Republican senators Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions have thrown aside political correctness and have demanded that the immigration system of the United States is overhauled after the Chattanooga military base shooting by an Islamic extremist. Cruz has attacked President Obama’s identification of the killer as a lone gunman and his apparent unwillingness to address the elephant in the room of radical Islamic terrorism.
Cruz has issued a statement in which he links the recent shooting to the 2009 attacks on military facilities in the United States in Texas and Arkansas, noting that the Obama administration again attempted to play the incidents off as workplace violence rather than addressing the religious motivation of the attacks. It took six years ‒ until 2015 ‒ for the victims of these attacks to be recognized as victims of assaults by foreign terrorists, and Cruz says that the US cannot afford another six years to pass before it is willing to admit the reality of the Chattanooga shooting.
Cruz wants to see enlisted men and women given the right to carry weapons in military facilities, for Congress to pass the Expatriate Terrorist Act to prevent Americans who go overseas to train with terrorists from returning to the United States, and to overhaul an immigration system that enables such individuals to obtain citizenship.
Sessions agrees with Cruz on the latter point in particular, noting that a number of other terrorists, including the Boston bombers, were in the US legally at the time they committed attacks.