• Biden administration on track to accept fewest refugees of any president,
WASHINGTON — Since his days on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden has tried to cast himself as diametrically opposed to Donald Trump when it comes to welcoming refugees into the United States.
Within two weeks of taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order to rebuild and enhance federal programs to resettle refugees — programs he said had been “badly damaged” under the Trump administration. Mr. Biden also revoked some restrictive immigration policies Mr. Trump had put in place, including ones that sought to bar refugees from some countries. In February, Mr. Biden announced he was raising the annual cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, up from Trump’s historically low limit of 15,000.
However, Mr. Biden has yet to do one thing that would make all of those changes official: sign what is known as a presidential determination. Without that action, Mr. Trump’s old policies and his 15,000-person cap on refugee settlements remain in effect.
Signing a presidential determination typically takes place almost immediately after such policy announcements. The delay has lasted eight weeks.
Because of it, Mr. Biden is on track to accept the fewest refugees this year of any modern president, including Mr. Trump, according to a report released Friday from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nonprofit humanitarian aid group.
The Biden administration has admitted 2,050 refugees at the halfway point of this
fiscal year, despite Mr. Biden’s promises to reverse Trump-era immigration policies, significantly raise the cap on refugee settlements and respond to what his officials have called “unforeseen and urgent situations,” the IRC report noted.
The group estimated, at the current pace and without the reversal of Trumpera policies, the Biden administration will admit about 4,510 refugees into the United States this fiscal year, less than half of the figure admitted in Mr. Trump’s final year.
“I don’t know the specific reason why [ Mr. Biden] hasn’t signed, and it’s really unusual that he hasn’t signed,” said Nazanin Ash, the IRC’s vice president for global policy and advocacy. “It is typically a standard, automatic last step in the process.”
A State Department representative on Sunday referred all questions about the presidential determination on refugee admissions to the White House. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The IRC report criticized
the delay as “unexplained” and “unjustified,” particularly amid worsening refugee crises in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also said the administration was not using refugee resettlement as a “critical tool” to address the sharp increase in migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. This fiscal year, the United States has admitted 139 refugees from the “Northern Triangle” countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
“With more than 1.4 million refugees in need of resettlement worldwide and fewer than 1 percent of all refugees ever considered for this life-saving program, no admissions slot should go unfilled,” the report said.
It also noted Muslim refugees continue to be disproportionately affected by the Trump policies that remain in place, especially Syrian refugees who were already the group most affected by Mr. Trump’s refugee admissions cap. Under the Biden administration, 42 Syrian refugees have been resettled to the United States this fiscal year.
“These categories are nothing short of discriminatory,” Ms. Ash said.