Conservatives Sound Alarm over Danger of Importing Palestinian Refugees

A growing number of conservatives are warning against accepting Palestinian refugees amid rising terrorism threats and an ongoing illegal immigration crisis. On Saturday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) told supporters at a rally in Iowa, “I don’t know what Biden’s gonna do, but we cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees. … You don’t fly people and import them into the United States of America.” He continued, “We’ve got some serious problems in this country. We’ve allowed a lot of these problems to fester. But my view is very simple: If you don’t like this country, if you hate America, you should not come to this country. We’ve got to start being smart about this.”

DeSantis told reporters at a press event that neighboring Arabic nations should “step up” to take in Palestinian refugees. He said, “We cannot be absorbing people coming from Gaza to the United States of America. All those Arab countries for years have not done anything with respect to helping Palestinian Arabs. And so now’s the time for them to step up. They should do that.” He added, “But Egypt should open the gates, Saudi [Arabia] should help out, and that should do, but we cannot import to the United States.”

Republicans in Congress are also acting to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t import Palestinian refugees en masse. According to Breitbart News, Reps. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) have introduced legislation to block the Biden administration from issuing visas to those with Palestinian passports and bar the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from importing Palestinians via its parole program. Ogles said in a statement, “At a time when the threat of terrorism is not only grotesquely on display but being encouraged and justified, it is critical that we do our best to ensure the security of our nation.”

The bill, entitled the “Guaranteeing Aggressors Zero Admission” (GAZA) Act, is already garnering support in Congress. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have all agreed that the U.S. should not be accepting Palestinian refugees. In comments to the New York Post, Cotton said that Iran “should be responsible for refugees” coming out of Palestine, not the U.S. Similarly, Rubio said, “The U.S. is the most generous nation in the world, but we are in no position to accept additional refugees, especially from a region with as high a risk of terrorism, given our nation’s inability to secure our own border or vet those who are already here.”

This push to block progressive Democrats from importing Palestinian refugees into the U.S. comes as American law enforcement officials — including FBI Director Christopher Wray — warn of the threat Islamist terrorism poses to the U.S. and the vulnerability of America’s wide-open southern border. On Friday night’s edition of “Washington Watch,” Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, called the largely-unenforced southern border “the greatest national security threat to America.”

“The national government would like you to think that we’ve got problems all over the world that we need to go and fix for other people,” Lamb said. “The reality is, the greatest threat to America is happening right at our southern border. … I think the amount of people we’ve allowed to come into this country is staggering, and I think it’s a ticking time bomb.”

Lamb continued to explain that thousands of military-aged men are illegally entering the U.S. from countries “that we should be very concerned with,” such as China and Russia and countries in the Middle East and West Africa, where Islamist extremism is rife. He also reported that Border Patrol agents are so overwhelmed with the amount of illegal immigrants crossing the border that they can only vet about 5% of them, leaving the other 95% unvetted. As he warned, “We have no idea who they are or whether they present a national security threat to us, and that should be very alarming to every American.”