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 "The president’s executive order will effectively keep people
trapped in war zones, directly endangering their lives," MSF, also
known as Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.
“Slamming shut the doors to the United States of America, which has
rigorously vetted refugees for years, is an attack on the basic
accepted notion that people should be able to flee for their lives,”
Jason Cone, executive director of MSF-USA, was quoted as saying in
the statement.
“Every day our teams on the ground see people desperately seeking
safety at closed borders and in war zones from which they cannot
flee,” he said.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR says 4.9 million Syrians are refugees
in neighboring countries, while almost a million have fled to
Europe, and more than 6 million are displaced within their own
country.
During the election campaign, Trump decried former President Barack
Obama's decision to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted
to the United States over fears that some fleeing the country's
civil war might carry out attacks.
Some 25,000 refugees were resettled in the United States between
October and year-end under UNHCR's program for the most vulnerable,
UNHCR said on Friday.
Trump's administration has banned entry of refugees and people from
seven Muslim-majority countries, drawing criticism even from some
prominent Republicans and protests that drew tens of thousands in
major American cities.
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On Sunday his administration tempered the ban by saying people who
hold so-called green cards as lawful permanent U.S. residents would
not be blocked.
Apart from Syria, the affected countries are Somalia, Sudan, Iran,
Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in
a joint statement on Saturday that the U.S. resettlement program was
vital, and but they stopped short of criticizing the new
administration's policy.
Nobody at UNHCR or IOM was immediately available to comment on
Monday.
(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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