Donald Trump Tells Syrian Refugees To Go Back To Mexico

They look pretty dangerous all right

Not content to merely say that he'd refuse to help any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria, Donald Trump promised that he will return all Syrian refugees that the United States has already taken in. "I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back. They're going back, I'm telling you," declared the alleged human being at a rally in Keene, New Hampshire Wednesday. Trump didn't specify whether he'd be satisfied with merely declaring refugees stateless and deporting them, or whether he genuinely meant "going back" to Syria, which would require returning the refugees to a war zone. Not that Trump supporters would have a problem with that. But congratulations, Mr. Trump: You may have just passed Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul in the competition to take the most hideously inhuman position on the refugee crisis.

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Tell us more, Associated Press!

The billionaire businessman ... [said] that he was worried the refugees, who have been fleeing their country after years of civil war, could be Islamic State militants looking to get into the U.S.

"They could be ISIS, I don't know," said Trump, who questioned both the number of men in their ranks and why Syrians were fleeing their country instead of staying and fighting.

"This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe," he later added. "That could be possible."

Given that the current total of ISIS fighters in both Iraq and Syria is estimated to be between 20,000 and 31,500, that seems maybe a bit unlikely, but you never know, especially with dirty refugees, who could be anybody. Trump's promise to return people who have already been subjected to an insane two-year screening process should be wildly popular with his asshole supporters, who are certain that ISIS terrorists are already infiltrating their local sandwich shops. 

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Trump would reverse a recently-announced policy of increasing the number of refugees that the United States will accept; in early September the White House announced it would accept 10,000 Syrian refugees next year, an improvement over the pathetic total of just 1,500 Syrians the Greatest Nation On Earth has allowed in between 2011 and early 2015. Germany, by contrast, expects to accept an estimated 800,000 refugees, mostly from Syria, and Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasized that there's no strict legal limit on the number of refugees her country could take in. You might almost think that Germany had learned a thing or two about refugees since the days of WWII -- when the United States was also   unwilling to accept more than a relative handful of people fleeing Hitler. 

American Republicans are awfully quick to compare Middle Eastern dictators to Hitler. It's a goddamn shame that so many of them seem determined to refuse any help for the people who are desperately attempting to escape today's murderous regimes. Must be more of that American Exceptionalism at work.

[ AP at HuffPo / CNN / Yahoo News ]