Refugee advocates hope Biden aids efforts
Come January, refugee resettlement agencies across the country, including the two in Columbus, will likely be tasked with helping to rebuild a system the Trump administration has all but dismantled.
With record low numbers of refugees being resettled during the past four years, many local agencies have been gutted, with others closing.
But some refugee advocates say President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration offers hope that has been absent for the past four years.
“It gives us hope that we can rebuild a robust refugee resettlement program and, for so many people in our community, it gives them hope that they could be reunited with their families,” said Nadia Kasvin, co-founder and director of US Together, one of two refugee resettlement agencies in Columbus.
Kajene Etienne, 27, of the North Side keeps hoping his family will be able to join him soon.
Born in the Congo, Etienne’s family fled to Rwanda when he was 3 after being chased out of their country by another tribe threatening to kill them. His mother, sister and two younger brothers live in a refugee camp in Rwanda, awaiting resettlement to the United States, which was approved six years ago.
But the Trump administration’s cuts of more than 80% to the resettlement program mean they haven’t been able to come.
“My family is not here because of the Trump administration,” said Etienne, who became a citizen in August 2019 and voted for Biden. Etienne, who resettled in the U.S. in 2013, said he was happy when Biden won.
“There is a chance that since he took over the office there are more people who are going to come in, more than the Trump administration did the last four years,” Etienne said. “I have 95% hope that my family will come. When Trump was in the office, it was like 15%.”
The hope that comes with a Biden presidency is due in large part to a campaign promise that he will raise the number of refugees resettled each fiscal year from Trump’s historic low of 15,000 to 125,000, a number more in line with historic averages.
Despite that, some refugee advocates say the progress might be slow.
Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, doesn’t see immigration to be as high of a priority for Biden as it has been for Trump.
The institute estimates that the Trump administration made more than 400 changes to the nation’s immigration policy.
“I think we’re about to see the pace of immigration changes slow down significantly,” Pierce said. “There are overarching questions of whether or not the new administration is going to have the bandwidth to do all of this within the first 100 days. Will immigration actually be their key priority? And I think we know it’s not going to be. … During Trump, immigration was a key priority.”
Naomi Steinberg, vice president of policy and advocacy at HIAS, a national refugee resettlement organization, said it’s important to keep the pressure on
the Biden-harris administration make sure refugee resettlement increased.
Refugee resettlement is largely controlled by the executive branch, so Biden likely won’t have to go through many regulatory hurdles to change the amount of refugees who can be resettled, said Angie Plummer, executive director of Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS), the other refugee resettlement agency in Columbus.
Plummer said she is relieved Biden was elected president, as she has had to tell numerous clients that their family members won’t be able to join them during Trump’s presidency.
“It was really dark,” she said. While she feels Biden “shares the same values and appreciation for what refugees bring,” Plummer added: “I know our work is cut out for us.”
Refugee advocates are hoping Biden will talk to Congress on day one of his presidency, relaying to them his new goal for resettlement and starting the program on a path to rebuilding. He already has pledged to reverse Muslim and other travel bans Trump instituted, which are keeping refugee families separated to this day, advocates say.
Families like that of 38-year-old Muhammed Omar of the Northwest Side were unable to be reunited because of
to is
Trump’s January 2017 Muslim ban, which stopped many from Muslim-majority countries from being resettled in the United States.
Omar and his family are originally from Somalia and are awaiting the arrival of his 17-year-old stepdaughter, Ramla Aweis, now in Tunisia. She had lost all hope of being able to join her mother, stepfather and two half-siblings in Columbus until Biden was elected, he said.
“She’s hopeful now,” Omar said of Aweis. “We can see a lot of hope right now.”
Throughout most of the history of the program, annual refugee admissions have averaged 80,000. It is likely that just half or less of the 15,000 would be resettled this year if Trump had been reelected, said Meredith Owen, interim director for policy and advocacy at Church World Service, a national refugee resettlement agency.
“The Trump administration was laser-focused on destroying U.S. refugee protections, including through the asylum system,” Steinberg said.
The Trump administration wasn’t planning any interviews for the first and second quarter of this fiscal year, which
began Oct. 1, Owen said. But there are opportunities to interview refugees safely and fully in compliance with health guidelines during COVID-19, she said.
Right now there are 117,945 refugees in the pipeline to be resettled in the U.S., Owen said, but the majority have not started the process, which includes interviews, screenings, background checks and more. That process took approximately two years before Trump began to slow it down, she said.
About 38,000 refugees are currently approved by the federal government, but only 2,557 are ready to depart for America, Owen said.
“It’s a much smaller pipeline than existed five years ago,” Owen said. “Under the refugee allocation categories ... the Trump administration set, only about 20,000 of them would even be eligible to come.”
Kasvin, whose organization is affiliated with HIAS, said restoring the program to its previous high numbers and beyond is possible.
“It took systemic decimation of the program,” Kasvin said, “and we will need a very systemic, very planned, very strategic building up of capacity at all levels.” dking@dispatch.com @Danaeking