B7 Trump vows crackdown after NY attack

WASHINGTON, D.C.: President Donald Trump on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila) vowed a battery of tough measures to curb immigration after a deadly terror attack in New York, but left the

Trump ran for election last year promising a crackdown on immigration, including building a wall on the Mexican border and banning Muslim immigrants.

This year he has already slashed the country’s annual refugee intake by more than 50 percent to 45,000, tightened visa issuance around the world and ordered a ban on travelers from 11 unnamed

Refugee experts say all but one have Muslim-majority populations; they do not include Uzbekistan.

- tery Program aims to diversify the origins of people granted permanent residence—so-called green cards—in the United States.

received from more than 14 million people, of whom 49,377 won green cards, including 2,524 Uzbeks.

Few US attacks by immigrants

Trump said he wants to move US immigration to a “merit- based to bring their extended families.

Republicans in Congress have tried for several years to eliminate the visa Democratic resistance.

Trump blamed the program on Chuck Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, even though it was resoundingly supported by both parties and signed into law in 1990 by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush.

Tuesday’s incident was the second time the lottery has been tied to a jihadist attack inside the United States.

whose wife entered the country on the green card program shot two people dead at the ticket counter for

Otherwise, Trump’s immigration crackdown would not have prevented any of the deadly jihadist attacks inside the United States over the past 16 years.

Most have been perpetrated by US-born and radicalized perpetra countries not covered by Trump’s

He ‘felt good’

The Uzbek immigrant behind New York’s worst attack in 16 years confessed to acting in the name of the about the killings, having planned an assault for a year, investigators said.

The shocking details emerged as federal prosecutors filed terrorism charges against Sayfullo Saipov, who subsequently appeared in court in a wheelchair—he had been shot in the abdomen by police—24 hours after mowing down pedestrians and cyclists, and colliding with a school bus.

The attack killed eight people, five of them childhood friends since their high school graduation, a 31-year-old Belgian mother, and two US men, from New York and neighboring New Jersey.

Of 12 wounded, four remained in critical condition following the on September 11, 2001.

Saipov first started planning an attack a year ago, before settling two months ago on using a truck to kill as many people as possible during Halloween celebrations, according to a federal terrorism complaint.

Prosecutors unveiled the charges, saying he had waived his rights and upon exiting a rented pickup truck in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday.

“Saipov committed this attack announced, using an acronym to

Saipov appeared in a wheelchair before a US magistrate in Manhattan federal court, where the charges were formally read.

He was not required to enter a plea and was afterward sent to a federal detention facility, most likely in New York, a spokesman