Advocates fear Trump win would upend Biden gains on immigration

With national attention focused on the chaos at the southern border, President Joe Biden has been steadily rebuilding a legal pathway for immigration that was gutted during the Trump administration.

The United States has allowed more than 40,000 refugees into the country in the first five months of the fiscal year after they passed a rigorous, often yearslong, screening process that includes security and medical vetting and interviews with U.S. officers overseas.

The figure represents a significant expansion of the refugee program, which is at the heart of U.S. laws that provide desperate people from around the world with a legal way to find safe haven in the United States.

The United States has not granted refugee status to so many people in such a short period of time in more than seven years. The Biden administration is now on target to allow in 125,000 refugees this year, the most in three decades, said Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesman.

By comparison, roughly 64,000 refugees were admitted during the last three years of the Trump administration.

“The Biden administration has been talking a big talk about resettling more refugees since Biden took office,” said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “Finally we are seeing the payoff in higher numbers.”

But as the presidential campaign heats up, immigration advocates fear that the gains will be wiped out if former President Donald Trump is elected. The former president has vowed to suspend the program if he takes office again, just as he did in 2017 for 120 days.

Trump has characterized the program as a security threat, even though refugees go through extensive background checks and screening. He reassigned officers, shuttered overseas posts and slashed the number of refugees allowed into the country every year.

The result, when Biden took office, was a system devoid of resources.

“The refugee program hangs in the balance with this election,” said Barbara Strack, the former lead refugee official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The refugee program historically has had strong bipartisan support, in part because it was seen as the “right way” to come to the United States.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a congressional hearing last year that the process for the refugee program was “sound.” He said he did not view the program as a “substantial” safety risk and said the program’s robust checks stood in “contrast to the chaos we see at the southern border.”