Texas halting effort to keep out Syrians

Martin Cominsky leads the Houston office of Interfaith Ministries, an organization that also has experience working with refugees, and thinks the arguments made by Texas’ officials don’t make much sense.

In a suit filed Wednesday, the state says it wasn’t adequately consulted over refugee placement and asked the court system to immediately block the resettlement of any Syrian refugees in Texas.

“Though we anticipate New York City will only be a temporary home for these families while the state of Texas pursues a baseless attempt to resist their resettlement in the state, we welcome them with open arms to the city of immigrants”, de Blasio said.

The U.S. government joined an global resettlement group in asking a federal judge in Dallas to reject Texas’ request to block Syrian refugees from coming to this state.

The state says it needs to assess whether the refugees might represent a threat, especially in the wake of the Paris massacre perpetrated by ISIS militants just three weeks ago.

ACLU attorneys who filed separately on behalf of the refugee group called the Texas lawsuit “utterly meritless”. Those refugees will include twelve children between the ages of two and fifteen, four parents, two grandparents and a Syrian woman whose mother now lives in Houston. Abbott, and other governors and politicians across the US, contend that Islamic State terrorists could be among those refugees.

In a statement, Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state dropped its request for a temporary restraining order because it received more information from the federal government about the first group of Syrians scheduled to arrive next week.

The International Rescue Committee, the relief agency resettling the refugees, filed a separate lawsuit against the state asserting that Texas could not discriminate against refugees based on nationality.

By the end of the week, 21 additional Syrian refugees should be resettled in the state since the controversy broke out.

Despite Abbott’s directive, several resettlement agencies have said they plan to continue aiding Syrian refugees, and it appears the International Rescue Committee’s Dallas branch was the first scheduled to resettle any such refugees. “While we remain concerned about the federal government’s overall refugee vetting process, we must ensure that Texas has the seat at the table that the Refugee Act requires”.

Court documents by the federal government outlined plans to resettle members of the family of Faez al Sharaa, a Syrian who came to Richardson earlier this year.

The decisions in the injunction lawsuit and the various other lawsuit linked to Syrian refugee resettlement could set precedents for whether state governors have any legal means to bar resettlement.

The IRC, a non-profit agency, said in its response that a federal court rule against an emergency injunction it says could “severely harm” the work it is doing.

“It’s not clear what individual states can do to keep refugees out”.