After outcry, Biden to lift refugee cap in May
Facing swift blowback from allies and aid groups, the White House on Friday said President Joe Biden plans to lift his predecessor’s historically low cap on refugees by next month, after initially moving only to expand the eligibility criteria for resettlements.
In an emergency determination signed by Biden earlier in the day, he stated the admission of up to 15,000 refugees set by former President Donald Trump this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest.” But if the cap is reached before the end of the current budget year and the emergency refugee situation persists, then a presidential determination may be issued to raise the ceiling.
That set off a deluge of criticism from top allies on Capitol Hill such as the second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, who called that initial limit “unacceptable.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said later that Biden is expected to increase the refugee cap by May 15, though she didn’t say by how much.
Biden has been consulting with his advisers to determine what number of refugees could realistically be admitted to the United States between now and Oct. 1, the end of the fiscal year, Psaki said. “Given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited,” she said it’s now “unlikely” Biden will be able to boost that number to 62,500, as he had proposed in his plan to Congress two months ago.
But Biden, she said, was urged by advisers to “take immediate action to reverse the Trump policy that banned refugees from many key regions, to enable flights from those regions to begin within days; today’s order did that.”
The new allocations provide more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and lift Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Critics from both sides of the political spectrum had accused the president of bowing to political pressure that has been mounting over the record pace of unaccompanied migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trump’s immigration policies, tweeted that keeping Trump’s cap “reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses.”
The White House indicated the border situation was partly why Biden had not acted before now, even though migrants at the border do not go through the same vetting process as refugees.
“It is a factor,” said Psaki, noting that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “has personnel working on both issues and so we have to ensure that there is capacity and ability to manage both.”
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he didn’t buy that.
“This cruel policy is no more acceptable now than it was during the Trump Administration,” Blumenthal said. “To be clear: the asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear.”
Since the fiscal year began last Oct. 1, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken notified Congress on Feb. 12 of a plan to raise the ceiling on admissions to 62,500, but no presidential determination followed. The law does not require congressional approval and past presidents have issued such presidential determinations that set the cap on refugee admissions shortly after the notification to Congress.
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Biden in a letter Friday that his inaction “undermines your declared purpose to reverse your predecessor’s refugee policies.”
Menendez said it also makes it unlikely that the program can hit its target next budget year of 125,000, which Biden has pledged to do.
Refugee resettlement agencies said it was important that admissions go higher even if it’s not possible to meet the target to send a message that America will be a leader again in offering safe haven to the world’s oppressed.
Some 35,000 refugees have been cleared to go to the United States, and 100,000 remain in the pipeline and their lives remain in limbo, said David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.
“This leadership is sorely needed,” he said.
Under Biden’s new allocation, 7,000 slots are reserved for refugees from Africa, 1,000 from East Asia, 1,500 from Europe and Central Asia, 3,000 from Latin America and the Caribbean and 1,500 from the Near East and South Asia. A reserve of about 1,000 slots can be used as needed.
The State Department, which coordinates flights with resettlement agencies, booked 715 refugees to come to the United States with the anticipation that Biden would have acted by March, but those flights were canceled since the refugees were not eligible under Trump’s rules, according to resettlement agencies.
MEXICO CITY — Hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic have forced former sex workers in Mexico back into the trade years after they left, made it more dangerous and reduced some to having sex in cars or on sidewalks for lack of available hotels.
Claudia, who like most of the sex workers interviewed asked to be identified only by her first name, had stopped working the streets a decade ago after she married one of her former clients. But when her husband lost his job early in the pandemic, the couple fell four months behind on rent for their apartment.
The only solution Claudia saw was to go back to work- ing the streets.
“It was an income in order to eat, to pay the rent we owe,” said Claudia, 30, who now owes only one month back rent. “It is hard to come back and see so many of my fellow workers from the old days, my era, going back to do the same thing … to see all the problems out there.”
Laura, a 62-year-old trans- gender woman who began working Mexico City’s streets 40 years ago, wages a daily battle to stay housed. If she gets a client that day, she can perhaps afford a cheap hotel room for the night. If she doesn’t, she sleeps on the street.
Laura said many of her clients have lost their jobs and can no longer pay her. At one point she had to pawn her telephone, her only contact with some of her regulars.
“Some days you don’t have anything to eat . ... You might eat one day and not the next,” said Laura. As for avoiding coronavirus, “I put my trust in God and hand sanitizer.”
Things are even harder for older sex workers like Laura, because thousands of new sex workers have pushed onto the streets as the pandemic forced closure of restaurants and shops.
Elvira Madrid, who leads the activist group Street Brigade in Support of Women said her group found 15,200 sex workers on Mexico City’s streets in August, about twice the number before the pandemic.
“The surprise was that there were more. On every street corner — it was surprising,” she said.
Madrid estimates 40% of those on the streets now are women who had left the trade but were forced to return by the pandemic, another 40% are new to the profession and 20% are parttime or occasional sex work- ers.
“A lot of the other ones — the other 40% — had been waitresses who had never worked in the sex trade before,” she said. “You know, when they closed the restaurants, people have to eat and have to give their kids what they need. And then the sin- gle mothers — most of them worked in stores, clothing shops, bars, cosmetics.”
“They cried because they said, ‘I don’t want to do this, but I have to feed my kids,’ ” Madrid said. “But there was another 20% that surprised us more. They were housewives, women with grocery bags who did it for 50 pesos, or whatever they needed to buy food. They didn’t protect themselves (use condoms) because they didn’t consider themselves sex workers.”
Madrid said she knows of 50 sex workers in Mexico City who died of COVID-19. She and her husband and fellow organizer Jaime Montejo, caught it themselves, and he died of it last May. The sex workers who congregate outside one subway station believe Montejo caught the coronavirus while helping them.
Conditions that have always been tough for the women who ply the trade in Mexico City — violence by clients and gangs who prey on prostitutes and shakedowns by corrupt police — worsened during the pandemic.
Rules of the partial lockdown forced many hotels to close, and others raised the prices they charge sex workers. That left some earning the equivalent of only $3 or $4 from each client.