Refugees flooded into U.S. after ban lifted, Trump says

President continues criticism: ‘Our legal system is broken!”

JUPITER, FLA. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that judicial decisions that halted his executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries had allowed a flood of refugees to pour into the country.

“Our legal system is broken!” Trump wrote in a Twitter post a day after he said that he was considering a wholesale rewriting of the executive order to circumvent legal hurdles quickly but had not ruled out appealing the defeat he suffered Thursday in a federal appeals court. “SO DANGEROUS!” the president added.

He made the post at the start of a day of golf with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan at his resort in Jupiter, Fla.

Trump cited a report in the Washington Times asserting that 77 percent of the refugees who entered the United States since Judge James Robart of U.S. District Court in Seattle blocked the order on Feb. 3 had been from the seven “suspect countries.”

According to an analysis of data maintained by the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, the percentage of refugees arriving from those countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — has risen considerably since the directive was suspended, but the weekly total of refugees arriving from the targeted countries has risen by only about 100. And all are stringently vetted.

At the same time, refugee arrivals from countries not affected by the order have fallen sharply. Since the judge blocked the ban, 1,049 of the 1,462 refugees who have arrived in the United States, or 72 percent, were from the seven countries affected. In Trump’s first week of office, before he issued his order, more refugees arrived — 2,108 — and 935 of them, representing 44 percent, were from those seven nations.

The figures suggest that the State Department and refugee resettlement agencies, which meet weekly to determine which individuals and families to admit to the United States, may be increasing their efforts to help refugees from the seven countries.

Trump’s order also sought to put an indefinite freeze on Syrian refugee admissions and temporarily suspend the rest of the refugee program until the screening process could be reviewed and made more restrictive.

The figures show a similar phenomenon for Syrian refugee arrivals; their proportion has nearly doubled since Trump moved to block them, although that represents a relatively small increase of about 100. While the 296 Syrians who arrived during the president’s first week in office made up 14 percent of the total, the 402 who have entered since his order was blocked amount to 27 percent of all refugee arrivals over that period.

Refugees already face the strictest of vetting procedures to enter the United States, a process that takes from 18 months to two years because of multiple layers of security and background checks.

HIROKO MASUIKE / THE NEW YORK TIMES Asia Khoja (right) and her Kurdish Syrian refugee family were welcomed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York last week after President Donald Trump’s travel ban was put on hold.