Fewer than 5,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in the United States, and none have turned out to be ISIS fighters, Rep. Pete King said Thursday, refuting claims made by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump that "a lot" of the refugees are members of ISIS.
"I think the total amount of Syrian refugees is around 4,800," the New York Republican, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Counterterroism, told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "I'm not aware of any ISIS smuggling."
He said he is concerned about Syrian refugees coming in however, as he doesn't think 'we can adequately vet them," but at this time, King said he is not aware of any terrorists coming in."
"First of all, nobody would let an ISIS terrorist into the country," said King.
"If anybody knew of this investigation it would be you and not Donald Trump, right?" said show host Joe Scarborough.
"I would hope so, yeah," King replied.
Wednesday night, Trump appeared on
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's program, where he commented that the Obama administration is "letting tens of thousands of people come in from Syria and nobody knows who these people are and lot of these people are ISIS."
O'Reilly told Trump that he's not convinced of his ISIS statements, but he still thinks "there has to be a slowdown on that and a real vetting."
Meanwhile, King also thinks that security needs to continue to grow and adapt at the nation's airports.
"I think we need more bomb-sniffing dogs not just at the entrances but where the TSA inspectors are, or how close is the nearest cop for them to stop the attack," said King. "Also, I think we need more use of license plate readers. It will be hard to do facial recognition of everyone coming into our airports. It is such a great disparity.
"We could always be doing more. I think no matter how much we do at the airports, at the number of overseas travelers that we have, we can never stop all of the attacks that happen at the airport. The important thing is have the intelligence to stop it before it gets there."
He said he does agree that ISIS is as dangerous as it ever has been, because it keeps adapting.
"We have to keep up the extraordinary military pressure on them," King said. "They have established beachheads around the world."
FBI Director James Comey has said there are 1,000 terrorism investigations underway, King continued, and at least 800 involve ISIS.
And with Ramadan extending past July 4, King said there is always the danger of lone wolf attacks, such as the one in Orlando that was reportedly inspired by ISIS.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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