After the governors of Michigan and Alabama declared on Sunday that they would be blocking Syrian refugees from resettlement within their states, the measure spread wildly across the country, with more than half the nation's governors taking up the call by Tuesday morning.
The governors of 27 states are now saying that they oppose letting Syrian refugees within their borders, CNN reports. All but one of them, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, are Republicans.
The movement comes in the wake of Friday's ISIS-linked terrorist attacks in Paris. Investigators said on Sunday that one of the bombers carried Syrian identification papers, although they were possibly forged, CNN reports.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot made his case in a letter to President Obama. "A Syrian 'refugee' appears to have been part of the Paris terror attack," he wrote. "American humanitarian compassion could be exploited to expose Americans to similar deadly danger. The reasons for such concerns are plentiful."
Cecillia Wang, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants' Rights Project, responded to the governors' movement in a statement on Monday.
Some politicians have attempted to fabricate a link between the tragedy in Paris and the resettlement of Syrian refugees to the United States. Making policy based on this fear mongering is wrong for two reasons. It is factually wrong for blaming refugees for the very terror they are fleeing, and it is legally wrong because it violates our laws and the values on which our country was founded.
In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes also addressed concerns about security screenings for refugees:
We have very extensive screening procedures for all Syrian refugees who have come to the United States. There is a very careful vetting process that includes our intelligence community, our National Counter Terrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, so we can make sure that we are carefully screening anybody that comes to the United States.
As much as some governors might wish to determine who settles in their states, the U.S. constitution does not actually grant them that power. Under the 1980 Refugee Act, the federal government has the authority to place refugees anywhere in the country.
"Legally, states have no authority to do anything because the question of who should be allowed in this country is one that the Constitution commits to the federal government," American University law professor Stephen I. Vladeck explained to CNN. "So a state can't say it is legally objecting, but it can refuse to cooperate, which makes things much more difficult."
GOP contenders Jeb Bush and Texas Sen.Ted Cruz proposed a slightly different, and wholly noxious, approach to the situation: only accept Syrian refugees who are Christian and reject the Muslim ones.
President Obama, who announced in September plans to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees, criticized the notion of a religious filter during the G20 Leaders Summitt in Turkey on Monday.
When I hear a political leader suggesting that there should be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war torn country is admitted... when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that is shameful. We don't have religious tests to our compassion.
Governor Jack Markell of Delaware was among the handful of politicians actively standing apart from the refugee-banners, declaring his state's plans to accept those fleeing the violent chaos of their homeland. "It is unfortunate that anyone would use the tragic events in Paris to send a message that we do not understand the plight of these refugees, ignoring the fact that the people we are talking about are fleeing the perpetrators of terror," he said in a statement, according to CNN.
