Progressive lawyers and judges have frozen the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to minimize security threats from each year’s wave of government-approved refugees, even though the FBI says it is investigating and watching 300 foreign radicals who were invited into the country via the refugee programs.

“Part of this [freeze] has to go to the review of the refugee program that has been put on hold” by the courts, DHS spokesman David Lapan told Breitbart News May 9. The agency can’t consider changes to its programs “until we’re given the authority,” he said.

But, he added, “I don’t want to give the impression we’re doing nothing if there is something going on in the department that I’m just not aware of.”

Throughout the court reviews, the judges have downplayed the threat to Americans posed by Islamic refugees allowed into the United States. But that danger was outlined in congressional testimony on May 3 by the since-fired head of the FBI, James Comey, who said:

We have about 1,000 home grown violent extremist investigations [in which] we have no indication that they’re in touch with any terrorists … [and] then we have another big group of [1,000] people that we’re looking at, who we see some contact with foreign terrorists. So you take that 2,000 plus cases, about 300 of them are people who came to the United States as refugees.

“Clearly the refugee program is not as secure as its defenders are saying because we’ve been hearing for months that refugees are no problem and no security threat,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The FBI director just said at least 15 percent of their terrorism investigation involves people who came as refugees.”

In January and February, President Donald Trump’s safety review of the refugee programs was quickly frozen by progressive lawyers and judges in Washington state, Maryland, and Hawaii, even though a judge in liberal Boston first decided that President Donald Trump has the constitutional and legal authority to reform the refugee programs.

On Feb. 3, the judge in Boston, Mass., rejected the lawsuit by the Massachusetts’ government against Trump’s reform. “Therefore, in light of the“plenary congressional power to make policies and rules for exclusion of aliens,” … which pursuant to8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), has been delegated to the President, the Court concludes that the [federal] government’s reasons, as provided in the EO, are facially legitimate and bona fide,” the judge declared Feb. 3.

This week, the Maryland decision is being reviewed by an appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, and is likely to be approved by the mostly Democratic-appointed judges in the court. The court’s decision will then be sent to the Supreme Court for review, stretching out the period when Trump’s reform are frozen by progressive lawyers and judges.

“Judges want to take over immigration policy, and this a subversion of self-government,” said Krikorian. “If the elected representatives of the people no longer have the right to keep foreigners out then the people are no longer sovereign, and we really are ruled by judges, rather than having judges as part of a government,” he said.

Amid the refugee freeze, DHS is proceeding with other reforms intended to vet would-be travelers to the United States, said Lapan. “The department has continued to look at uniform screening and vetting procedures …We’ve made some changes, we’ve identified some things where we can make the changes” without changes in regulations of laws, and without bumping up against the courts’ reviews of refugee reforms, he said.

He declined to identify the changes, adding “we’re doing things that are in our authority to do.”