Summary
Clearly, the administration decided this was a key talking point for the rollout of its new immigration executive order: that more than 300 refugees are subjects of counterterrorism investigations.
On March 6, President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, revising the version that led to massive confusion around the world and a federal court decision that halted enforcement of the order.
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While the Justice Department did not provide data to support its assertion, it may be deriving data from the Justice Department National Security Division’s list of terrorism and terrorism-related convictions, wrote Shirin Sinnar, an associate law professor at Stanford Law School. Previously, Sessions used this data to claim that hundreds of people convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related activities were foreign-born. Sinnar obtained the division’s list of public or unsealed international terrorism and related convictions from Sept. 11, 2001, to Dec. 31, 2015, through a Freedom of Information Act request.
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Sinnar found this list to be a misleading source to support the administration’s claims about its travel ban. (For more, read the full, detailed report.)
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