5 False Claims About Trump's Refugee Ban

By Samuel Smith, Deputy Managing Editor
Monday, February 13, 2017

BBC Claims Trump's Refugee claim is 'without factual basis'

An Internally displaced refugee girl from al-Bab town waits to receive food aid in Ekhtreen town, northern Aleppo countryside, Syria, January 21, 2017. | (Photo: Reuters/Khalil Ashawi)

The U.K.-based Christian aid group Barnabas Fund is calling on the BBC to correct a statement made by its New York correspondent, Nick Bryant. On Jan. 29, Bryant said that Trump didn't have "any factual basis" to claim that Obama's refugee resettlement policy favored Muslims over Christians.

The comment that Bryant was referring to came during Trump's interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Jan. 27. In that interview, Trump said "if you were a Christian in Syria, it was impossible, at least very, very tough to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim you could come in. But if you were a Christian it was almost impossible."

In a statement, Barnabas Fund called the assertion by BBC "wholly untrue" and "potentially damaging to tens of thousands of Syrian Christian refugees."

According to Pew Research, only one-half of 1 percent of all Syrian refugees resettled in the U.S. in 2016 were Christian even though Christians made up about 10 percent of Syria's pre-war population. Ninety-nine percent of the Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. in 2016 were Muslims.