Ivanka Trump, a top adviser to her father, President Donald Trump, went further than he has when it comes to support for allowing Syrian refugees to enter the US in the face of their country’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.
“I think there is a global humanitarian crisis that’s happening and we have to come together and we have to solve it,” she told NBC in an interview aired Wednesday morning.
An executive order signed by the President in early March, currently held up by the courts, would ban immigration from six Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, and temporarily ban on all refugees form entering the US. It specifically blocks citizens of Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from obtaining visas for at least 90 days.
Asked whether that would include opening the borders to Syrian refugees, Ivanka Trump, who formally serves in the administration as assistant to the President, indicated openness.
“That has to be part of the discussion. But that’s not going to be enough in and of itself,” she said.
The first daughter spoke to NBC following her participation in a W-20 Summit panel on women’s economic empowerment in Berlin at the direct invitation of Chancellor Angela Merkel, her first international trip on behalf of the administration and a coming out of sorts.
Trump’s remarks come in the wake of a missile strike against an Assad regime airbase earlier this month. The President has said that the horrific images from a chemical weapons attack compelled him to authorize the strike.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Ivanka Trump’s brother, Eric Trump, said that his sister influenced that decision.
“Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff,'” Eric Trump told the Telegraph.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday in Berlin, Ivanka Trump dismissed her brother’s comments as a “flawed interpretation.”
“I, of course, shared my perspective and opinion. It aligned with his own. I think it would be, have to be — I think it would be very hard as a human being to see the images that we saw and not react and not be very shaken to the core. That said, and while I expressed that sentiment, as a leader of a country, you can’t make decisions based on emotion alone, and his decision was incredibly well informed and advised at every level,” she said.
“I’m proud of the action he took, how decisive he was, and the clear message he sent that heinous attacks of this nature using chemical weapons will not be condoned by the United States.”
