Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, a man who came to the United States in 2009 and was granted a green card by the Obama administration, admitted in court on Monday that he taught himself to build detonators for improvised explosive devices, trained to use automatic rifles and plotted to sign up as a martyr for the Islamic State group.
Al Hardan came to America as a teenager after spending time in refugee camps in Jordan and Iraq, and was adopted legally through Barack Obama's Iraqi refugee program, the standard-bearer of today's Syrian refugee program.
In 2014, federal agents exposed Al Hardan as he tried to make contact with an informant, and after his guilty plea on Monday to one count of terrorism, he will be sentenced in January.
“This screening process has been enhanced over the last few years,” said James R. McKinney, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service said, though he refused to disclose information on the case.
“The overall system is grievously broken,” says Matthew O’Brien, a former USCIS employee who is now research director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Saying the Iraq program is a model, it’s the model for a failing system overall, that doesn’t work. The Syrian situation is marked by an absence of all of the things you need for a program to be successful.”
Obama is configuring an agenda that would bring 110,000 refugees to the United States by October 1st of next year, despite warnings from lawmakers that it would endanger American lives.