Former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Friday he agrees that the United States should do all it can to help refugees who are fleeing war-torn Ukraine, but he told Newsmax that he's concerned about the current administration's ability to properly vet them.
"I think what we've seen, given what occurred in Afghanistan, is that this administration has very little credibility on how they process individuals coming in from overseas," Wolf said on Newsmax's "National Report."
"What we saw is a very chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. We know individuals get here into the U.S. that probably don't deserve refugee status."
He added that he'd ask the administration if it is following the procedures under which each person must by interviewed by a refugee officer to determine if they qualify for refuge.
"They can be expedited a little bit, but again, I don't know that I have a lot of faith and confidence and trust, knowing that this administration cut all of the corners on all of those procedures when we look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan," he commented.
Wolf also discussed a draft of new rules released by Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that would allow asylum claims for people coming into the United States at the Mexico border to be fast-tracked.
"I think it's important for the American people to really understand what the department is proposing here," said Wolf. "These are illegals across the border that can now be seen by an asylum officer instead of an immigration judge … this means that now you don't have a U.S.government attorney and ICE attorney asking these migrants hard questions about their asylum claim, because we know there's a lot of asylum fraud."
He added that the new rules won't address the underlying problems of what's happening at the border but will instead incentivize more to come to the United States.
The asylum officers do go through full training, and they ask a number of questions, but those questions are designed to be "non-defensive, very accommodating" rather then being fully probing questions concerning the immigrants' fear of prosecuiton and more.
"You're not going to have that critical eye looking at it any longer," he said. "The percentages of claims being granted are going to increase and that's not the way that asylum should work. Asylum should be hard to get, and it should be a process to go through as well."
Meanwhile, the Title 42 expulusions allowed during the pandemic are about to end, and that will allow even more people to come across the border, said Wolf.
"We have to remember that this crisis has been self-inflicted by the Biden administration because they tore down a number of successful programs that have encouraged this huge influx of individuals to the southwest border," he said.
"Now, they're in the place of trying to fix what they created and what we're going to see, unfortunately, is, we're going to a lot of resources being thrown at the border. What they're going to try to do, unfortunately, is process more individuals instead of trying to address the underlying problem of the illegal behavior."
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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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