The aunt of a Syrian boy whose lifeless body drew attention to the Syrian refugee crisis says President Donald Trump’s move to temporarily shut down the U.S. refugee program “hurts a lot.”
“People should understand those refugees, they’ve been forced from their country because of the war,” Kurdi told CTV News Channel on Monday. “They are fleeing from terrorists.”
Kurdi said she wants people who support Trump’s order because they believe it will make them safer from terrorism to “show me the evidence.”
“How many of them they actually did something bad in (Canada or the U.S.) as a terrorist?” she said. “I want to know that.”
In fact, no Syrian refugee has committed a deadly terrorist attack in the U.S. or Canada, according to an extensive review published last fall by U.S think tank The Cato Institute.
The study examined terrorism by immigration status and found only three out of 3,252,493 refugees admitted to the U.S. between 1975 and 2015 had committed deadly terror attacks. All three were Cuban nationals who killed Americans in the 1970s.
The study also found that three of the 700,522 people admitted to the U.S. as asylum seekers --- those who apply for refugee status as the U.S. border, usually after arriving on tourist visas -- had committed deadly terror attacks on U.S. soil.
One of the three was 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef, who entered the U.S. on a Pakistani passport, and helped plan the attack that killed six people. The other two were Kyrgyzstan-born brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three people and injured 264 in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
In total, 12 of 3,432 terrorist deaths over a 40-year period were committed by those with refugee status, according to the study.
During the 2015 federal election Kurdi, a hair stylist by trade, become one of the leading voices advocating for Canada to take in more Syrian refugees.
Kurdi attended U.S. President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress last week as a guest of Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, in an attempt to raise awareness about the refugees and the need to end the war.
