CANBERRA, Feb 1: Australia’s prime minister would not say how many refugees from Pacific island camps will be resettled in the United States after President Donald Trump’s administration said “extreme vetting” would be used to check their cases.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said today that Trump had agreed during a weekend telephone conversation to keep an Obama administration promise to resettle an undisclosed number of mostly Muslim refugees held on the impoverished nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters: “There will be extreme vetting applied to all of them.”
Questioned about Spicer’s comments, Turnbull would not say how many refugees the United States could end up accepting.
Australia pays Papua New Guinea and Nauru to house more than 1,200 asylum seekers it has refused to accept. (AGENCIES)
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