent to the process contemplated in that
bill. People are subjected to the most intense scrutiny. There
is intense supervisory review. Cases that present concerns are
actually elevated. Our Fraud and Detection and National
Security Directorate is brought in to participate in the
analysis of those cases.
So, it would be my view, along the lines of what the
President has said, that, in fact, it would not necessarily add
much beyond the process that we are already----
Chairman Johnson. As you are seeing by the very legitimate
questions of the panel, the concerns of our constituents, I
would think this would just be one additional level of control
to provide that kind of comfort to make sure that these--this
redundant system would actually work.
But, with that, Ms. Richard, do you have any closing
comments?
Ms. Richard. Yes, sir. Thank you. I want to assure Senator
McCaskill that another way for us to help make America safer is
to work with the Europeans to make their own borders safer, and
that is something that is an active discussion right now
overseas.
Senator Peters asked about the 23,000 who had been referred
to us, and we have brought 2,000 to the United States, but we
continue to review cases and we will get new referrals and it
is really more of a pipeline that people are flowing through.
Senator Tester asked how many have been denied, and
worldwide--and I am sorry I did not tell him this when he was
here--under our current screening, worldwide, it is about 80
percent are approved, 20 percent, so one in five, are denied.
And, so, I do not have specifics by nationalities.
The issue about the FBI having no holdings, it is normal
for the U.S. Government to have very little information about
most refugees at the beginning of the resettlement process.
Refugees are, after all, innocent civilians who have fled war
zones. Iraq and Afghanistan are the exceptions. We have a lot
of information about people who worked alongside or with the
military or nearby. And the people who, therefore, are referred
to the program, we work with them so that they tell their
stories and put together a case file and fill in the gaps that
I know are a concern right now to everyone, based on the fact
that the FBI does not have the whole picture on hand for
Syrians. So, I do not think that has to stop the program. I
think that we can work with the NCTC and with other
intelligence agencies to help fill in those gaps, working with
other agencies.
I want to reassure this Committee that we work very closely
with DHS. This is my fifth time on the Hill in the last 3 days,
and that is partly why I was so glad you gave Leon all the
tough questions---- [Laughter.]
But we are very happy to continue to--we work together on a
daily basis and we are happy to continue to respond to you.
One question was, should we be looking closer at our
program. The White House has already asked us to really go
through the entire process carefully to look for efficiencies
without cutting corners on security. Is it really the best
process that we can possibly have? We are convinced that it is
a very secure process, but everyone has noticed that it is
lengthy. So, we are willing to do that. That is part of our
jobs.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Rodriguez.
Mr. Rodriguez. Chairman, Ranking Member, Senators, I want
to thank you, first and foremost, for leading what I think has
been an incredible, from my perspective, an incredibly
thoughtful and productive hearing. I think the questions that
you have asked of us are questions that we needed to be asked,
and I hope our answers offered some clarity.
I think one of the things that has become very clear to me
over the last 2 weeks is that we have a burden with the
American people in really explaining to them how this process
works, what the safeguards are in that process, and this has
been a great opportunity, the way this hearing has been led, to
accomplish that.
Senator Heitkamp asked me a question that I fear I did not
actually answer, which is are you looking for ways to make your
process better, and the answer is absolutely yes. It is
something that I and my staff--some of my leadership is here
with me today--we do it every day, because we realize what this
means to the American people. We realize what this means to the
individuals often in great distress who are asking us to admit
them to the United States. And, so, to that extent, we always
are looking to improve and we always are willing to engage with
this Committee to talk about how we can improve that process
further.
So, thank you again for your invitation up here today.
Chairman Johnson. Again, we want to thank you both for your
service, for taking the time to testify. We really want to
thank the administration for making you available. I know this
was very short notice, but I think we all agree, this was very
important and useful information for the American people to
hear, so thank you very much.
With that, you are dismissed and we will call up the next
panel.
[Pause.]
I am just going to make you all stand up again, so why do
we not all stand up. Raise your right hand.
Do you swear the testimony you will give before this
Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Bergen. I do.
Mr. Jenkins. I do.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I do.
Mr. Schwartz. I do.
Ms. Limon. I do.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you. Please be seated. I like to be
as efficient as possible.
Again, I appreciate you all for taking the time. Our first
witness of the second panel is Mr. Peter Bergen. Mr. Bergen is
the Vice President at New America in Washington, DC, where he
is also Director of Studies and of several programs. Mr. Bergen
is also CNN's National Security Analyst and a National Security
Fellow at Fordham University. He is currently writing a book
about homegrown terrorism, which HBO is basing a forthcoming
film on. Mr. Bergen.
TESTIMONY OF PETER BERGEN,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY
STUDIES PROGRAM, NEW AMERICAN FOUNDATION
Mr. Bergen. Thank you Senator Johnson and Senator Carper
and distinguished Senators on the Committee for the invitation
to speak today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Bergen appears in the Appendix on
page 73.
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So, my brief was to answer what are the homeland security
lessons of the ISIS attacks in Paris and Sinai, and I think
there are several. We have already addressed at length today
the question of the refugees, but the real issue, I think, is
not the refugees. It is the fact that there were so many
Belgian and French citizens in the plot who might qualify for
the Visa Waiver Program. It was not clear from the answers of
the witnesses how many of these people were on watchlists, but
let us assume that some of them were not, and even if some of
them were, it certainly shows that with 1,800 French citizens
having gone to Syria and 700 Brits and 700 Germans and you name
your country in Europe, you have had a substantial number.
So, the Visa Waiver Program, I think, is more of an issue
than the Refugee Resettlement Program, which seems to be
incredibly robust. In fact, it seems like the last thing you
would do would be to apply as a refugee because it would be so
lengthy and so onerous. It would be much easier to come on a
student visa or through the Visa Waiver Program.
And, I think another issue that we learned from--sort of
changing subjects slightly--but the bombs in the Paris attacks
were made from triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which were used
in the 7/7 attacks, they were used in the planes plot of 2006,
which actually did not work. They were used in the Najibullah
Zazi plot to bomb the Manhattan subway around the eighth
anniversary of 9/11. And, I think that is a reminder to us that
hydrogen peroxide bombs, which are easily, relatively easy to
access, are what the jihadi terrorist groups want to use in the
future because hydrogen peroxide is obviously easy to acquire
and does not flag in the same way as acquiringd ammonium
nitrate or other kinds of issues. So, bulk purchases of
hydrogen peroxide, as Najibullah Zazi did in Denver, Colorado,
during his plan to attack in Manhattan, is something that
certainly law enforcement around the country should be flagging
for suspicious activity reports.
Another, I think, lesson of the Sinai attack is the
question of airport workers. We have seen that five American
citizens since 9/11 involved in jihadi terrorist crimes had
jobs at American airports, three of them at Minneapolis-Saint
Paul International Airport (MSP), two members of Shabaab, one
member of ISIS, one of them at John F. Kennedy International
Airport (JFK), who was a baggage handler there before 9/11 but
used that in a plot luckily that was deferred--that did not
work out--and also one at Los Angeles International Airport
(LAX), who was part of the cell that was planning to attack
synagogues, LAX, and U.S. military recruiting facilities in
California 4 years after 9/11.
And then extend that problem to somewhere like Heathrow
Airport, where a Heathrow Airport employee gave information
about security to a self-described member of al-Qaeda. Luckily,
she was arrested and he was arrested. An employee of British
Airways was in touch with Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al-
Qaeda in Yemen, about a plan to put a plane--a bomb on a plane,
a British Airways plane, coming to the United States. And, so,
this--I think Sharm el-Sheikh shows a huge vulnerability.
We have 200 airports around the world. Many of them are not
in countries with necessarily particularly strong security
services. And if you want to kill a lot of people, do not send
a group of people to Paris with AK-47s. Put a bomb on a plane.
After all, if you look at Sinai, 224 dead versus 129 dead. So,
this question of airport security, I think, is an important
one.
And then in the brief time I have left, New America, where
I work, we have done a survey of 474 named foreign fighters
going to ISIS, and here are the headlines about what we found.
We found that one out of seven were women. Now, that is an
astonishing finding because, in previous jihads, militants
attracted to these jihads--by definition, these are very
misogynistic groups--did not attract women. In Paris, of
course, we had a woman blow herself up just 24 hours ago in a
raid in St. Denis.
