c. 2006 Religion News Service
Advocacy groups are pressuring Congress to take broader action to alleviate the plight of refugees who have been caught in a tangle of new regulations designed to keep terrorists from entering the United States.
Refugee Council USA, which includes numerous faith-based organizations, estimates that as many as 20,000 refugees worldwide are being denied asylum in the United States because their activities fall within broad new U.S. definitions of helping terrorist organizations. Many of the refugees, from countries like Myanmar, Colombia, Liberia, and Cuba, are living in refugee camps in other countries.
Aid groups say many refugees are innocent victims kept in limbo by provisions of the USA Patriot Act passed in 2001 and especially the Real ID Act of 2005.
Part of the Real ID Act was designed to keep people who had supported terrorist organizations from entering the United States. But the definition used was broad enough to also apply to people in war-torn countries who supplied trivial support to militias and other groups while under threat of injury or death.
Ralston Deffenbaugh, president of the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said that in some cases, women have given livestock, water, or food to gunmen who have raided their homes and threatened to rape or kill them. That kind of contribution is all it takes under America’s new definitions of giving “material support” to a terrorist group.
“The impact of it has been that we are blocking the entry now of people who are themselves victims of persecution,” Deffenbaugh said.
The House has voted to extend for three years economic sanctions against Myanmar, a country that is ruled by a military dictatorship and which has produced thousands of refugees.
Deffenbaugh said some refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma) may never be able to gain asylum in the U.S. because they have fought against the dictatorship.
In May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a first-of-its-kind waiver to allow about 9,300 Myanmar refugees at a camp in Thailand to go through a screening process that could result in asylum for some in America or elsewhere. The waiver does not apply to Myanmar refugees in other camps.
“For those of us from the faith-based agencies, (the issue) raises a profoundly moral question,” Deffenbaugh said. “How many innocent victims are we willing to have in this war on terrorism?”
