Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett has backed off a position that Syrian refugees should never have been allowed into the U.S. to begin with.
Bartlett posted that Monday on Facebook, but aletter he sent to President Obama yesterday asked for vetting procedures to be improved and said Tulsans are ready to be of service.
"What we're looking at is the safety of our city and certainly not trying to draw a red line between us and refugees or anyone coming to Tulsa," Bartlett said.
The local organizations that would assist refugees, Catholic Charities and the YWCA, have said they don’t expect to see Syrian refugees in Tulsa because there are larger Syrian populations in other cities.
Bartlett acknowledged Tulsa is home to people from all over the world, some of them refugees.
"And each and every one of them are terrific people, and they contribute a lot to our society, and I welcome them here, and I call them friends," Bartlett said. "So, to show this as Dewey Bartlett being anti-refugee is simply not true and is very improper."
According to the YWCA Tulsa, more than 5,000 refugees live here.
Bartlett said as a boy, he met two families of Lebanese refugees in elementary school.
"And that was my first exposure to somebody from out of this country," he said. "And great — they were terrific families; terrific people; good friends; good, solid citizens."
Hundreds of people criticized Bartlett in comments on his Facebook post. He said it was written hastily to respond to a situation.
