Karen Greenberg was quoted in a Clarion Project article about a recent terrorism report released by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
A terrorism report released by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security has come under fire from two groups seeking to suppress the information contained in the report, reported The Washington Times.
Muslim Advocates and Democracy Forward are suing the government to block the report, saying that it is so misleading that it violates the Information Quality Act.
The report found that 73 percent (three out of every four persons) convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. courts between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016 were foreign-born.
During the same time period, the report states, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed approximately 1,716 aliens with national security concerns. Further, in 2017 alone DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list (also known as the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database) traveling to the United States.”
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Critics who object to the report – and Trump’s travel pause — say it is misleading in that the number of foreign-born people convicted of terrorism-related charges in recent years has significantly decreased. One such critic, Karen Greenberg, who is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, says 60 percent of individuals convicted of ISIS cases in the U.S. in “the last few years” were born in the U.S.
Greenberg, however, did not offer the number of years for her statistic, nor did she comment all terror-related cases (only those involving ISIS).
Ironically, Greenberg as well as other critics say that the report is too vague, pointing to certain language in the report.
For example, when the report states that in 2017 alone the DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list, it does not state the outcome of those encounters.
“You can’t say because someone is investigated that they’re guilty,” said Greenberg.