The Justice Department has acknowledged errors and deficiencies in a controversial report issued a year ago that implied a link between terrorism in the United States and immigration, but — for the second and final time — officials have declined to retract or correct the document.
Released by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the report stated that 402 of 549 individuals — nearly 3 in 4 — convicted of international terrorism charges since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were foreign-born.
The report was written in compliance with President Trump’s March 2017 executive order halting immigration from six majority-Muslim countries.
Critics immediately expressed alarm at what they considered highly misleading data presented without context. They called it an attempt to misuse law enforcement agencies to advance a political agenda in opposition to immigration, and former senior counterterrorism officials warned it could play into terrorists’ hands by fueling misperceptions about radicalization and stoking societal divides.
It is, experts said, a rare admission from the department that its reporting may have confused and misled the public. “This is the government’s statement on the risk of terrorism presented by foreign-born individuals in the United States, and it’s critical that it be accurate — not just because the law requires it but because they have a duty to the American people to accurately report information of this type,” said Ben Berwick, counsel for Protect Democracy, one of the groups that sued the government and is representing the others in court.
Otherwise, he said, it “erodes trust in the government. It erodes democracy.”
Well yeah. Who on earth has beef with Nigerians?