c. 2006 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Advocacy groups are pressuring Congress to take broader action to alleviate the plight of refugees who have been caught in a tangle of new regulations designed to keep terrorists from entering the United States.

Refugee Council USA, which includes numerous faith-based organizations, estimates that as many as 20,000 refugees worldwide are being denied asylum in the United States because their activities fall within broad new U.S. definitions of helping terrorist organizations.

Many of the refugees, from countries like Myanmar, Colombia, Liberia and Cuba, are living in refugee camps in other countries.

Aid groups say many refugees are innocent victims kept in limbo by provisions of the USA Patriot Act passed in 2001 and especially the Real ID Act of 2005.

Part of the Real ID Act was designed to keep people who had supported terrorist organizations from entering the United States. But the definition used was broad enough to also apply to people in war-torn countries who supplied trivial support to militias and other groups while under threat of injury or death.

Ralston Deffenbaugh, president of the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said that in some cases, women have given livestock, water or food to gunmen who have raided their homes and threatened to rape or kill them. That kind of contribution is all it takes under America’s new definitions of giving “material support” to a terrorist group.

“The impact of it has been that we are blocking the entry now of people who are themselves victims of persecution,” Deffenbaugh said.

On Tuesday (July 11), the House voted to extend for three years economic sanctions against Myanmar, a country that is ruled by a military dictatorship and which has produced thousands of refugees.

Deffenbaugh said some refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma) may never be able to gain asylum in the U.S. because they have fought against the dictatorship.

“Here are people who have risen up against that regime, who have not used terrorist tactics in the normal meaning of the word, but have taken up arms against oppression,” he said.

Last April, a report by the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees warned of the damaging effect the U.S. policies were having on large swaths of refugees who posed no security threat. Then in May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a first-of-its-kind waiver to allow about 9,300 Myanmar refugees at a camp in Thailand to go through a screening process that could result in asylum for some in America or elsewhere. The waiver does not apply to Myanmar refugees in other camps.

Joe Mancini, a State Department spokesman, said the agency has looked at the possibility of granting waivers for other groups of refugees, but that no decision will be made until there has been time to evaluate the process for the Myanmar refugees in Thailand.

Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., plans to introduce legislation that would change the existing law by narrowing the definitions of what constitutes support for terrorists. Skip Brown, a spokesman for Pitts, said the bill likely will be introduced next week (week of July 17).

The supporters of the Real ID Act did not expect the current fallout for refugees, Deffenbaugh said. “I have yet to hear of anyone either in Congress or the administration who anticipated this result of the Real ID Act passage,” he said.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who authored the Real ID Act, said in a written statement at the end of March that he was “sensitive to the plight of persons who are forced by threats of violence to make contributions or otherwise provide material support to terrorist organizations.”

Still, Sensenbrenner stressed the need to keep firm definitions that don’t allow loopholes for those who have supported terrorists to get into the country.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Norm Coleman, R-Minn., tried to amend an appropriations bill to change the definitions of terms like “terrorist organization.” But their effort was defeated because it was seen as unrelated to the appropriations bill.

Leahy has said he would continue pushing the matter.

“For those of us from the faith-based agencies, (the issue) raises a profoundly moral question,” Deffenbaugh said. “How many innocent victims are we willing to have in this war on terrorism?”

KRE/RB END SACHS