State Department official schools Omar on visas

Socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has been schooled by a State Department official on visas, waivers and more after she criticized President Trump’s executive order to prevent terrorists from entering the country. The Trump order has been through several iterations, and the Supreme Court upheld the latest one. It restricts entry to the United States […]

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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., at the Twin Cities Pride Parade in Minneapolis on June 24, 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)

Socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has been schooled by a State Department official on visas, waivers and more after she criticized President Trump’s executive order to prevent terrorists from entering the country.

The Trump order has been through several iterations, and the Supreme Court upheld the latest one.

It restricts entry to the United States for people from countries that sponsor or harbor terrorism. It has been falsely described by many opponents as a Muslim ban, even though two of the countries are not Muslim-majority and it impacts only 8% of the world’s Muslim population.

In a House hearing, Omar repeated the “Muslim ban” claim when she addressed Edward Ramotowski, deputy assistant secretary for visa services., Fox News reported.

“Former consular officer Christopher Richards, who resigned in protest of the Muslim ban, said in an op-ed that the consular officers were not able to issue waivers on their own, that they had to get approval from the State Department.

“Would that be you? Do you give that approval?” she asked Ramotowski.

He replied: “No, that’s not correct. Consular officers make the decision of the first two prongs of the waiver, national interest and undue hardship, and then the interagency security review provides the guidance on the security prong.”

Omar then asked about the White House role in making such decisions and was told there is none.

She also brought up another earlier allegation, from Sarah Gartner, a former officer, who told CNN that employees “felt pressure to approve as few folks as possible.”

Ramotowski said officers are “not implicitly or explicitly pressuring anyone to act in any way contrary to the law.”

Trump’s executive order has been challenged repeatedly in the courts, but the Supreme Court in June 2018 affirmed the plan to impose restrictions on travel to the U.S. from those in Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, North Korea and Somalia.

During the hearing, Omar also pointed to a memo signed by some 100 diplomats in June 2017 while the case over the travel restrictions was underway.

But that was before the current version was adopted and approved.

Ramotowski told Omar the plan is “designed to try to keep the United States safe.”

Other Democrats joined Omar, with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., calling it a “sham” and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., calling it “phony.”

Omar, meanwhile, faces headwinds of her own in her first term in Congress.

She recently deleted a Twitter post that provides further evidence she married her brother in an immigration-fraud scheme.

The 2013 Twitter post confirmed the findings of investigative reporter David Steinberg that Omar took the name of another Somali family to come to the United States, and the man to whom she was married from 2009 to 2017, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother.

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