Tenn. GOP Rep.: State Must Bar Syrian Refugees If Obama Doesn’t ‘Protect’ Us

Tennessee state Rep. Glen Casada (R) on Wednesday said that if President Obama does not improve the vetting process for Syrian refugees, then states should act to “protect our citizens” by barring refugees from Syria.

Casada on Tuesday joined the chorus of Republican lawmakers calling for Syrian refugees to be barred from their states in light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris.

He told The Tennessean that the state should activate the National Guard to block Syrian refugees from settling in Tennessee and that the state should “gather (Syrian refugees) up and politely take them back” to a federally run immigration center.

In a phone interview with TPM on Wednesday, Casada said that his comments about rounding up Syrian refugees were taken out of context. He said that he does not want to remove Syrian refugees already in Tennessee, but gather up any refugees from Syria newly placed in the state.

“That statement was in context of those that are coming because they haven’t been properly vetted. My statement was taken out of context. But it was for those Syrian refugees,” Casada told TPM.

He said that President Obama wants to resettle more Syrian refugees in Tennessee.

“If he violates our ability to protect ourselves, I think we need to take them back to the ICE facility in New Orleans,” Casada said.

Casada said that the U.S. needs to improve vetting of refugees entering the country, referring to the recent attacks in Paris and the shooting at a Navy-Marine reserve center in Tennessee carried out by a Kuwait-born gunman.

“My comments were made from the fact, after observing Syrian Muslim refugees get into France and the effect in Paris, here in our own state we’ve had a Muslim who was, in essence, educated here in the state of Tennessee kill four soldiers in Chattanooga. I think it’s time that we take a strong look at those that we let into this country, and I think we need to do a firm vetting before we let them into our state,” he told TPM.

He said that France did not properly vet Syrian refugees, and that the U.S. uses a similar process.

“We and the French did a poor job, and thus, many of their citizens and in the future some of ours will be dead,” Casada said.

The state representative said that any refugee who “practices Islam and comes from a country where terrorism exists” should be subjected to a stricter vetting process. When asked if Christians from those same countries also need extra vetting, Casada said they did not.

Following the Paris attacks, numerous Republican lawmakers responded to reports that one of the attackers was a Syrian refugee by calling for the U.S. to bar refugees from Syria from entering the U.S. One of the attackers was carrying a Syrian passport and posing as a refugee, but it was likely fake. And many of the individuals who carried out the attack were French and Belgian nationals.

When asked if rounding up Syrian refugees resettled in Tennessee would be similar to the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during World War II, Casada said the situations were not the same.

“I think there’s no similarity,” he told TPM. “The Japanese had no history of killing Americans, where these refugees that went to France have a history of killing French. ISIS has very clearly said, ‘We’re going to embed terrorists in these refugee populations, and we’re coming to America to blow up your cities.’ So when your enemy tells you what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it, why would we not vet much better than what we’re doing now and much better than what the French did?”