State had Syrian refugee; reporter who fled at war’s start now gone

Arkansas has been a temporary home to a single refugee of the Syrian civil war -- a reporter who criticized President Bashar Assad and feared for his safety, according to the charity that relocated him.




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"In the early days of the Syrian civil war, this person was a journalist ... and he was not complimentary to the regime and he had to get out of Syria in a hurry," said Patrick Gallaher, executive director of Catholic Charities of Arkansas, in an interview. "He became a refugee and resettled here because he had an acquaintance in Northwest Arkansas."

Gallaher said he couldn't betray his client's confidentiality, but he confirmed that Catholic Charities resettled the man, who he said no longer lives in the state.

"We meet [refugees] at the airport. We help them get housing. We help them obtain employment. We help teach them English," Gallaher said. "If there are cultural issues -- and there always are -- we help teach them about American culture. It can take a while to get someone resettled."

Gov. Asa Hutchinson released a statement Monday opposing any effort by the federal government to relocate Syrians to the state, including "any facility or installation in Arkansas being used as a Syrian refugee center."

Hutchinson was in Japan on Tuesday for an economic development trip. On a conference call with reporters, he spoke for five minutes about his trip and 15 minutes about his opposition to Syrian refugees in Arkansas in response to questions from reporters.

"I understand fully the difficulty of checking out the background of someone that is coming from either a war-torn country or a country that has some history of terrorism," the governor said.

"It's not sufficient simply to rely on databases to determine whether someone poses a risk. If a refugee or someone [is] without documentation or history that is known, you don't know what you're getting into."

Hutchinson served as the undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005.

Of the 215 Syrian refugees relocated to the United States from fiscal 2012-14, the journalist is the only one to come to Arkansas, according to data from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The United States accepted about 70,000 refugees in 2014, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. President Barack Obama's administration announced in September that 10,000 Syrians will be allowed entry next year.

In fiscal 2014, only Hawaii accepted fewer refugees than Arkansas. Only one-hundredth of 1 percent of refugees that enter the United States resettle in Arkansas.

Catholic Charities Immigration Services in Springdale is the only local affiliate of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Arkansas.

"We're a small office. We have one immigration specialist who handles refugee resettlement," Gallaher said. "If we were to handle a dozen people in a year, that would be a lot for us."

It's a stark change from the 1970s, when Fort Chaffee housed more than 50,000 refugees from Southeast Asia, and the 1980s, when thousands of refugees from Cuba passed through the same military installation in western Arkansas.

Hutchinson said Tuesday that the state's history informs his current position. Though he said the relocation of Southeast Asians went relatively well -- and was important for the United States to participate in because of the Vietnam War -- the Cubans posed problems.

"That went awry because we had the federal government sending in what they said were Cuban refugees without adequate security, without adequate checks," he said.

"We later find out that Fidel Castro had actually opened up some of his prisons and people had mental-health problems, they had criminal backgrounds, they were violent and they were mixed into the population and it caused a security issue for our state."

Lt. Col. Joel Lynch, spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said Fort Chaffee currently has 3,200 beds and is used to train the National Guard as well as federal, state and local police.

Lynch said he wasn't aware of any plans to use Fort Chaffee to house refugees.

The last time an influx of civilians hit the base was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when several thousand evacuees were taken there in 2005.

In the past three years, Arkansas has taken in a total of 24 refugees -- 14 from Burma, nine from Iraq and one from Syria.

Burmese have long settled in Northwest Arkansas and primarily worked in the poultry industry. The U.S. State Department prefers to settle refugees where they might have family contacts or friends.

Iraqis come for a variety of reasons.

"We have experience resettling families from Iraq, and these families tend to be Christian families, Catholic families who were subjected to religious persecution," Gallaher said.

"Some of the resettlements from Iraq were young men, gentlemen, who served as translators for U.S. forces, and their lives were in danger. Even in those cases, the background investigation done by the State Department took ages -- I mean a year, at least."

When asked about the governor's statement, Gallaher said his office is nonpartisan.

"When people come to our front door, we don't say, 'Are you Catholic? Are you a U.S. citizen?' We say, 'What do you need?' We have to rely on the government to make sure that people who are refugees assigned to Arkansas are properly screened for security purposes."

During the conference call, Hutchinson broke with some other Republicans who called for the United States to exclude Muslim refugees.

"That's not part of my policy or beliefs. I recognize in the United States and worldwide there's Muslims who hate what happened in the terrorist attack in Paris and other instances across the globe and we need to have good relations with those moderate Muslims, respect their contributions," he said.

"It's not a religious basis, but it's a geographic issue and a security issue."

Metro on 11/18/2015

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