We found the average age was very young, the average age
was 24. We found a lot of teenagers. For instance, we found an
astonishing 80 named teenagers from the West who had gone,
including, of course, from the United States, from places like
Colorado and Chicago. Many of them have familial ties to
jihadism, brothers, sisters who are also fighting in the jihad,
or people who get married in Syria, or people who had been
participating in previous terrorist plots, and a good example
is what we just saw in Paris, where two brothers were involved
and the leader of the plot brought his 13-year-old brother to
Syria to basically fight there.
The American profile of these foreign fighters is very
similar to the overall Western profile--young, one in six are
women, and a key point here is that, for the American recruits,
nine out of ten were very active in online jihadi circles, and
that does not mean just sending e-mails. That means posting
repeatedly on jihadi websites.
A final point. The war in Syria and Iraq, of course, very
deadly. Half of these foreign fighters, the male ones, are
dead, and 6 percent of the females, even though they are not on
the front lines.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Bergen.
Our next witness is Brian Michael Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins
serves as the Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND
Corporation. He is also Director at Mineta Transportation
Institute's National Transportation Security Center. Mr.
Jenkins is a decorated veteran, served as a member of the White
House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security for President
Clinton, as well as an advisor to the National Commission on
Terrorism. Mr. Jenkins.
TESTIMONY OF BRIAN MICHAEL JENKINS,\1\ SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE
PRESIDENT, RAND CORPORATION
Mr. Jenkins. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and
Members of the Committee, thank you very much for inviting me
to address this urgent issue.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Jenkins appears in the Appendix
on page 90.
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I would like to be able to report that in response to the
terrorist attacks in Paris, all of the perpetrators have been
identified and apprehended. They will be executed promptly.
That air strikes have smashed the Islamic State, and that an
event such as this will never happen again. However, the
reality is that this conflict is likely to go on. There are no
quick or easy solutions. And terrorists certainly will attempt
further attacks.
Let me give you some observations from the written
testimony I have presented, first with regard to the conflict,
itself. The fighting in Syria and Iraq will continue. Right
now, the situation is at a military stalemate. Syria and Iraq
are now effectively partitioned. I think these partitions will
persist. Sectarian and ethnic divisions now drive the
conflicts. That is going to make them hard to settle. The world
will be dealing with the fallout of this conflict for years to
come.
ISIL's ideology continues to exert a powerful pull, despite
the bombing, the coalition bombing. The number of individuals
joining or planning to join ISIL has not diminished. ISIL right
now is calling on more to come.
The uniquely destructive nature of this conflict has
produced four million refugees, caused four million people to
flee from Syria and Iraq. Another 12 million are internally
displaced. These are the new Palestinians. Neighboring
countries cannot absorb them. They will be a continuing source
of instability. We will be dealing with this issue for decades.
Hundreds of thousands of these refugees have headed to
Europe, raising fears that terrorists can hide among them. Some
may have done so, which brings me to the events in Paris.
The attack in Paris offers some important takeaways. It
underscores the importance of intelligence. Now, just how this
group managed to get past French intelligence, we are still not
sure. But the French services are simply being overwhelmed by
volume. The numbers that Peter mentioned of those who have gone
from France, the number that are suspected of planning to go,
the number that is in France suspected of planning to carry out
homegrown terrorist attacks, that has simply overwhelmed the
authorities. It is thousands.
The availability of terrorist recruits in France and
Belgium
and elsewhere in Europe reflects some societal problems of
marginalized and alienated communities, where extremist
ideologies can easily take root. Now, that is going to take a
long time to fix.
The Paris attack has increased pressure on the United
States to step up the fight against ISIL. My own view is that
certainly we can do more militarily, but we must keep cool and
stay smart here. We should not be provoked into measures that,
in the long run, and this has the potential to be a very long
run, could prove to be unsustainable or counterproductive.
Now, paradoxically, military success against ISIL in Syria
may heighten the threat of terrorism beyond. That is, it will
scatter the foreign fighters. It will validate ISIL's
propaganda that this is the final showdown between the
believers and the unbelievers, and we could see a surge of
terrorism worldwide even as we achieve some measure of success
of ISIL in Syria.
Further terrorist plots must be presumed. We must prepare
for an array of scenarios, including armed assaults at multiple
locations, like the one we saw in Paris, although we are more
likely to see low-level attempts that still may be lethal.
With regard to refugees and immigrants, immigrants since
the 19th century have brought their quarrels with them. The
phenomenon is not new, but these are extraordinary
circumstances. These are refugees from an active war zone where
fighting continues, where loyalties are fluid, where our foes
continue to exhort followers to carry out terrorist attacks
here. This adds a layer of risk.
However, on the good news, the United States is not Europe.
The numbers here are much smaller. The American audience for
ISIL propaganda remains unreceptive. They are simply not
selling a lot of cars here. And the new laws and structures
which Congress has put in place to prevent terrorist attacks
appear to be working. Moreover, we are not dealing with
hundreds of thousands of refugees landing on our shores, but
much smaller numbers, and we have more opportunities to vet
them and select them.
An important point here. We are not just trying to filter
out bad guys. Efforts to radicalize and recruit continue after
arrival, and so this is not a one-time sign-off that gets us
through. But America, historically, has been successful in
assimilating immigrants.
And, finally, our domestic intelligence efforts have
achieved a remarkable level of success. We are batting about
900.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Jenkins.
Our next witness is Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Mr.
Gartenstein-Ross is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at
Georgetown, and a lecturer at the Catholic University of
America. His body of work concentrates on al-Qaeda, the Islamic
State, and other jihadist organizations and transnational
ambitions. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
TESTIMONY OF DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS,\1\ SENIOR FELLOW,
FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member
Carper, and Senators, it is an honor to be here to testify
before you today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Gartenstein-Ross appears in the
Appendix on page 101.
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I thought the first panel was quite strong and it was
gratifying to see that it echoed my own conclusions in my
written testimony. I would like to go over a couple of points
and then look at broader issues.
The first and most important point is that I concluded, as
did the previous panel, that the risk of refugee resettlement,
in terms of moving operatives into the United States, is low
because it is such an inefficient way to place operatives. Not
only do the operatives have to wait 18 to 24 months, but they
have to be selected. We are selecting about 10,000 out of over
2.1 million refugees in recognized UNHCR camps. That is a very
small figure. They have no control over whether an operative
would be selected, and given the way that we privilege the most
vulnerable populations, it is highly unlikely that they would
be.
That being said, I think it is also significant that the
previous panel acknowledged the intelligence gaps, which I
think we need to be forthright about. The panel characterized,
I think accurately, the situation as one in which the risk we
face is low, but it is not a no-risk proposition. There is some
risk. But the selection process significantly reduces the risk,
as well as increases the inefficiency of moving operatives in.
That being said, I think that the selection process is much
more of a barrier than the screening process. It is a multi-
layered screening process, but as FBI Director Comey
acknowledged and as NCTC Director Rasmussen talked about, we do
not have good visibility, and that means, inherently, there are
limitations on our intelligence.
Indeed, recent events in Paris dramatically underscore the
limitations of this intelligence. Not only did you have at
least two large cells that were interlocking, but it is
important to look at the travels of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was
the mastermind of this attack. He was able to move from Europe,
after a plot he was involved in in Belgium was interrupted on
January 15 of this year, move back into Syria, then move back
into Europe to personally direct the plot in France. That is
significant. That means while he was a wanted man, he was able
to move past European authorities into Syria, then past
European authorities again as he moved back in. That indicates
a much more significant intelligence gap than I think anybody
would have anticipated prior to this plot.
The third thing I will say is that I think it was very
important to highlight the fact that, when you are looking at
vulnerabilities that the United States has to terrorist entry,
that things like VWP are just more important than refugee
resettlement programs. The reason why we are talking about
refugee resettlement programs so much is because of the
dramatic pictures of large numbers of refugees and migrants
moving into Europe.
But, as we all know, the situation that we face is very
different in the United States. Rather than a refugee
population which is crossing into the U.S.'s borders, these are
refugees that are being selected out of camps. It is just a
fundamentally different situation and I think it makes sense
for this legislative body to think about those means of entry
that are of highest risk, and definitively, refugee
resettlement programs are not.
The fourth point is that I do think we should think about
the Islamic State's use of refugees, not so much in the United
States as in Europe, because this is a problem that will arise.
