02, May 2018 | CJP Team

In a piece titled ‘Trump Has Banned Muslim Refugees. These Numbers Prove It’, VICE News reported that US President Donald Trump’s administration, who once promised to implement a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming into the country seems to have delivered on this pledge, in spite of legal hurdles. Data from the US State Department, which operates the US refugee programme, indicates that 1,891 Muslim refugees have been allowed entry into the US thus far in the 2018 financial year. This figure is 90% lower than the number for the same period last year, which was 18,342 Muslim refugees. The acceptance of refugees from Syria, where conflict has displaced millions, appears to be particularly low. Only 44 Syrian refugees have been accepted into the US in the first half of the fiscal year. Of these, just 27 identify as Muslim. The same period last year saw 5,839 Syrian refugees being given entry. The Trump administration has established a ceiling of 45,000 refugee acceptances for the ongoing financial year. However, the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian group, has projected that just 23,000 refugees will be resettled in the fiscal year 2018 due to “excessive red-tape vetting and processing changes”.