Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration last year he was asked about the ongoing plight of Syria’s Christians. He said that Christian refugees would be given priority under his administration.
But a review of the numbers of Syrian Christians admitted to the U.S. since his inauguration shows that those priority promises have not come to pass.
In fact, statistics from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center show that only nine Syrian Christians have been admitted to the U.S. during 2018.
President Trump’s promises to give Syrian Christian refugees a priority were made shortly after his inauguration in an interview with David Brody of CBN News. President Trump decried the Obama administration’s treatment of Syrian Christians:
DAVID BRODY: Persecuted Christians, we’ve talked about this, the refugees overseas. The refugee program, or the refugee changes you’re looking to make. As it relates to persecuted Christians, do you see them as kind of a priority here?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yes.
DAVID BRODY: You do?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: They’ve been horribly treated. Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.
Brody File Exclusive: President Trump Says Persecuted Christians Will Be Given Priority As Refugees: https://t.co/i2gup7aMDF via
— CBN News (@CBNNews) January 27, 2017
I reported on several occasions here at PJ Media on the Obama administration’s anti-Christian policy in the midst of the presidential election, when Trump’s call for a moratorium on refugees from terrorist states was being hotly discussed.
But the Trump administration has continued those discriminatory policies.
I noted in an article here at PJ Media last October that only 37 Syrian Christians had been admitted from his inauguration to that time. Ultimately, according to the State Department’s figures, only 39 were admitted by his administration in 2017. That represented 1.9 percent of all Syrian refugees admitted by the Trump administration in 2017.
Iraq’s Christian community, which also suffered the brunt of the Islamic State’s takeover of ancient Christian homelands in northern Iraq in June 2014, has only had 18 admitted to the U.S. as refugees in 2018.
Since 2014, I have been reporting from Egypt on the waves of attacks targeting that country’s Coptic Christian community — the largest Christian community in the Middle East, representing more than half of those in the entire region.
Unfortunately, despite suicide bombings targeting Coptic Christian Palm Sunday services last year, massacres of Coptic pilgrims traveling to remote monasteries for retreat, and virtually the entire Coptic Christian community being run out the Sinai Peninsula by targeted killings and threats by the Islamic State in that area, not a single Coptic Christian has been admitted to the U.S. during the entire Trump administration.
I reported last year that during the entire Obama administration — as attacks of Egypt’s Coptic Christian community skyrocketed — only 22 Coptic Christians were admitted as refugees. In 2013 and 2014, as the Muslim Brotherhood — who had been backed by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department — waged a terror campaign targeting Christians in Egypt, the Obama administration didn’t admit a single Egyptian Christian.
That policy ignoring the Coptic Christian community has clearly been continued under the Trump administration.
The U.S. is not the only Western country ignoring the plight of Middle Eastern Christians.
As was reported just a month ago, in January-March 2018 as the UK admitted 1,112 Syrian refugees, not a single one was a Christian.
Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in the UK in the first three months of this year, the Home Office has admitted https://t.co/NbAedbKLxn
— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) July 29, 2018
In fact, Prime Minister Teresa May’s government declined the applications of four Syrian Christians who had been recommended for resettlement by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees.
It seems clear that the rhetoric by Western political leaders, including President Trump, about the plight of Middle Eastern Christians, hasn’t matched the reality of those Christians being granted refuge.
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My previous reporting on Middle East Christian refugees:
Aug 1, 2016: Obama Admin ALREADY Discriminates Against Syrians — if They’re Christians
Sept 30, 2016: Syrian Refugee U.S. Arrivals in September: 1825 Muslims, 22 Non-Muslims (1.1 Percent)
Feb 13, 2017: More Coptic Christians Murdered the Past Two Months Than Admitted as Refugees During Obama’s Presidency
Oct 19, 2017: Muslim Ban? Tillerson’s State Department STILL Discriminates Against Syrian Christian Refugees
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