The Islamic State sees the refugees who are fleeing its self-
proclaimed caliphate, and also fleeing Syria, as a major public
relations problem. Between September 16 and 19, they released a
dozen videos about the refugee situation. It seems that either
one of the attackers used the refugee route or else planted a
refugee's passport, or a Syrian passport, following the attack.
We do not know which one yet, and there is evidence that points
in both directions.
But, either way, one thing they will absolutely, in my
view, try to do is make it--is either infiltrate an operative
that way into Europe or else make it seem like that has
happened in order to provoke a backlash against refugees. They
have talked about their desire to destroy the gray zone between
the European population and the Islamic State, so that Muslims
have nowhere to go. That is something that is worth thinking
about, not so much for our own resettlement program, so much as
that is an issue that will come up, and if such a backlash
occurs, if such an attack occurs, we need to have thought about
that, I believe, so that we can fashion appropriate policies.
The final thing, or the final policy point I want to make,
is that we also, as several Senators said, should consider our
own policies toward Syria in order to reduce the
destabilization.
The final point I make in my written testimony pertains to
our Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program for sponsoring
rebels. I think it deserves much more scrutiny because I think
there are some very deep problems. I do not want to divert this
hearing, but I think that is not separable from this overall
issue.
The final thing, taking off my hat as an expert witness and
just talking as an American, I want to thank you for this
hearing because I think that it was very sober at a time when
we have had a political discussion which is extraordinarily
hyperbolic. Senator McCaskill said we should come together as
Americans, and I think that is very important. I think it is
worth acknowledging that on both sides of this debate, people
have very legitimate concerns. On the one hand, some people are
concerned about security. Are they safe? And on the other hand,
people are concerned that we, as Americans, are compassionate
people. We want to welcome refugees. And I think both sides
should recognize that there are legitimate concerns and be able
to talk about this and advance ourselves, as opposed to having
partisan finger pointing and zingers.
So, thank you, as an American, for holding a hearing that
was very reasonable and very measured.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you.
Our next witness is Eric Schwartz. Mr. Schwartz is the Dean
of Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Mr. Schwartz previously
served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population,
Refugees, and Migration and as the second highest ranking
official in the office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights. Mr. Schwartz.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE ERIC P. SCHWARTZ,\1\ DEAN, HUMPHREY
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA AND FORMER
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POPULATION, REFUGEES, AND MIGRATION AT
THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE (2009-2011)
Mr. Schwartz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Committee has
asked that witnesses discuss any vulnerabilities in the program
for resettlement of Syrians, and this is a very important
issue. But it is really only relevant, first, if we believe we
have a national interest in resettling Syrians, and second, if
we are confident that we are asking the correct security-
related questions. So, I will talk about our national
interests, in fact, our national security interests, in this
program first.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Schwartz appears in the Appendix
on page 110.
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Nobody disputes the critical national security importance
of issues surrounding the Syria conflict--stemming the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, supporting our
friends and allies, sustaining economic relationships,
defeating ISIS and others seeking to export campaigns of
terror, and providing assistance to desperate people in need--
all objectives that demand U.S. leadership in highly uncertain
times, when more than at any time in recent memory, we need the
support of our friends and our allies.
So, how does refugee resettlement of Syrians address these
concerns, and more particularly, how might obstacles to the
continuation of this program threaten our national interests?
First, the program communicates a commitment to burden
sharing to governments neighboring Syria. If we are asking
Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon to continue to host some four
million refugees, and if we are expecting their support for our
efforts in the region, it is important that we sustain our
resettlement efforts and it is counterproductive for us to send
those governments a negative signal by shutting off
resettlement programs for Syrians, given all that those
governments are doing.
Second, if we are urging our European allies to implement
humane policies on protection for hundreds of thousands of
Syrians, here again, our commitment to resettlement is critical
and a failure to offer modest resettlement will be perceived as
hypocrisy and diminish our capacity to lead on issues of common
concern.
Third, the battle against ISIS is also a battle of ideas,
in which ISIS rejects any notion of the compatibility of Islam
with other traditions. Our Refugee Resettlement Program rebukes
that preposterous notion. But imposing significant obstacles to
particular groups does risk playing into the very narrative
that we seek to combat worldwide, and it is worth reflecting--I
think we have to reflect--on the fact that legislative efforts
to single out particular programs in Iraq or Syria do risk
playing into that narrative and might, indeed, be welcomed by
our adversaries.
Finally, the United States has long advocated refugee
resettlement based on the applicant's vulnerability, and
measures that either privilege or disadvantage any group would
depart from that principle and undermine our leadership.
So, if there is a compelling interest, national security
interest, in resettling Syrians, what questions regarding
vulnerability should we be asking? First, we should not be
asking whether the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program, or for
that matter any immigration program, can guarantee against
admission of an individual with ill intent. To put this into
perspective, between 2010 and 2013, some four million people
entered our country to establish residence and almost none of
them received anything like the scrutiny given to Syrian
refugee applicants.
In fact, applications for Syrian refugee admissions are, as
we have heard, the most thoroughly vetted in our immigration
and refugee process, involving reviews by intelligence,
security, and law enforcement agencies. All applicants provide
biometric and biographical data and undergo detailed interviews
by officers of DHS. And I am convinced that these and other
measures do provide a robust degree of safeguards that more
than justify continuation of this program in light of the
national security and humanitarian interests that they serve.
In conclusion, in yesterday's Smithsonian.com website,
Daniel Gross writes of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, who applied
for U.S. asylum in 1942, claiming to be a persecuted Jewish
refugee. Bahr's story unraveled and he was convicted of
conspiracy and planned espionage. The event helped to stoke the
contention that Jews could be part of a fifth column of spies,
as United States officials turned their backs on those who were
in need of protection from the Holocaust. There were some
voices who condemned this inaction, but, to use Gross's words,
they were drowned out in the name of national security.
Members of the Committee, I hope that we can ensure that
voices supporting protection of the vulnerable are not drowned
out and recognize that our Refugee Admissions Program not only
meets our national security interests, but also reflects our
values as a people.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Schwartz.
Our final witness is Lavinia Limon. Ms. Limon is the
President and Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants, one of the nine domestic agencies
contracted with the State Department to resettle refugees in
the United States. Ms. Limon has more than 30 years of
experience working on behalf of refugees and immigrants. Ms.
Limon.
TESTIMONY OF LAVINIA LIMON,\1\ PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, U.S. COMMITTEE FOR REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS
Ms. Limon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Carper,
and honorable Committee Members. On behalf of the U.S.
Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a national nonprofit
organization serving refugees and immigrants with a network of
over 90 agencies and offices around the Nation, I am honored to
testify before you today in support of the U.S. Refugee
Resettlement Program and to provide information on the program.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Limon appears in the Appendix on
page 117.
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I want to thank you, Chairman Johnson, for complimenting
our security screening fact sheet, which my staff works very
hard to keep up to date, and we have changed it--it has been
around for about 2 years, and we keep changing it as we learn
more. And, of course, we are on the outside, so we do not have
the inside information, but even the Government people say we
got it right. So, that is pretty exciting.
Chairman Johnson. I always appreciate good information, so
thanks.
Ms. Limon. Thank you.
So, for over 100 years, USCRI has protected the rights and
addressed the needs of persons in voluntary or forced migration
worldwide. We are proud to do this work in the United States
because our country is the world leader in providing protection
to people who need it. This global refugee crisis requires
strong leadership and the United States will inherently make a
statement by our presence or our absence.
For refugees who are the most vulnerable, even after
fleeing their countries: the torture survivors, women at risk
and those with complex medical situations. For those
individuals, resettlement is often the only option. And for
refugees who have languished in refugee camps without the right
to work and with their children denied education, these are the
individuals for whom we stand.
We must not let the heinous acts in Paris make us turn our
backs on children and families when our heritage and our
history is to welcome refugees in the United States.
When I was invited to testify, I went out to our network
and I said, tell me what Syrian refugees that we have resettled
are saying, and I want to share some of their messages with
you.
A Syrian refugee who came to Detroit with his wife and four
children in September wanted everyone to know that he and his
family are so happy to feel and be safe again after arriving in
the United States. He told us, quote, ``I truly appreciate the
kindness of the American people that we witnessed.''
A Syrian family who arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania last
night, told us that they were very happy to finally arrive in
the United States after many years of waiting. The family was
very thankful to be in Erie, Pennsylvania. The father was an
electrician in Syria and he and his wife managed to keep their
children alive while being displaced for almost 3 years. The
father said that he felt an overwhelming sense of relief now
that his children were finally safe.
