U.S. exceeds annual 50,000 cap on refugees

The United States surpassed the Trump administration’s 50,000-person cap on refugee admissions Wednesday as a group of about 160 people landed in airports across the country to begin new lives.

The State Department allowed all refugees scheduled to fly on July 12 to be admitted, “to ensure an orderly, effective implementation of the 50,000 cap,” a spokesman said by email. By Wednesday afternoon, 50,086 people had entered the country as refugees this year.

The 50,000-person limit is more than a 50 percent reduction in the number of refugees that had been authorized by President Barack Obama and Congress for this fiscal year, ending Sept. 30.

President Donald Trump ordered the cap as part of a January executive order that also sought to suspend the entire refugee resettlement program for 120 days. The order, which called for a temporary ban on entry of citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries, was blocked in multiple iterations by federal courts. The Supreme Court last month ruled that a partial version of Trump’s order could take effect, allowing for the 50,000-person limit on refugees.

The cap isn’t a hard line, however. The Supreme Court ruled that people with a “bona fide” relationship to a person or entity in the United States could still enter, a standard that the administration has since defined to mean those with immediate family in the United States. As a result, thousands of people who have been cleared in background checks to resettle in the United States still could be denied entry.

“Beginning July 13, only those individuals who have a credible claim to a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States will be eligible for admission through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” the State Department spokesman said in an email.

This month, the State Department issued new guidance to the agencies, such as HIAS, that are contracted by the federal government to resettle refugees, saying that applicants must provide evidence of a relationship with a close family member before departing for the United States.

Homeland Security officials and refugee resettlement advocates have said the U.S. government’s refugee admissions program - a process of applications and background checks by multiple agencies that can take months or years — largely has ground to a halt since January.

“They’re doing death by procedure,” Becca Heller, the director of IRAP, which has sued the federal government over the restrictions, said of the administration. “They’ve realized they can just use bureaucracy to delay so long that no one ever gets in, de facto.”