Flow of refugees to U.S. slows
State Department cites stricter screening process for delays
In Fayetteville, Ark., this March, volunteers were on their way to set up an apartment, cars loaded with linens, lamps, crockery and canned food, when they were abruptly told to turn around. The refugee family from the Democratic Republic of Congo would not be coming.
In Columbus, Ohio, a 14-passenger white van that would take refugees to medical appointments sits unused. In the rare instance a newcomer or two needs transport, they travel in a fuel-efficient economy car.
And in southwest Houston, a 1,500-square-foot storage room is loaded to the ceiling with furniture, toys, bedding and other items donated for refugee families, all collecting dust.
The flow of refugees to the United States has slowed nearly to a halt, demonstrating that what President Donald Trump’s administration could not achieve by executive order it is accomplishing by bureaucracy.
The administration has cut the staff that conducts clearance interviews overseas, intensified the screening process for refugees, and for those people it characterizes as high-risk, doubled the number who need to be screened. As a result, if the trickle of refugees admitted continues at its current pace, just 20,000 are projected to enter the United States by the end of this year.
The machinery of refugee resettlement has ground down accordingly.
“Every stage in the process works like the assembly line in a factory — each station knows exactly what to do and how to do the handoff to the next step,” said Barbara Strack, who retired in January as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “This fiscal year,” she added, “the administration essentially ‘broke’ the assembly line.”
The steepest decline has been in the number of Muslims who have been resettled. In fiscal 2016, 38,900 Muslim refugees came to the United States,. The following year, that number fell to 22,861. This fiscal year, just 2,107 have arrived.
A total of 13,051 refugees of all backgrounds have been admitted, making it unlikely that the administration’s originally planned cap of 45,000 — about half the number that came during the last year of the Obama administration — will be met.
“It’s death by a thousand paper cuts,” said Jennifer Sime, senior vice president at the International Rescue Committee, one of the nine national resettlement agencies contracted by the State Department.
A State Department spokesperson did not dispute there was a slowdown and said processing times may be slower as the government implements new screening procedures. And refugee resettlement, the department insisted, was not the only way to help displaced people.
“The United States will also continue to lead the world in humanitarian assistance and support displaced people close to their homes in order to help meet their needs until they can safely and voluntarily return home,” Carol T. O’Connell, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, said in a statement.
The State Department said it expects to fund a smaller number of agencies next year, corresponding to the fewer refugees to be resettled, and the survival of even some of the most-established organizations, like the global Jewish nonprofit resettlement group, HIAS, which was founded in New York in 1881, is in doubt.
“The refugee program reflects the priorities of every administration,” said Melanie Nezer, senior vice president at HIAS. But what’s happening is unlike anything she has seen before, she said. “We’ve had extreme vetting for years, but refugees have cleared the process. Now they don’t. It’s not extreme vetting any more, it’s a closed door.”