A Syrian refugee resettled in California had a video and
music shop in Damascus before having to flee with his mother
because of the conflict. They escaped to Lebanon, where they
stayed for 2 years until they were admitted to the United
States as refugees in February of this year. He told us, quote,
``There are many, many innocent people who really need help,''
and he feels so blessed and lucky that he had the opportunity
to resettle to the United States and wishes to see more Syrians
have the ability to come here.
USCRI supports a solutions-based approach. Based on our
experience, we have the following recommendation. We would like
the U.S. refugee programs to be supported through all aspects
of our government and by elected officials as a safe
humanitarian and foreign policy operation. We would like to see
funding for the Department of Homeland Security increased to
maintain the integrity of the security checks. We would like to
see increased support for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to
enhance the integration of newly arrived refugees.
As the former Director of the Federal Office of Refugee
Resettlement, and after a 40-year career--we gave you bad
information there, Mr. Chairman--of helping refugees, I am
proud and confident that our resettlement program works and is
in the best interest of America.
Thank you for holding this hearing and thank you for
listening to our point of view.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Ms. Limon.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, let me start with you. You talked
about the refugee flow--I believe this is what you said. Let me
just clarify this. You think the refugee flow is a public
relations disaster for ISIS?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Yes, absolutely, and this is
something that they have made very clear in their own
propaganda. They purport to be the home for Muslims worldwide,
and the fact that people are fleeing from them and that other
Syrians, rather than going from Assad-controlled areas or war-
torn areas, they are going to Europe rather than into ISIS-held
areas is----
Chairman Johnson. That was really the point I was going to
make, because I think in other hearings, other briefings, we
are being told that the refugee flow is not out of ISIS-
controlled areas. It really is, primarily, because of Assad
bombing his own people. It is really the Syrian government's
genocide, his killing his own people, that is really causing
the refugee problem.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. It is out of both. I mean, for
example, if you look at the flow out of Mosul when the
Christians left, that was all because of ISIS. But, yes, I
mean, if you are looking at it, it is not as though most
refugees are fleeing ISIS. I do agree with those
recommendations, or with those assessments. But, let us be
clear. There are refugees fleeing ISIS.
And, the other point, the reason why it is a public
relations disaster for them is because ISIS is right there in
Syria.
Chairman Johnson. They should be flowing into ISIS.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Right, and----
Chairman Johnson. It is such a wonderful place.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Precisely.
Chairman Johnson. Let us talk about the greatest risk.
Again, I think, as we have heard testimony, the vetting process
is redundant. It is pretty robust. As you said, pretty
inefficient if you are trying to sneak people into the United
States, at least----
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Right.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. Less so going into Europe,
with that refugee flow. As I said in my opening statement, I
mean, I view the greatest risk literally as our completely
unsecure borders and people flowing into other countries, then
potentially coming in here. I just want to kind of go down the
list, or down the panel here. What is the greatest risk? Then I
will be asking you, what is the No. 1 thing we should do? Mr.
Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. I think Paris shows that the Schengen Europe
Agreement, in a sense, is the greatest risk, because it is very
unclear that European countries understand who is coming into
other--I mean, so, for instance, the mastermind, his travels
that Daveed laid out. It is still not entirely clear, but it
seems the French did not know what the Belgians knew and they
were not sharing information, probably. So, that is the biggest
problem.
And the secondary problem, then, is the Visa Waiver
Program, which is related to that problem.
And, finally, the big thing that we are missing is a global
database of who these people are. We only know 4,500 of their
names. There are 30,000 of them, and that is--if we do not know
who these people are, everything else is moot.
Chairman Johnson. Again, so the free flow within Europe,
combined with the Visa Waiver Program, creates a real risk for
those--I mean, to America, to our homeland, is the greatest
risk.
Mr. Bergen. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Jenkins.
Mr. Jenkins. First of all, I would agree that you and
Senator McCaskill, I think appropriately, broadened the inquiry
from simply refugees to saying, let us look at the whole thing.
Let us look at refugees, immigration, visa, VWP and border
security and see what are our gaps and what are the most likely
routes for terrorists, and I think there is probably consensus
that the refugee may be the least productive route for them.
I certainly would agree with Peter that a major
vulnerability is Europe, one, because of the numbers. Two,
because they do not have the capability of selecting--these are
people that are arriving and the Europeans are then trying to
sort them out. A third problem is that the Europeans are not
sharing information with each other in these senses. And as a
consequence of that, by the way, I think that either
cooperation within Europe is going to increase or we are going
to see increasing border controls within Europe, which is going
to challenge the European notion of free movement, altogether.
Border controls are going to come back up.
The weakness that I think that we have in our system
overall is that we are dependent on lists of names. We do not
have--in terms of looking at visa, this is--we have a robust
system for interviewing refugees and for screening that, but a
lot of these other things are dependent on a name being on a
list. If we do not have a name on a list, we do not have much
else to go on. It would be useful, at the very least, if we
could develop new ways of looking at this that we can say,
look, there are some of these people that we can clear pretty
fast because of who they are, and there are others that it is
simply going to require a new way of taking a look at this.
Chairman Johnson. In other words, if people have not
created that ripple, you have a problem.
Mr. Jenkins. Right.
Chairman Johnson. I will pick up on this, but I will go to
Senator Heitkamp out of respect for time.
Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to just hang around because I think what you are
talking about is so important, and I think as you have
complimented the Committee, and I share that compliment, or I
share your complimentary statements with the Chairman, I think
we have a great panel here.
And, so, just to kind of begin it, from everything that I
have read in your testimony and what you presented here, would
you say that the focus that we have put, kind of at this point
solely, on the Refugee Resettlement Program is perhaps
misplaced and it has diverted attention from much more critical
security issues that we have? Is that--it seems to be unanimous
on the panel. Just let the record reflect, everyone is nodding
their heads. If you disagree, please weigh in.
And, obviously, you represent a great cross-section of
national security experts. Would you say that your view is kind
of the majority view of people who study national security? So,
you guys almost talked to each other at some point here. Can
you tell me, building on what the Chairman has asked, what
things you think we are missing, that we have not talked about
today?
Obviously, the Visa Waiver Program is on everyone's mind.
Along with Senator Feinstein, we are introducing a bill to
address what we see as gaps. She has been on this for a long
time. Obviously, it is much more timely now, so it will be a
great bipartisan bill. We expect we are going to have a
discussion on it.
But, what are we missing that people within your expertise
today are saying, wow, why do they not get this? And that is
for anyone.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. One of the key things I would
recommend, and I agree with Peter entirely about the greatest
threat in terms of entering--terrorists entering the United
States being the Schengen Zone and VWP. I think the key thing
for me is, in the past, because of the Schengen Agreement,
there is certain information that the United States does not
get from European allies because of that agreement. Over the
course of the past several months, we have seen the virtual
collapse of the Schengen Agreement, which means that our own
leverage with our European allies is at an all-time high.
So, I would strongly recommend, Senators, to talk to U.S.
Customs and Border Protection to figure out what they need,
what information they need from Europeans, and where Schengen,
in the past, has posed a threat to U.S. border security to see
what we might be able to do in bilateral or multilateral
negotiations with our European allies.
Senator Heitkamp. Other things that we have missed.
Mr. Bergen. Well, I will tell you something that has gone
right, which is if you look at ISIS propaganda, they are very
concerned about Turkey now, because the pressure on the Turks
has really reduced, or at least impacted, the foreign fighter
flow. So, any encouragement and/or expertise or aid we can give
to Turks to increase their customs and border patrol would be
very useful, because that is where, overwhelmingly, the foreign
fighters are coming in.
Senator Heitkamp. OK.
Mr. Jenkins. Let me add to a comment by Daveed in terms of
both putting pressure on Europeans, but assisting them, as
well. This is probably going to be more emphasis on bilateral
agreements than on multilateral. There are profound differences
in Europe, policy differences, even philosophical differences
about how to deal with these issues--about intelligence issues,
about privacy issues, about resettlement issues and about
returning foreign fighters, whether they should be charged with
criminal violations or whether they should be rehabilitated and
put back into society.
When you deal with that many differences in a group like
the European Union, it tends to dilute the efforts down to sort
of the least common denominator, and so we really have to work
closely on a bilateral basis to ensure that we are getting the
information that we need for our own national security
interests.
