Terrorists for the Islamic State (ISIS) will not be returning to the United States thanks to a travel ban that has banned nearly all immigration from a handful of terrorist-ridden counties, President Trump said on Sunday.
While announcing that the U.S. Military had captured and killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump said ISIS terrorists fleeing Syria will not be stepping foot in America, citing his “very effective” travel ban that was found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court last year.
“They’re 8,000 miles away,” Trump said. “Now maybe they can get here, but we’ve done very well with homeland security and the ban which by the way is approved by the United States Supreme Court, as you know.”
“We have a very effective ban,” Trump continued. “It’s very hard for people to come to our country. But it’s many thousands of miles away.”
Trump blasted the leaders of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom for refusing to take back their ISIS terrorists, declaring that he will not allow the American taxpayer to subsidize the cost of detaining terrorists who did not come from the U.S. He said:
The European nations have been a tremendous disappointment because I personally called … ‘Take your ISIS fighters’ and they didn’t want them. They said we don’t want them. They came from France, they came from Germany, they came from the U.K. They came from a lot of countries. And I actually said to them ‘If you don’t take them, I’m going to drop them right on your border and you can have fun capturing them again.’ [Emphasis added]
The United States taxpayer is not going to pay for the next 50 years … we’re not going to pay tens of billions of dollars because we were good enough to capture people that want to go back to Germany, France, the U.K., and other parts of Europe. And they can walk back. They can’t walk to our country. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, Trump’s travel ban has been the most successful legal immigration reform that the president has enacted into law. Through the refugee resettlement program — which Trump has cut down to the lowest admission rate in history — less than 7,000 refugees from Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have been admitted to the U.S. since Trump was inaugurated.
Specifically, the U.S. has admitted only one refugee from Libya, 10 refugees from Chad, 1,335 refugees from Iran, more than 2,800 refugees from Iraq, 21 refugees from Yemen, and nearly 2,600 refugees from Syria since January 20, 2017.
The vast majority of these refugees — 5,345 of the 6,830 admissions — were brought to the U.S. in 2017 when Trump’s travel ban was being challenged in court. In 2018, less than 250 refugees from travel ban countries were admitted along with less than 1,300 admitted this year.
Compare these figures to former President Obama’s refugee admissions from travel ban countries between January 2014 and October 2016, when almost 64,000 refugees were brought to the U.S. Across the last three years of the Obama administration, more than 15,600 refugees arrived to the U.S. from Syria — more than double the total number of refugees admitted from travel ban countries in Trump’s first three years in office.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.