Biden has rebuilt the refugee system after Trump-era cuts
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A church volunteer stood at an apartment door, beckoning inside a Congolese family for their first look at where they would live in America.
“Your new house!” volunteer Dan Davidson exclaimed as the couple and the woman’s brother stepped into the two-bedroom apartment in South Carolina’s capital, smiling tentatively at what would come next.
Inside, church volunteers had made quilts for the beds and set out an orange and yellow plastic dump truck and other toys for the couple’s son. The family watched closely as a translator showed them key features in their apartment: which knob matched which burner on the stovetop, how the garbage disposal and window blinds worked. They practiced working the thermostat and checked the water in the shower.
“We are so happy to get this place,” Kaaskile Kashindi said through a translator.
Now 28, Kashindi was born in Congo and fled with his family at age 3 to a refugee camp in Tanzania, where he lived until this spring. That’s when he, his wife, little boy and brother-in-law moved to Columbia, a university town of 140,000 people.
“We’re still new. We just need help right now,” Kashindi said.
Scenes like this are becoming more common as the American refugee program, long a haven for people fleeing violence around the world, rebounds from years of cutbacks under Donald Trump’s administration. The Biden administration has worked to streamline the process of screening and placing people in America while refugee resettlement agencies have opened new sites across the country.
If President Joe Biden meets his target of 125,000 refugees admitted this year, it would be the highest number of arrivals in more than three decades.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in a 2020 rematch with Biden this fall, has pledged to bar refugees from Gaza and reinstate his Muslim ban if elected, while also putting in place “ideological screening” for all immigrants. Trump’s website highlights his first-term decision to temporarily suspend the refugee program.
Even with immigration — legal or not — a divisive campaign issue, many who help refugees settle in the United States say the growing numbers of refugees have been generally welcomed by communities and employers in need of workers.
The word refugee is sometimes broadly used to refer to anyone fleeing war or persecution. Often it’s conflated with asylum-seekers who come directly to the U.S.Mexico border. People like the family from Congo are coming through a different process, starting with an application abroad and with thorough vetting that can take years.
Usually they are referred to U.S. officials by the U.N. refugee agency, then interviewed by American immigration officials. There are background checks and medical screening.
The lucky few who are approved fly to towns across America to start new lives with the help of a nationwide network of resettlement agencies. They are eligible to become citizens eventually.
For decades, America led the world in refugee admissions in a program that had wide bipartisan support. Trump cut the program to the quick. By the time he left office in January 2021, he had set a record low goal of 15,000 refugees admitted a year. But even that mark wasn’t hit: Only 11,814 refugees came to the U.S. in Trump’s last year, compared with 84,994 at the end of the Obama administration.
Biden said he would reestablish the U.S. as a haven for refugees. It took a while.
His administration is now admitting more refugees and added about 150 new resettlement sites nationwide, said Sarah Cross, deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.