Senator Heitkamp. Go ahead.
Mr. Schwartz. I would just make four very brief points, and
they are a little bit disjointed, since we have been talking
about a lot of different issues.
First, I think support for front-line States is absolutely
critical. I was part of a letter from 22 former officials,
including Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz and former
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and
others, urging an additional allocation of up to $2 billion, in
large measure to support Jordan and Turkey, because they are
experiencing such significant challenges, and that would be a
very valuable symbol of solidarity and support.
My second comment is I agree with the other panelists that
the refugee program is not anywhere near the major threat.
My third and fourth points are that I agree that we need to
take a very close look at the Visa Waiver Program and other
programs, but I also think that we have to accept the fact or
understand the fact, without prejudice to that point about
looking at the Visa Waiver Program, we have to accept the fact
that our strength is also our vulnerability. I mean, our system
of immigration is responsible for creating a superpower.
Without the kind of immigration policies that we have had over
the past century or more, the United States would not have
achieved the kind of economic and political dominance that we
have in the world. And we have been spared some of the very
challenging, dramatically challenging, demographic challenges
that some of our European allies and Japan face. That is our
strength, but it is also our vulnerability.
Ms. Limon. Senator, I think the greatest risk is that we
allow our political discourse and climate in the United States
to make it acceptable to be anti-refugee and anti-immigrant, to
say things that are negative and stereotypical of people,
whereby the mainstream population thinks it is OK to turn our
backs on newcomers.
I think when you look at Europe, you can see the sort of
social isolation that a lot of their immigrant communities live
with day to day, and the strength of America, the beauty of
America, is
that we do not do that, that our values and our ability to
assimilate--and I will use that old fashioned word--we do, in
fact, assimilate new people. By the second and third
generation, they usually cannot speak their grandparents' or
parents' language.
When people are willing to share our values of freedom and
individuality and acceptance and incorporation, they become
Americans, and we native-born people look at them at some point
and go, oh, they are American. I do not know when that shift
takes place, but it takes place. And that ability to
incorporate keeps us from having that group that may turn on us
internally.
And, so, we have to keep that political discourse and have
the leadership to say to the American people--and it is not
easy, because people are different and people do not like
different and it makes everybody uneasy--but it is the
political leadership that have to keep the dialogue in that
positive way that it reinforces the beauty and strength of
America.
Chairman Johnson. And, unfortunately, the past is not a
complete predictor of the future. So, I think that is a real
particular question.
I will start with Mr. Gartenstein-Ross again in terms of
the greatest risk.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. As I said before, I agree with Peter
about the Schengen Agreement and the problems within Europe as
being the greatest immediate risk in terms of terrorist entry.
But, I do want to highlight something else which is very
much related. This hearing, obviously, for very good reason,
has focused on the Islamic State, on ISIS. But our enemy for
the past decade and a half has been al-Qaeda, which has been
pushed from the headlines, and this is not a good thing. Al-
Qaeda today enjoys a lot more freedom of movement than anyone
would have thought possible 5 years ago.
If you look at recent U.N. delistings, including Mohammed
Islambouli, who has been fingered by National Public Radio
(NPR) as a high-level leader in the Khorasan group, you can see
that a lot of the U.N. sanctions are getting peeled back. Al-
Qaeda is again receiving State support in Syria. Its affiliate,
Jabhat al-Nusra, which is part of a coalition called Jaysh al-
Fateh, is getting support from Qatar, from Turkey and from
Saudi Arabia, and I think that we need to pay attention to this
rebranding of al-Qaeda as a more reasonable jihadist force.
This is something that, if we do not pay attention to it
now, I believe we will fully regret this in several years, not
just in terms of immediate entry to the United States, but
ability to operate throughout the world.
Chairman Johnson. Well, for my own part, I always refer to
them as Islamic terrorists, and there are a number of different
variations of that, a number of different groups, but they are
Islamic terrorists and they are at war with civilization.
Mr. Schwartz, what is the greatest threat?
Mr. Schwartz. I am sorry, in terms of----
Chairman Johnson. I guess, I could sign on to former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and
say the greatest threat to our national security is our debt
and deficit. I think that is true.
Mr. Schwartz. I am sorry, is----
Chairman Johnson. Our debt and deficit. I mean, I think
that is true, but this hearing is really about the threat that
we face because of Islamic terrorism, so I think that is--and,
again, we were talking about our vulnerabilities. You were
talking about----
Mr. Schwartz. Yes. I mean, as I said----
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. VWP, those types of things.
I am looking for more specifics from that standpoint.
Mr. Schwartz. Yes. Sure. As I said before, I think my
expertise here is on our refugee programs, in particular, and
to my mind, the refugee programs are far from our greatest
threat. I think they are durable programs with processes----
Chairman Johnson. OK, so you voice your support for that--
--
Mr. Schwartz. Right.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. But where is our greatest
vulnerability within these programs, within our acceptance of
refugees and asylum seekers and immigrants?
Mr. Schwartz. Well, as I said, I think it is clear that the
Visa Waiver Program has greater vulnerabilities than the U.S.
Refugee Resettlement Program, but I am, frankly, not an expert
on all of the immigration programs. But, I can tell you that
the Refugee Resettlement Program, which I know very, very well,
is not one of those.
And, if I could just make one other point, which I made in
my testimony, but I really think it is important. If Members of
the Committee feel that the Department has made the case about
the security procedures in the Refugee Resettlement Program,
you should think long and hard on this issue of additional
legislation because of my concern that it does play right into
the narrative of us against them, our choosing a particular
group and creating greater obstacles when we have a system in
place that is rigorous and responsible.
I think our geopolitical interests require that we reflect
very carefully about that kind of legislation. And even if the
President has promised to veto it, the introduction of it and
the passage of it is very worrisome.
Chairman Johnson. Ms. Limon, do you want to take another
stab at it, or do you want to stand by your----
Ms. Limon. I will just add that since last week, my office
has received many phone calls of people who are extraordinarily
worked up about Syrian refugees, and they will say things like,
``I live in Des Moines. I want the names and addresses of every
Syrian you brought here.'' And that is one of the more polite
things that are said. It has been kind of scary.
And when we look at resettling refugees right now, and, as
I said, someone arrived in Erie last night and people are going
to arrive in Chicago tomorrow and we have State Government
officials saying to us, we want the names and addresses of
these people, and we are like, whoa, what is going on here?
These people are legally admitted to the United States. And are
we--how are we going to protect them? These are people who have
been persecuted, who have been fleeing violence and persecution
because of their race, religion, or membership in an ethnic
group, and they come to America, the land of the free, and we
have to say, you may be persecuted because of your membership
in a particular ethnic group.
It is a very dangerous time, and I will tell you, there are
thousands of people who do this work around the country who are
calling us going, ``What am I supposed to do?''
Chairman Johnson. Which is why I think the certification
process would give the American people the assurance that I
think they probably are looking for. Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. I apologize for being in and out. There is
a lot going on, and I am very much interested in these issues.
I spent a lot of time, as the Chairman knows, on these issues,
and as does he.
Something I said earlier that I think you heard, and I
talked about competing moral imperatives, and one of the moral
imperatives which was reminded to us by Pope Francis a month or
two ago was our obligation to the least of these. When I was
hungry, did you feed Me? When I was naked, did you clothe Me?
When I was thirsty, did you give Me a drink? When I was a
stranger in your land, did you take Me in?
And the admonition--I think the biggest applause line that
he got when he spoke at a joint session of the Congress was
when he invoked the golden rule, that we should treat other
people the way we want to be treated. I think everybody stood
on their feet and applauded for a long time.
And, so, we have that moral imperative that faces us
squarely and I am reminded of every day, those imperatives, as
we confront this challenge. But we also have a moral imperative
to 325 million people who live here and who want to be able to
live to a ripe old age and have a good life. And, the question
is, can we do both? Can we do both? Do we have to be true to
one and not to the other?
Another Committee that I serve on, in fact, one of the
things I was out of the room on was because of my
responsibilities on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
We have oversight over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But,
we are always wrestling with the question, in that Committee,
of can we have cleaner air, cleaner water, and at the same time
have a stronger economy, or is it a choice of one or the other?
I think it is a Hobson's choice. I think we can have both, and
if we are smart, we will have both.
