Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) said late Monday that he opposes allowing any Syrian refugees into the United States, including “orphans” younger than 5 years old.
“The fact is that we need appropriate vetting, and I don’t think orphans under five should be admitted into the United States at this point,” he said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
{mosads}“You know, they have no family here,” Christie said. “How are going to care for these folks?
“In the end, I don’t trust this administration to effectively vet the people that they’re asking us to take in,” the 2016 GOP presidential candidate added.
“We can come up with 18 different scenarios [but] we need to put the safety and security of the American people first.”
Christie said President Obama is incapable of handling the Syrian refugee crisis or the brutal civil war that is generating it.
“This is a president who is living in a fantasy land,” he said. “He sees the world as he wishes it were, not as it truly is.
“What I will remember of the Barack Obama presidency, when it is long relegated to the past, is that he was often wrong, but never in doubt.”
Obama is defending his plan for resettling Syria’s refugees Monday amid fierce bipartisan criticism.
“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism, they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” he said during the G-20 Summit in Ankara, Turkey. “We have to each of us do our part, and the United States has to step up and do its part.”
Last week’s terrorist attack in Paris killed about 130 people. Reports have since emerged suggesting that one of the attackers may have entered Europe by using a Syrian passport.
Multiple 2016 GOP presidential candidates are now calling for a pause on the Obama administration’s plan for accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees by next year.
Christie said Obama is incapable of stopping extremist violence, given his remarks on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) last week.
“If his comments on Thursday to ABC News, where he said that ISIS was contained by his strategy, and then we had hundreds of people killed and wounded within 24 hours on the streets of Paris, aren’t proof of the fact that this president has no idea what he’s talking about, then nothing else will be.”