WORLD NEWS:Trump to resume granting US entry to refugees

The Trump administration is to resume refugee admissions while introducing more rigorous screening procedures and continuing largely to bar individuals from 11 countries that the US views as a security threat, it announced on Tuesday.“The security of the American people is our highest priority,” said Jennifer Higgins, associate director for refugee, asylum and international operations with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. US officials will collect more information on potential refugees, including employment history and the names of close relatives, and will scour their social media posts to verify application details. Citizenship and immigration services officers will be added to overseas posts to intensify scrutiny of potential refugees. Under Donald Trump’s revised travel ban, refugee admissions were halted in June in a move that the president said was designed to protect Americans from terrorist attack. That 120-day pause expired on Tuesday, which the president marked with a new executive order restarting the refugee programme. But most admissions from 11 “high-risk” nations will be frozen for a further 90-day review so that officials from the state department, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community can determine whether even tighter measures are needed for individuals from those countries, officials said. Individuals from those 11 countries may still be granted entry to the US but only after long case-by-case processing that demonstrates their presence in the country is deemed to be in the national interest and poses no security threat, officials said.Officials declined to identify the 11 nations. But Refugees International said they almost certainly accounted for the majority of recent refugee admissions.
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Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International, said that countries such as Iraq and Syria were likely to be on the list and criticised the administration’s move as “another unreasonable ban that primarily affects Muslims”.
In March, the president said that “more than 300 persons who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation”.
Since 1980, the US has admitted more than 3m refugees; more than 1m have entered the country since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.