But, in terms of the moral imperatives, how do we meet both
moral imperatives? How do we meet both moral imperatives,
especially the latter one, to keep people safe, and one of them
is to the rigor of the refugee programs, which is, I think,
pretty well demonstrated now, and we are drilling down on the
Visa Waiver Program to see what is good about that, and it has
certainly improved over time. Is there some more that we can
do? I think so.
One of the things, we have a very senior guy that the
administration has nominated, I think a very good guy, Adam
Szubin. I understand he is the perfect guy and his nomination
is hung up in the Banking Committee for reasons that I do not
understand. He is, I think, the guy who did the financial--sort
of helped bring Iran to its knees on the financial side and cut
off their funding. He did the same thing with North Korea, and
we would like for him to do that with ISIS, too, if we can get
him confirmed.
So, there are some things that we are doing, can be doing,
but just respond, if you would, to my question, please. Thank
you.
Mr. Jenkins. We have become a risk-averse, security-
obsessed nation. That is understandable. I mean, we are still
in the shadow of 9/11. We are dealing with these extraordinary
times and threats. But we cannot remove all risk, and we have
been doing a pretty good job, in terms of our domestic
intelligence, in terms of preventing these attacks and so on.
But we do not get to zero.
The problem is, if we try to get to zero, that has costs in
other directions, costs in terms of real economic costs if we
were to abolish the Visa Waiver Program, costs in terms of
moral costs, in terms of our reputation as a society.
So, I think part of it is, without dismissing the very real
threat, and this is very much a long-term thing, this is the
shape of things to come, but we have to be able to accept that
none of these programs, not one of these, provides us with an
absolute guarantee--no amount of screening, no signatures, or
so on. You can, as the Senate, keep the heat on people on this,
and that is important, because over a period of time, measures
become routinized, people go slack, and you can energize that.
But, we do not get to zero.
Senator Carper. Good. Excellent point.
Others, please.
Mr. Bergen. Can I just make a factual observation? Every
person who has been killed by a jihadi terrorist in this
country has been killed by an American citizen or resident
since 9/11. Refugees have not been involved. I mean, the real
problem, the domestic terrorism problem, is provoked by
homegrown terrorists.
Senator Carper. That is a great point.
Mr. Jenkins. Great point.
Mr. Schwartz. Senator Carper, I certainly agree that the
Refugee Resettlement Program has robust procedures in it to
help ensure the security of Americans, and I also believe that
the Refugee Resettlement Program is the best expression of
American values, the moral imperative.
But let me repeat what I said in my testimony, which is
that I also believe in this particular instance, and in many
others, that the continuation of this program serves vital
national security imperatives. Our burden sharing with front-
line States that are hosting over four million refugees. And
burden sharing with European governments that we are asking to
treat humanely hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. These
are governments that we need in terms of the geopolitical
objectives that we are trying to achieve in Syria and other
places in the world.
And third, and perhaps most importantly, we rebuke the ISIS
narrative of us versus them. Our programs are an expression of
the proposition that it is not the Muslim world and everyone
else. We combat that ISIS narrative day in and day out with our
refugee programs. So, I think we have stakes in these programs
that go far beyond the humanitarian imperatives.
Senator Carper. Wonderful points. Thank you. Thank you all.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Jenkins, you talked about the
intelligence community (IC) being overwhelmed by the volume.
Keep cool. Stay smart. I do not think--no one would dispute
that we cannot turn this into a risk-free world, but these are
threats and I believe these threats are growing. I mean, we
just witnessed this in Paris.
So, if we sit back and play defense the whole time, I do
not think that is particularly smart. How do we go on offense?
I mean, how do we solve the problem then?
Mr. Jenkins. I would not argue for a defensive strategy. I
agree that we do have to--we do have to become more effective
in how we deal with this in Syria. I personally happen to think
that it is not by deploying large numbers of American forces on
the ground. I think the numbers that people mention
underestimate the task. I think that that would become very,
very quickly an unsustainable thing. Can we do other things,
with the air campaign, with increasing the number of special
operations personnel? I think we can even do more creative
things. For example, our efforts to create a guerilla army and
then throw it into battle against ISIS, that has turned out to
be----
Chairman Johnson. It obviously did not work.
Mr. Jenkins. It did not work. However, that does not mean
that competitive recruiting will not work. I am not talking
about throwing people into battle. I am talking about, among
Sunnis that are exposed to ISIL's areas of influence, it may
make more sense for us to recruit them and pay them, in a
sense, just to be on our payroll rather than spending the money
to go after them. Let us provide a place in Syria where we can
bring people on board.
Chairman Johnson. So, let me ask, has the threat grown or
receded over the last year and a half under the current
strategy?
Mr. Jenkins. I would say that in some cases, certainly, we
have checked ISIL's advances.
Chairman Johnson. Yes, but has the threat grown or has it
receded? You are saying the intelligence community is
overwhelmed by the volume. Is not the volume growing?
Mr. Jenkins. The intelligence community in Europe is
overwhelmed by the volume. We are----
Chairman Johnson. And, again, that is----
Mr. Jenkins. We are keeping up with it.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. That is our greatest threat,
is what you are telling us.
Mr. Jenkins. It is.
Chairman Johnson. So, that threat is growing. So, the
strategy currently is not working, so the risk is increasing.
Mr. Jenkins. The risk of terrorism outside is going up.
That, I think, is true for a variety of reasons. In fact, as I
said, even as we have more success on the ground, that threat
outside is going up. So, you cannot connect necessarily--you
cannot look at the threat outside as evidence of failure inside
Syria. That threat can go up even with success inside.
Chairman Johnson. But, again, remember the mission of this
Committee is to enhance the economic and national security of
this Nation. So, you have a destabilized Middle East. You
started stabilizing nations in Europe. That destabilizes the
entire world economy and that also affects our economic
situation, as well.
Mr. Jenkins. It clearly does. So far, though, so far, we
have been able to manage--we have been able to manage this.
This is a matter of, can we improve things as opposed to
fundamentally alter our strategy? So, over a period of time. I
think we have been extraordinarily cautious.
Chairman Johnson. Do you think it is a good thing that Iran
and Russia are gaining greater influence in the Middle East? Is
that a good----
Mr. Jenkins. Russia----
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. Is that good for our
regional security and world peace?
Mr. Jenkins. OK. Russia is not a newcomer to Syria. I mean,
when the Syrian army crossed----
Chairman Johnson. I understand, but its influence is
growing in the Middle East, correct?
Mr. Jenkins. I am not sure that it is.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, do you think that
is a good thing?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. No, I certainly do not think it is a
good thing that either Russian or Iranian influence is growing,
which both of them undoubtedly are.
In terms of the strategy, I think that there are things
that we can do. As Brian said, and this is not a duck from your
question, my direct answer to your question is that the threat
has grown worse in the past year and a half. But, No. 1, if you
look on the ground in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has experienced
about a steady year of losses with one very good week in May,
where they gained Ramadi, Baiji, and Tadmur in Syria. But,
publicizing their losses is very important because they have a
narrative of strength.
And I would say one area where the United States has
clearly failed is it has not publicized their losses, including
their losses outside of Iraq and Syria. They have at least four
major losses in Africa that almost no one is aware of,
including people in Africa. I know this because at an African
Union seminar I was at last month in Namibia, people were
absolutely unaware of all of ISIS's setbacks there.
A second reason why I would say that things have grown
worse is if you look at the terrorism problem writ large,
Tunisia is now fundamentally threatened in ways that it was not
2 years ago. Yemen is falling apart, and that is not an ISIS
issue. There are many other things that are related, and ISIS
has kind of glommed onto that.
But, we have to recognize the overall situation is one
where violent non-State actors, including jihadist violent non-
State actors, are gaining much more ground. This is a real
problem, not just the problem set of Islamic terrorism, but the
problem set of the democratization of violence. We are going to
see much more violence at a sub-State level. So, a lot of these
concerns, including what Senator Carper, I think, very
articulately describes as competing imperatives, they are going
to remain, and this is one reason why, when discourse becomes
so locked and very jaded, as we have recently seen, I think we
do ourselves a disservice if we are not able to reason through
together as one body these very, very difficult issues that we
are going to be grappling with for a long time to come.
Chairman Johnson. Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
On the question of the influence of the Russians and the
Iranians waning, I think one of you maybe said maybe not so
much. Another, I think I understood you to say yes. Actually,
Iran is sort of--talking about competing interests, you have
competing interests there, as you know. You have the one group
led by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard, and you
have another group led by the elected president of the country,
in a country where, I want to say, like, 78 million people, the
average age of the country is 25. And you have a generational
divide there that we will see where they go. Most of the places
where they seem to be involved in the Middle East, it has more
to do with Shia versus Sunni, I think, than anything else.
