Fact Checker: Trump’s Refugee Policy Isn’t Really Like Obama’s Or Something

Glenn Kessler attempts to “fact check” a Trump statement, and highlights his partisanship and Trump Derangement Syndrome

Trump’s facile claim that his refugee policy is similar to Obama’s in 2011
There are several important differences between the two refugee policies.

“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months.”
—President Trump, statement on executive order, Jan. 29, 2017

In justifying his controversial executive order halting travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries, President Trump claimed that President Barack Obama did the same thing in 2011. But the comparison is a bit facile.

Here’s what happened in 2011.

Here’s what really happened. The Credentialed Media didn’t bother to investigate the issue for years. There were no unhinged and apoplectic opinion pieces and editorials. They were good little lapdogs. But, the idea here is to try and paint the orders as totally different, and that the Iraqi one was totally different.

The only news report that we could find that referred to a six-month ban was a 2013 ABC News article that included this line: “As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News — even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets.”

And that right there should put the Credentialed Media into a disgrace timeout. Before Kessler trotted out this “fact check,” he gave it a whirl on Twitter, and was beaten like a rented mule.

@seanmdav @FDRLST two big differences: 1) pause was not announced at the time, done quietly. reporters only found out years later. 2) not based on religion.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 28, 2017

Your first rationalization here is a massive indictment of media performance under Obama. https://t.co/7KPS8G06lo

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 28, 2017

Boom.

Anyway, Kessler goes through his “argument”, leading up to

So what’s the difference with Trump’s action?

First, Obama responded to an actual threat — the discovery that two Iraqi refugees had been implicated in bomb-making in Iraq that had targeted U.S. troops. (Iraq, after all, had been a war zone.) Under congressional pressure, officials decided to reexamine all previous refugees and also impose new screening procedures, which led to a slowdown in processing new applications. Trump, by contrast, issued his executive order without any known triggering threat. (His staff has pointed to attacks unrelated to the countries named in his order.)

Apparently, Glenn is not familiar with all the goings on in Europe. All the rapes, sexual assaults, crimes, the spread of hardcore extremist Islam, etc and so on, along with several attacks and stopped attacks by the “refugees.”

Second, Obama did not announce there was a ban on visa applications. In fact, as seen in Napolitano’s answer to Collins, administration officials danced around that question. There was certainly a lot of news reporting that visa applications had been slowed to a trickle. But the Obama administration never said it was their policy to halt all applications. Even so, the delays did not go unnoticed, so there was a lot of critical news reporting at the time about the angst of Iraqis waiting for approval.

So, media incompetence is now a rationale to give Trump…..2 Pinocchios.

Third, Obama’s policy did not prevent all citizens of that country, including green-card holders, from traveling to the United States. Trump’s policy is much more sweeping, though officials have appeared to pull back from barring permanent U.S. residents.

That’s because it didn’t. Glenn should read the actual Executive Order.

And the media wonders why Trump won the election.