Trump Signs Order to Restrict Refugees from 7 Countries But Not Saudi Arabia

When the data don't fit, ignore them, suppress them. And most importantly, keep working the fear.

How Stephen Miller Single-Handedly Got the U.S. to Accept Fewer Refugees

When evidence emerged that didn’t suit Miller’s aims, he squelched it. In March, the White House had asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study the costs of refugee resettlement. The department returned with a study, in July, showing that the revenue generated by refugees in the form of local, state, and federal taxes exceeded the costs of resettling them by sixty-three billion dollars. According to the Times, Miller suppressed the study and demanded that H.H.S. recalculate the numbers. Two of the White House officials told me they’d heard that Miller had given H.H.S. strict instructions at the outset. “The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President,” he had told people at the agency. (The White House denied that Miller was involved with the H.H.S. report.)

“He shut down the U.S. government’s democratic approach to decision-making,” a State Department official told me. “He suppressed evidence that was important to consider in determining a refugee number that would be beneficial to our national-security interest. We’re not talking about reports written by outside groups. We’re talking about evidence being generated from within the federal bureaucracy, documents generated from within the government.” Miller and his team at the Domestic Policy Council heavily edited several discussion papers outlining policy considerations, according to one of the White House officials. Statistics were cherry-picked. “We’d get them back from D.P.C., and they were eighty-five-per-cent different,” the official said, referring to papers generated by the N.S.C. staff. “D.P.C. would just sit down and write their own paper. They put in a lot of spurious statistics. Things like: refugees are thirty times more likely than the general population to commit a terrorist act.” According to the official, many of the statistics Miller’s team favored came from the Center for Immigration Studies, an influential anti-immigration think tank. (The White House denied that Miller had a role in editing policy papers.) When officials pushed back against these kinds of changes, Miller would point to the backlog of asylum cases at D.H.S. and argue that the refugee program was unsustainable. All four officials believed this argument was disingenuous. “This was a manipulation to get the result he wanted,” one White House official told me. “He basically just had a political agenda: to limit the number of foreign nationals who come into our country.”

 

Well, if the facts don't support your policy, ignore 'em and make up your own facts that do...

Team Trump Bypassed DHS Analysts to Produce Bogus Terror Report

https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-...ogus-terror-report?source=twitter&via=desktop

 

this underscores the weakness / ignorance / incompetence of the useful idiot occupying the WH,
being held hostage by a 32-yr old suburban elite from Calif, w a Duke education.