I want to go back to something, I think it was Mr. Bergen,
that you said, talking about the greatest threats, at least the
greatest threats to us. I do not believe, from what I can tell,
that the greatest threats to us are necessarily with respect to
Syria and ISIS. I do not think they are necessarily related to
those that are going through the Refugee Resettlement Program.
I think we pretty well established that. I am not sure that the
greatest threats are those who are going through a Visa Waiver
Program, or those who come here on a tourist visa, or a student
visa, or some other way that I am not thinking of.
I think you said it, Mr. Bergen. The thing that keeps me up
at night more than anything else is the folks that are here,
homegrown, born here, raised here, in many cases, and they
become radicalized, and they can do great damage from the
inside. Those are the folks that I worry about.
And, in order to address that threat, reduce the threat, a
couple things, and we talked about them, but they bear
reiterating, and one of those--I read a couple of books not
long ago by a woman named Phyllis Schwartz. Do I have that
right? Jessica Stern--not even close. Jessica Stern.
[Laughter.]
Jessica Stern, one dealing with ISIS, another dealing with
terrorism. She went around the world, just met with all kinds
of terrorists. I cannot believe they let her in and just opened
up their hearts to her, but they did. And she--the older book
is the
one--not the ISIS book, the ISIS book is the newer book--but
one of the things she found in talking to all these terrorists,
a lot of them were faith-based, and they--but they were people
who, mostly guys, who had not had a lot of success in their
lives and they were looking for a way into the big time.
And the big time could be to be involved in a military
operation, to be trained, be effective, be a hero, to get
killed and go to heaven and then you would have all these
brides or wives. If they do not, they get paid. They get on
somebody's payroll and make some money. Their families, if they
do die, actually get money from the organization, in this case,
ISIS.
So, one of the points that came to me from reading her
first book was if ISIS is not successful, if they are losing
territory and not gaining territory, if we are cutting them off
financially, they become a whole lot less attractive. In their
social media, they can still pump out the social media, but if
the back story is these guys are faking it, it is like, as you
said in Montana, all hat, no cattle.
So, that is why it is so important--Mr. Chairman, I agree
on this--it is so important to crush these guys, sooner rather
than later, but to do that.
The second piece is we actually have the ability--the
Department of Homeland Security has this ability. We talked a
little about one of the programs that they have that we have
been asked to fund that enables them to run a counter-message
within the Muslim communities, here in our country, where there
are a lot of people and where a bunch, particularly the young
people, are subject to being radicalized, but to have a
countervailing message out there and work with the community
there to make sure that that is an effective message, an
effective message.
So, those are a couple of thoughts that I would leave with
us. Do you all want to react to any of that? If you do, please
do. If you do not, that is OK.
Mr. Schwartz. As a Minnesotan, by way of New York and
Washington, but having spent my last 4\1/2\ years at the
University of Minnesota, I do need to say a word about the
great work of the U.S. Attorney there, Andrew Luger. The
countering violent extremism programs are one element, but what
he has done and what his office has done is engage refugee and
immigrant communities in very significant and substantial ways,
in dialogue and in discussion, helping to understand the
challenges that they confront without sacrificing in any way,
shape, manner, or form the law enforcement imperative of his
office. And, I think it is a real model for the rest of the
country and deserves mention.
Senator Carper. Just a show of hands. On the issue of the
greatest threat that we face to the homeland, whether it is
refugees, VWP folks, travel visas, student visas, homegrown,
does anybody, by a show of hands, also think that the homegrown
threat may be the biggest threat that we face?
[Show of hands.]
Thank you. Four out of five. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. I do want to talk a little bit about the
incentives created. In testimony we heard, and this is pretty
well widely known, more than seven million refugees displaced
within Syria, four million refugees outside, hundreds of
thousands have now flown into Europe. The more that are
accepted in, will not more flow? Is that not a destabilizing--
again, Ms. Limon, you talked about the lack of assimilation.
Part of the problem, I think, in France is that they have, just
around Paris, about a 1.7 million Muslim population, not
particularly assimilated, people that lack futures. And so they
are drawn to this or more easily recruited to this type of
ideology.
So, from my standpoint, the solution certainly is not to
show greater compassion and allow the flow to go because you
are just going to exacerbate the problem. Is that not a
problem? Anybody?
Ms. Limon. Yes, it is a problem. I think it is pretty
unprecedented, as well, since World War II, the idea of all
these people coming in. And I think Europe faces huge
challenges in dealing with this. But I think it is also time--
when Germany, Merkel says, fine, we will bring in--I think they
are bringing in 800,000 people, and she sees that as a benefit
to her country, which I happen to agree with her, but they are
going to have to do this wholeheartedly. And that is, when you
talk about those communities outside Paris, there are second,
third generation Moroccans and other Middle Easterners who live
there who do not feel like they are French, and that is the
beauty----
Chairman Johnson. Again, it is that lack of assimilation--
--
Ms. Limon. That is right.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. The Balkanization of
societies----
Ms. Limon. That is right.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. Which is not a good thing.
Ms. Limon. That is not a good thing.
Chairman Johnson. It is very destabilizing.
Ms. Limon. And Europe has to deal with that and we need to
make sure we do not do that here.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Bergen, I do have to challenge you. I
mean, you talked about all the terrorist attacks being
perpetrated by U.S. citizens, but the Tsarnaev brothers were
not homegrown. I would argue certainly that the 9/11 hijackers
were on visa overstays. That, by the way, is kind of ignoring
the fact that Islamic terrorists were at war with us since at
least the mid-1990s, that did bring--in the end, we had 9/11,
and--
Mr. Bergen. Well----
Chairman Johnson. And, by the way, talking about whether
they are perceived as winners or losers, I mean, you down a jet
3 weeks ago. You have a successful, and I would consider low-
tech, terrorist event in Beirut, I would say another low-tech
terrorist event in Paris. I do push back on the sophistication
of these. People talk about sophisticated, like, it kind of
deludes us. Well, it is too sophisticated. It takes an awful
lot of planning. It seems to me pretty easy to say, here are
the targets. We are going to hit them at zero hour. Take a look
at the weapons, readily available on the black market. I think
the explosives may be a little more complex. But, just speak to
the real threat and the growing threat. Mr. Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. Well, I think you are absolutely right, sir,
the attacks in Paris were not sophisticated, but they were
complex, putting the operation together.
Chairman Johnson. They were organized.
Mr. Bergen. They were highly complex.
The point I was trying to make, sir, since 9/11, yes, the
Tsarnaev brothers came as minors into this country, and the
real problem was that they got radicalized here. They were
perfectly normal. They lived here for 10 years. It was the last
2 years of their existence----
Chairman Johnson. Point taken.
Mr. Bergen [continuing]. That they got radicalized.
Chairman Johnson. OK. Does anybody else want to comment?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Yes. Just, I agree with you. You made
a point about winners and losers. Obviously, this is a point
where ISIS has had a string of successes and, at such a time
trying to have an information-operations campaign around their
losses is just not going to be particularly effective.
But, I do think that there is very strong proof, and I
testified before the Senate about this back in April, that they
have consistently exaggerated their strength, and I do think
that we can do a better job of knocking that down, bearing in
mind that when they have big successes, like these awful
attacks that we have just seen, you are not going to be able to
convince people that they are on the losing side.
Chairman Johnson. No. I would argue ISIS's sophistication
is the use of social media. The way that they are able to
recruit and inspire people to join this barbarity, that takes a
fair amount of sophistication to be able to identify people
willing to blow themselves up. But, the actual attacks
themselves strike me as relatively low-tech, which gives me a
great deal of concern.
Mr. Bergen, did you want to say something?
Mr. Bergen. No. I totally agree.
Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Chairman, can I address the other
question you asked, about incentives.
Chairman Johnson. Sure.
Mr. Schwartz. In most cases, when you are dealing with
migration and it is economic migration, you feel you can, as a
matter of policy and ethics, it is reasonable to create certain
deterrents to undocumented migration. The dilemma in the Syria
case is that, yes, there are seven million internally
displaced, four million refugees, but very few of those are
people who did not have good reason to move, based on
persecution, abuses, or conflict.
