We all got to celebrate World Refugee Day on Wednesday, although the best news for U.S. policy toward refugees may have actually come a day earlier.
Two senators — Arizona Republican John McCain and Delaware Democrat Chris Coons — sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday indicating strong opposition to the nomination of Ron Mortensen, a Utahn, to lead the State Department’s refugee programs.
And they didn’t pull any punches.
“We are deeply concerned about the possibility of a virulent opponent of immigration serving as the United States’ senior diplomat for migration and refugee policies,” they wrote. “At a time when more than 65 million people are displaced worldwide, the nomination of Mr. Mortensen for this position sends a chilling message to all those around the world who look to the United States as a beacon of hope and security for persecuted peoples.”
McCain’s opposition is not a shock, since Mortensen once wrote that the senator “rolled out the welcome mat for ISIS” terrorists to come through the southern border because he was soft on enforcement.
Ron Mortensen, a co-founder of the Utah Coalition on Illegal Immigration and a retired U.S. foreign service officer, published a critical account of LDS Church involvement in the issue of illegal immigration. President Donald Trump's nomination of Mortensen to lead the State Department's refugee programs has been controversial. File Photo
My colleague Thomas Burr also reported this week that Gov. Gary Herbert made his opposition to Mortensen’s nomination known to the White House.
“We reached out to let them know that in no way could we support Ron in that kind of position because he doesn’t represent Utah values in terms of how we think about immigration,” Paul Edwards, Herbert’s deputy chief of staff, said.
The Salt Lake Chamber also called on the Trump administration to withdraw Mortensen from consideration.
The nomination of Mortensen, who has a long and well-documented record of inflammatory rhetoric and a hard-line stance on illegal immigration, was a jaw-dropper, coming without the normal consultation or even a heads-up to Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee.
Hatch and Lee on Wednesday again avoided the question of whether they would support Mortensen’s nomination.
But it doesn’t really matter at this point.
With McCain joining fellow Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake — who had already voiced his opposition — this nomination is as good as dead.
Democrats would almost certainly demand he get 60 votes for confirmation, and the opposition from the two Arizona Republicans leaves Mortensen short of even 50 votes. No senator has yet expressed support for the pick.
And with Utah’s senators seemingly willing to let his nomination wither, it’s unlikely that Mortensen will ever get a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The position Mortensen was nominated to fill is perhaps more important now than ever before. Globally, as the senators noted, there are some 65 million people displaced because of unrest in their homelands, from places such as Syria and El Salvador.
Yet the United States is flatly refusing to take a leading role in solving the humanitarian crisis, capping the number of refugees who will be allowed in this country at a historic low — 45,000. For the first time since the Vietnam War, we will not lead the world in refugee resettlement.
Instead, the administration is imposing “extreme vetting” and travel bans, while it shrugs at an incomprehensible scale of human suffering.
The State Department on Wednesday sought to mark World Refugee Day by touting U.S. leadership.
“We will continue to help the world’s most vulnerable refugees, reflecting the deeply held values of the American people,” the statement from Secretary Pompeo read in part.
But Mortensen — who advocates for deportation of young people whose parents brought them to this country illegally; who castigated The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for joining the Utah Compact, which calls for humane policies that keep families together; and who has argued that most undocumented immigrants “routinely” commit felonies — is a nominee who is starkly out of touch with those “deeply held values of the American people.”
All of that seems plain enough for the average person to see, but perhaps not surprising that an administration that cages thousands of children of families seeking asylum in so-called “tender age shelters” doesn’t seem to grasp it.
Fortunately, Flake, McCain, Coons, Herbert and likely several others understand that reality and — as shocking as it may seem in today’s Washington — the system appears to have worked.
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