Refugee deal: US officials stop screening refugees from Nauru
The United States officials have stopped screening refugees seeking resettlement in the US. However, as noted by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, officials from the US Department of Homeland Security will return to Nauru to carry out “extreme vetting.”
The vetting comes as part of the refugee deal struck between former US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The deal, according to which 1,250 refugees were to be resettled, has been described by Donald Trump as “dumb.”
Several refugees currently imprisoned on Manus Island and Nauru are natives of countries included in Trump’s travel ban list. In an executive order signed by Trump, people from seven Muslim-majority countries were denied entry to the US.
While officials from the US visited Nauru within days following the announcement of the deal in November, they left this week without offering clarity on the deal’s fate. "I don't have any comment to make in relation to when US officials will be on Nauru next. There have been officials there who have left ... in the last couple of days and we would expect other officials to be there in due course,” Dutton said.
"But there is a lot of work being done at an officials level with people from my department and the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State in the US, but it's not something that I have anything to comment on," he added.
As reported by AAP (via 9News), more than 1,500 refugees among 2,077 asylum seekers are currently located in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Around 1,130 asylum seekers, including women and children, live in Nauru. Nearly 820 men were housed in the Manus facility and 127 male asylum seekers live in other places in Papua New Guinea.
"It's an issue for the United States under the agreement as to who they take and the way in which they conduct their vetting, so I don't have any comment in relation to the US process," Dutton said. "Our desire is to get people off Nauru and Manus as quickly as possible.”
In his first conversation with Turnbull, Trump accused the prime minister of sending “the next Boston bombers” to the United States, as reported by the Washington Post. The phone call was described as the “worst phone call so far” in the day. The conversation, which was meant to last for an hour, was cut short by the US president in 25 minutes.
