After Trump cuts, Biden hopes to welcome more refugees to US

WASHINGTON (TND) — The Biden administration maintained the current cap of refugees who can be admitted into the United States over the next year at 125,000 — an ambitious goal that the country failed to reach in 2022.

President Joe Biden campaigned on reversing many of the Trump administration’s restrictions on immigration to the U.S. and opening the doors for more people from around the world to take refuge from oppressive regimes and persecution. Trump set new record-lows for the cap every year he was in office, finishing at 18,000 in 2020.

Biden immediately increased that figure to 62,500 shortly into his term and expanded again to 125,000 for 2021, though the government has struggled to come close to reaching the cap. While only about 20,000 people were admitted through the refugee system over the last year, tens of thousands of Afghans and Ukrainians were able to come to the U.S. through “parole,” a separate designation that allows migrants into the country legally but doesn’t give them the right to pursue a green card or citizenship.

The increases in the cap have been a welcome sign for advocates and Democratic lawmakers who say setting consistently ambitious goals helps keep the systems and supporting infrastructure functioning.

Since coming into office, the Biden administration has frequently noted how much work and reinvestment was needed to get the country’s immigration and refugee programs operating at a higher capacity again after years of slashes to the budget, staff and limits on who could take refuge in the U.S. under Trump.

It's no secret that the Trump administration did not prioritize refugee admissions,” said JC Hendrickson, senior director of resettlement, asylum, and integration policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee. “Every year of the Trump presidency, there was a consecutive historical low admissions cap and the effect that that has is that it atrophies the infrastructure to welcome refugees.

“If you have a low cap, you don't have as many people being processed through, you don't have agencies resourced to do the jobs.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also created issues for the nation’s refugee programs as positive cases caused temporary shutdowns of offices, created backlogs in cases and lags in processing refugees.

Now, refugee advocacy organizations are hoping the administration can start demonstrating some progress.

“The first two years, the rhetoric has been the administration has been rebuilding the program. For fiscal year ‘23, we're going to have to hold them accountable,” said Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’ve only got a couple of years left in this term, we’re at the halfway point. You can't be perpetually rebuilding.”

Groups outside the government are also hoping for legislation from Congress that would set a permanent minimum cap on refugees that would give government organizations a consistent set of priorities to work toward regardless of who is in the Oval Office.

“It's time to not just rebuild but think about ‘how do we make the system more resilient to future anti-refugee, xenophobic-type administrations so that you can't just dismantle an entire system so easily — something that's been around for a long time,” Varghese said.

Accepting refugees is an issue that polls well among broad swaths of Americans. A Pew Research survey conducted in August found 72% of Americans said taking in civilian refugees from countries where people are trying to escape violence and war should be a very or somewhat important goal for immigration policy in the United States.

Congress has yet to pass a bill that would create a permanent minimum. The GRACE Act, which would not allow a president to set a limit below 125,000, has been introduced several times but has not passed.

“The refugee program is not and should not be a partisan issue. Is the U.S. a place for those who are being persecuted because of their religion or their political opinion to find protection? Do we want to have a system like that where people are not sent back to be persecuted or tortured?” Varghese said. “It's important, I think, to kind of separate this from other politics and maybe try to depoliticize as part of the rebuilding and resilience for not just this administration, but future administrations.”