How did a Reuters reporter get tipped off that the deal was fizzling?
Some men in Australian detention centers are talking to the press.
By a ‘refugee’ with a pipeline to western media!
Makes you wonder if these ‘refugees’ will be trouble-makers if they ever get to America.
This news should not come as a shock since we did reach the 50,000 CEILING last week(for FY17) and these ‘refugees’ likely have no “bona fide relationships” with anyone in America or with federal contractors (except maybe the IRC could claim a relationship?).
The story is from AAP (Australia Associated Press):
US officials interviewing refugees held in an Australian-run offshore detention centre have left the facility abruptly, throwing further doubt over a plan to resettle many of the detainees in America.
US officials halted screening interviews and departed the Pacific island of Nauru on Friday, two weeks short of their scheduled timetable and a day after Washington said the United States had reached its annual refugee intake cap.
“US (officials) were scheduled to be on Nauru until July 26 but they left on Friday,” one refugee told Reuters, requesting anonymity as he did not want to jeopardise his application for US resettlement.
In the United States, a senior member of the union that represents refugee officers at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a Department of Homeland Security agency, told Reuters his own trip to Nauru was not going forward as scheduled.
[….]
The Australian Immigration Department declined to comment on the whereabouts of the US officials or the future of a refugee swap agreement between Australia and the United States, which President Donald Trump earlier this year branded a “dumb deal”.
An indefinite postponement of the deal would have significant repercussions for Australia’s pledge to close a second detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus island on October 31.
Only 70 refugees, less than 10 per cent of the total detainees held in the camp, have completed US processing.
Sure Malcolm, you got a deal! The US will take over 1,000 of your rejected asylum seekers (mostly from terror-producing Muslim countries) and you will take some undetermined number of Central Americans, mostly Catholics, who are not refugees and who are safe in Costa Rica—what a deal!
“The US deal looks more and more doubtful,” Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said.
Former US President Obama agreed a deal with Australia late last year to offer refuge to up to 1250 asylum seekers.
[On the backs of US taxpayers!—ed]
The Trump administration said it would only honour the deal to maintain a strong relationship with Australia, and then only on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.
[On the backs of communities that must absorb these men from terror hot spots—ed]
In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a centre in Costa Rica, where the United States has taken in a larger number of people in recent years.
[Any fake refugees in Costa Rica are not our problem—ed]
The swap is designed, in part, to help Australia close both Manus and Nauru, which are expensive to run and have been widely criticised by the United Nations and others over treatment of detainees.
[And American taxpayers and communities get the short end of the stick—ed]
[….]
The majority of the detainees interviewed on both Manus and Nauru by US officials in April are from Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan. ...
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