Trump hints at Muslim ban ‘expansion,’ rejecting Syrian refugees
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says the recently-announced revisions to his proposed ban on Muslims entering America are an ‘expansion’ of the initial idea and do not mean it is scrapped.
Trump announced the controversial ban during the primary contests in December, after a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.
However, after facing heavy backlash, he said the ban was only meant for people entering the US from countries “compromised by terrorism.”
“I actually don't think it's a rollback. In fact, you could say it's an expansion,” the New York businessman told NBC on Sunday.
“I'm looking now at territory,” he said. “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can't use the word Muslim. Remember this. And I'm OK with that, because I'm talking territory instead of Muslim.”
Trump said he would send immigrants through an “extreme vetting” process to determine their eligibility to enter the country.
“We're going to have tough standards,” he said. “And if a person can't prove … that they're from an area, and if a person can't prove what they have to be able to prove, they're not coming into this country.
The real estate mogul, who eliminated more than a dozen candidates and was elected as the GOP nominee over the weekend, said Syria was one of the territories he would not accept any immigrants from.
“I would stop the Syrian migration and a Syrian from coming into this country in two seconds,” he asserted.
This is while earlier in July, US Secretary of State John Kerry had reaffirmed Washington’s plans to resettle some 10,000 Syrian refugees in America.
Obama first announced the plan last September and ordered the State Department to take in 1,500 Syrian refugees each month.
Trump had previously claimed that “a lot” of Syrians accepted for asylum in the US are members of the Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri terrorist group which, along with other foreign-backed militant groups, have been wreaking havoc in Syria since 2011.
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