Judge Rules Trump Admin. Is Wrong to Deny 87 Iranian Christians, Religious Minorities Asylum Without Reason
(Worthy News) – A federal court ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration wrongly denied asylum to dozens of Iranian Christians and other religious minorities who were invited to seek asylum in the United States under a congressionally enacted program.
Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the Trump administration violated the Lautenberg Amendment by rejecting resettlement for a group of about 87 Iranian religious minorities who were invited to leave their homes and travel to Vienna, Austria, to be processed for resettlement into the United States to live with their families and worship without fear of persecution.
The Lautenberg Amendment was originally enacted in 1990 to facilitate the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union but was later expanded to include religious minorities in the Shia Muslim nation of Iran. Many of the Iranian asylum seekers in Vienna had been waiting for about a year to finally be resettled into the United States under the Lautenberg-Specter program but were sent notices of ineligibility in February and risked being deported back to Iran. [ Source: Christian Post (Read More…) ]