Now, traditionally, there are three ways that the cases of
people in that situation are resolved. They can be locally
integrated into the places they flee, they can return to their
country of origin, or they are resettled in a third country,
and traditionally, third country resettlement is really for a
pretty small minority of refugees, and----
Chairman Johnson. Which, again, that is my point. It points
to what the solution should be, which is to attempt to
stabilize the situation in Syria and Iraq, which requires----
Mr. Schwartz. Well, that was----
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. Wiping ISIS off the face of
the earth in terms of their territory.
Mr. Schwartz. But, I think it also----
Chairman Johnson. I do not see how that--I mean, I think
that has to be the solution. I guess I was baffled, Mr.
Jenkins, by your assertion that is going to make it even worse.
Mr. Jenkins. No, it is not that I am saying that, look, do
not go after them because it will make it worse. I am saying
that that is a consequence we have to be prepared for anyway.
That is not a reason not to go after them. We have to continue,
and indeed increase, our efforts to destroy ISIL. I have never
been equivocal about going after ISIL. There is no option.
There is no option that allows the continued existence of ISIL.
And I would agree with Daveed, I do not make these distinctions
between a bad ISIL and a slightly less bad al-Qaeda. We are
talking about an ideology----
Chairman Johnson. It is Islamic terrorism.
Mr. Jenkins. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. And we, I think, as a civilized world, it
is about time we remain--we begin or become completely, 100
percent committed to defeating them. And I realize it is a
long-term process, but----
Mr. Jenkins. That is the point.
Chairman Johnson [continuing]. We have taken care of them
in one situation and said, OK, we have kind of mopped that up,
and we forget about it.
Mr. Jenkins. No, that is the point here, that, first of
all, this is about this type of ideology, No. 1, that it--that
we must destroy the military formations. I cannot tell you that
we will ever change people's souls or beliefs. There are still
Nazis in the world that believe in Nazism. But we can destroy
these organizations, and, hell, I have been the Senator Cato of
this in terms of repeating regularly that, furthermore, al-
Qaeda and ISIL must be destroyed.
However, we have to accept that this is going to be a very
long task and, therefore--and, therefore--pick our way through
this in a way that we can sustain it in the long run and not do
things that will immediately erode both international and
domestic public support and not do things that are going to be
counterproductive. So, this is not about going after them. This
is about how we go after them.
Chairman Johnson. Yes. I think we are on the same page
here. It requires, again, the 100 percent commitment by the
civilized world to understand the reality of this, it is not
going away, and it has to be destroyed.
Mr. Jenkins. Absolutely.
Chairman Johnson. Anybody else----
Mr. Schwartz. Well, I would only say that there is nothing
inconsistent between that objective and the efforts to bring
together the major powers that are so dramatically impacting
the situation on the ground in Syria today. I credit the
administration for the efforts it is making. If that does not
happen, then the humanitarian crisis that really overlays this
whole situation will just be continued, because however
desirable these objectives are, the destruction of ISIS, that
is a long-term proposition, and right now, there is an
imperative to chart out some sort of disposition of the
situation in Syria and to address the humanitarian crisis.
Chairman Johnson. I would say the imperative is to make it
not so long-term. I would say the imperative is to shorten the
term of when we finally do achieve basic victory.
But, anyway, let me give everybody a chance to kind of
summarize. I have taken enough of your time. And we will start
with you, Ms. Limon.
Ms. Limon. Thank you. Senator, I was just going to add
that, as we have already agreed, the majority of the refugees
are actually fleeing the government of Syria and Assad----
Chairman Johnson. Right.
Ms. Limon [continuing]. And their actions. And having spent
my entire career trying to help refugees fleeing bad
governments, I am really wishing we would start putting our
attention on those actions--not to take away from destroying
ISIS and al-Qaeda and the rest of it, that is a good thing.
But, it is also--when does the international community punish
governments who have bad policies that have people fleeing? We
have tens of thousands of Eritreans fleeing what is going on
inside there. I could give you a whole laundry list. I will not
take your time. When do we have policies where we say, we have
to go to the source of this----
Chairman Johnson. I would say, when America leads.
Ms. Limon. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Schwartz.
Mr. Schwartz. The issues of this hearing have been many and
varied and quite fascinating. The issue of the day is the
legislation that was just enacted in the House of
Representatives, and I know you have expressed your
perspectives on it. I would only ask that if you and other
members have a reasonable degree of confidence that the
testimony of the administration was persuasive in terms of the
kind of security measures that are in place, I would ask that
you consider all of the implications of this legislation in
terms of its implications with respect to our friends, our
allies, governments, and people that are listening very, very
closely to what comes out of the U.S. Congress and the
administration. I have expressed my views on this----
Chairman Johnson. Right.
Mr. Schwartz [continuing]. Early in the hearing, so you
know----
Chairman Johnson. I generally do try and consider
everything. I think a simple certification provides the
American people the type of assurance that all of these
redundant safeguards and all of those vetting processes are
actually done. And, like I say, we require certification from
CEOs under Sarbanes-Oxley----
Mr. Schwartz. But my question is, why target this
particular program. the one that is least----
Chairman Johnson. Because hundreds of people have been
slaughtered in the last 3 weeks.
Mr. Schwartz [continuing]. Necessary in the----
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Well, I thought this was a strong
conversation. As Eric said, the topics were many and varied. We
have talked at great length about the primary topic, which is
the risks of refugee resettlement. We had a consensus on this
panel. So, let me just point to a couple of things that relate
to some of the last rounds of questioning.
I think one thing that I would love to see the legislature
exercise more oversight over is our CIA program for arming
Syrian rebels. A lot of the recent revelations are
extraordinarily disturbing, and I think that they are making
the situation worse in terms of the primary topic that we are
talking about, which is refugees. It also is something which I
think is at a disservice to our strategic interests.
The second thing I will say is, we talked about winners and
losers, and that is another area where I also think that the
legislature could play a very strong role. This, obviously, is
a time when ISIS has a number of prominent wins in terms of
awful, deadly attacks. They are also experiencing some
significant losses, the loss of Sinjar, for example, and their
major holding, their major victory in the past year, Ramadi, is
now increasingly threatened. I think being able to publicize
that is important.
The final thing, because you asked about the influence of
Iran and Russia, is Iran has been at the forefront of pushing
back ISIS and this is not a fully positive thing at all. The
atrocities being committed by the pro-Iran Shia militias
against Sunnis is the kind of thing that lays the groundwork
for this being a tragedy that will continue ad infinitum. So,
that is another thing that is not getting attention right now
that richly deserves it. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Appreciate your insights. Mr. Jenkins.
Mr. Jenkins. We do not like to use the term, or many people
do not, but we are at war. We have been at war for a long time
on this. That means we are going to incur costs, we are going
to incur risks in this. We cannot say, on the one hand, we are
committed to a war and we are going to go after these people,
and on the other hand treat every time we confront a risk as if
it is an outrage and a failure. And, so, if we are going to be
as determined as I believe you are, then that has consequences,
and it has consequences not just for what we do in terms of
going after ISIL, but how this Nation ought to be--ought not to
be panicked into fear as we go forward with this, which
sometimes I think we tend to do.
Chairman Johnson. Which, of course, the purpose of this
hearing--I think we have done a pretty good job--is laying out
the reality and getting a broad spectrum of viewpoints on this
thing, and we have done a pretty good job of it. Mr. Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. Chairman Johnson, I could not agree more. I
mean, this has been an excellent hearing. A lot of light was
shone on an issue that is being quite politicized.
One thing that we do not want to be doing is coming back
here in 2019 having the same hearing about Afghanistan, because
the plan to draw down to zero in Afghanistan is basically not a
good idea, and hopefully we do not--we have already seen how
this video plays out. ISIS already has a small presence in
Afghanistan, which is growing. So, we do not want to make the
same mistake that we have made in Iraq.
Chairman Johnson. Well, thank you, Mr. Bergen.
I really want to thank all the witnesses. I come from a
manufacturing background. I like information. I like facts. I
hate demagoguery. So, all of you, and the previous panel, too,
I really do appreciate the administration--this was a very fast
turnaround for the administration to provide us witnesses and I
truly appreciate that, and I think it inured to their benefit
on this issue. So, again, I appreciate all of you for bringing
forth some good information for the American people to hear.
With that, this hearing record will remain open for 15
days, until December 4 at 5 p.m., for the submission of
statements and questions for the record.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:03 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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