Flake won’t support pick

Flake won’t support Trump’s refugee bureau pick over anti-immigrant views

By LOUIS NELSON

Sen. Jeff Flake wrote online Tuesday that he will not support the White House’s nominee to lead a State Department office that oversees refugees because of the man’s hardline anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Trump administration announced last week that President Donald Trump had nominated Ronald Mortensen, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, to be assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The Center for Immigration Studies labels itself as nonpartisan and independent, but the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center has identified it as a hate group, in part because it “has routinely disseminated the works of white nationalist writers.”

Flake (R-Ariz.), who has long clashed with the president on immigration issues and is retiring at the end of this year, shared a link on his Twitter account to a POLITICO story about Mortensen and wrote that “this nominee will not have my support.”

The bureau has been a quiet conflict zone as Trump and his aides have tried to dramatically scale back refugee admissions to the United States.

With Republicans’ razor-thin, one-vote majority in the Senate and the absence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Flake’s opposition means Mortensen would need the support of at least one Democrat in order to be confirmed.

Mortensen has previously been critical of other Republican senators, including McCain, whose “support for illegal aliens and open borders has left the United States vulnerable to terrorists.” Of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mortensen wrote that he is “either exceptionally gullible or just plain dishonest.”