First lady Michelle Obama invited a Syrian refugee to join her as her personal guest to the State of the Union address Tuesday.
Refaai Hamo is a Syrian scientist who was given refugee status and resettled in Michigan with his four children in December. His invitation comes after President Barack Obama’s commitment to take in an additional 10,000 refugees last November.
There are, however, many other refugees who will not be there, and for good reason. Here are a few refugees and immigrants from conflict zones you will not see at the State of the Union. (RELATED: At Least 15 US ‘Citizen Terrorists’ Are Also Legal Immigrants)
The Tsarnaev brothers, infamous for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, received asylum from the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan based on their Chechen ethnicity. Their attack killed three people and injured over 260. (RELATED: U.S. Refugee Chief Didn’t Know Boston Bombers Were Refugees)
In April 2015, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a Somalian-born U.S. citizen, was charged by the Department of Justice for “[wanting] to go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style.” Mohamud came to the U.S. with his parents after fleeing war-torn Somalia in 1998 and trained with a terrorist group in Syria before returning to the U.S.
Ali Shukri Amin, a Sudanese-American teenager, ran a pro-Islamic State Twitter account and was charged with providing material support to terrorists. Amin’s mother brought him to America after fleeing their native Sudan, which had been previously embroiled in decades of civil war.
Bosnian couple Ramiz Hodzic and Sedina Unkic Hodzic were charged with conspiring to provide ISIS and al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front with money and military equipment in February 2015. Mensur Hatic, a community leader who knew Ramiz Hodzic, claims he was a soldier during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s and came to the U.S. in 2005. “Ramiz drank a lot for several years after coming to the U.S., but in the past couple of years, he became sober, and covered his wife and his daughter with hijab (a veil that covers the head and chest),” said Hatic to Voice of America, “but we did not know that he was involved in this network of [ISIS] supporters.”
In November 2010, Somalian-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested for plotting to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. Born during the peak of the Somalian civil war, Mohamud came to the U.S. and became a naturalized citizen before attempting to detonate a fake bomb provided by undercover authorities in a sting operation.
Obama will give his last State of the Union address to Congress Tuesday night.
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