WELCOMING REFUGEES.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: MIDDLE AMERICA

In the wake of the U.S. with-drawal from Afghanistan, Fort McCoy, an Army base in rural Monroe County, Wisconsin, has been in the process of receiving up to 13,000 Afghans who are fleeing the Taliban, which has taken control of their country. Many of these people directly aided the United States during the twenty-year war, making them targets at home and desperate to escape. And yet, some U.S. politicians, including Congressmember Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, say the United States has been too quick to take them in.

The Biden Administration has not sufficiently vetted Afghans as they flee, Tiffany claims, adding that "we cannot have terror imported into the United States." Tiffany wrote a letter to social service agencies that are helping resettle Afghan refugees, insisting they make sure Afghans have proper background checks before they are "released into American neighborhoods."

"It appears the Biden Administration is doubling down by bringing people who are unvetted into our country," Tiffany told Tucker Carlson of Fox News. He was particularly outraged that none of the Afghan people he saw when he visited Fort McCoy came here on a Special Immigrant Visa, which requires an exhaustive vetting process that can take years.

"They were all there on parole," Tiffany said, making it sound as though a wave of convicted criminals was arriving in Wisconsin directly from the prisons of Kabul. In fact, the United States' "humanitarian parole" process allows refugees fleeing disasters, including earthquakes, famine, and the collapse of their governments, to come here on an accelerated basis, under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security.

When Tiffany and other Republican members of Congress took a tour of Fort McCoy, trailed by the press, the Air Force general in charge, Glen D. VanHerck, explained that the Department of Homeland Security does counter-terrorism screening and bio-metric testing before people enter the United States.

"There are six different federal agencies that screen these folks--a lot of that processing happened before they even got on an airplane," adds Dawn Berney, executive director of Jewish Social Services of Madison. The group, she explains, is involved in resettling three categories of people from Afghanistan: refugees, people holding Special Immigrant Visas (many of whom provided support to the U.S. military effort), and the "humanitarian parolees" that Tiffany is so worried about.

This last group--people...