Obama administration plans to resettle 358 Syrian refugees per week in U.S.

Syrian refugee Ahmad al Aboud and his family members, who will be resettled in the United States as part of a refugee admissions programme, walk to board their plane at the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, on April 6,2016.Reuters

Syrian refugees will arrive in the United States at an average of 358 per week until September under a plan of the Obama administration to speed up the process and bring a total of 10,000 refugees this year.

To date, 1,411 Syrian refugees are now living in the U.S., WND reports.

The Obama administration said the Syrian refugees are the "most thoroughly vetted" of all immigrants with checks and processing taking about 18 to 24 months.

But it is now processing refugees within three months to speed up the resettlement, the report said.

The U.S. has set up screening centres in Jordan where about 600 Syrian refugees will be interviewed per day.

More than 98 percent of the Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims and 1 percent are Christians.

FBI Director James Comey previously told the U.S. Congress that even up to 24 months, it was impossible to verify the identity of the Syrian refugees.

According to Philip Haney, former Homeland Security investigator who retired last year, "whenever unilateral political actions are taken to 'speed up' a complex programme, which is already known to be fraught with uncertainty, it becomes virtually impossible for officials to conduct a reliable vetting process."

Republican congressmen sent letters to President Barack Obama to oppose the Syrian refugee programme.

House Speaker Paul Ryan put an omnibus spending bill to fully fund the refugee programme, which aims to resettle 85,000 refugees from different countries in 2016, half of which from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

About 100,000 refugees are planned to be brought to the U.S. next year.

For the first six months of the year, Michigan had the most number of Syrian refugees at 173, followed by California with 138, Pennsylvania with 126 and Illinois with 98.

Recently, Missouri got 16 Syrians while Ohio has 14, Arizona 12, Illinois 11, Pennsylvania nine, Michigan seven and Indiana five.

Gina Kassem, the regional refugee coordinator at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, told the Associated Press that while 10,000 target pertains to Syrian refugees, majority of those that will come to the U.S. are from refugee camps in Jordan.

"The 10,000 is a floor and not a ceiling, and it is possible to increase the number," she said.

Dozens of Republican governors refused to receive Syrian refugees, but the U.S. government said they are not entitled to stop the programme.

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann accused President Obama of "doing everything within his power to advance an Islamic invasion of the U.S., primarily made up of Muslims emanating from global terror hotspots."