UPDATE: According to recently released footage provided to The Daily Caller, there is new clarification as to what Mr. Stewart said that provides greater context to his answer when asked about how to deal with the refugee crisis.
Faye Stewart, a Republican candidate for the contested U.S. Senate seat in Oregon, retold a story about Vietnamese refugees coming to the Pacific Northwest and “harvesting people’s dogs and cats” for food “because their culture and their lifestyle didn’t mix with ours.”
During a GOP candidate forum on March 10 at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, Stewart said, “[W]e took in some refugees, I believe it was some Vietnamese refugees into this state years ago and it created a huge problem because their culture and their lifestyle didn’t mix with ours.”
“And when I say that, you know our government housed them in buildings in the Portland area, my understanding and what ended up happening was is [sic] they didn’t know how to heat their homes. What did they do? They started a fire in the middle of their living room in an apartment complex,” Stewart said.
Adding, “Or when they needed something to eat, they went to their natural ways of doing it by harvesting people’s dogs and cats, their pets.”
“And so what we need to do is we need to make sure that when we do help people we do it appropriately. I question why can’t we go over there and help them in their native land and protect them there. Why do we need to bring them here and potentially jeopardize the citizens lives here. If we do bring them here, then we need to make sure that we do it appropriately so that it doesn’t negatively impact. We have people today that want to kill us because of who we are and we need to make sure that we don’t jeopardize the citizens in the process.”
Steward did note that he is “compassionate” and that he wants to “help people” but “we need to understand that we need help people appropriately and we also need to not jeopardize ourself or our citizens in the process.”
Stewart is currently a county commissioner from Lane County and is one of the four men running to be the Republican candidate to face Democratic incumbent Sen. [crscore]Ron Wyden[/crscore].