US officials stop vetting Nauru refugees for resettlement
canberra — US officials stopped screening refugees for potential resettlement in the United States this week but will return to the Pacific atoll of Nauru to continue working towards a deal that President Donald Trump has condemned as ‘dumb,’ an Australian minister said on Thursday.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton would not say when US Department of Homeland Security officials would return to Nauru to conduct what Trump describes as “extreme vetting.”
Trump made enhanced screening a condition for agreeing to honour an Obama administration deal to accept up to 1,250 refugees refused entry into Australia. Australia pays Nauru and Papua New Guinea
i don’t have any comment to make in relation to when uS officials will be on Nauru next’. Peter Dutton, Australian Immigration Minister
to keep more than 2,000 asylum seekers — mostly from Iran, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka — in conditions condemned by rights groups.
US officials were sent to Nauru within days of the deal’s announcement in November after the US presidential election. But they left this week with arrangements under a cloud. “I don’t have any comment to make in relation to when US officials will be on Nauru next,” Dutton told reporters.
“There have been officials there who have left ... in the last couple of days and we would expect other officials to be there in due course.”
Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul said most of the refugees on Nauru who had been accepted by the United States as candidates for resettlement had initial interviews with USofficials in what they had been told was a two-step process.
But there have been no second interviews so far, Rintoul said.
Australia has determined that there are 1,600 genuine refugees among 2,077 asylum seekers on Papua New Guinea and Nauru. —