After outcry, White House says Biden will lift refugee cap in May
WASHINGTON — Facing swift blowback from allies and aid groups, the White House on Friday said President Joe Biden plans to lift his predecessor’s historically low cap on refugees by next month, after initially moving only to expand the eligibility criteria for resettlements.
In an emergency determination signed by Biden earlier in the day, he stated the admission of up to 15,000 refugees set by former President Donald Trump this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest.” But if the cap is reached before the end of the current budget year and the emergency refugee situation persists, then a presidential determination may be issued to raise the ceiling.
That set off a deluge of criticism from ranking Democratic members of Congress, including Senate Majority Whip and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who called it “unacceptable.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said later that Biden has been consulting with his advisers to determine what number of refugees could realistically be admitted to the United States between now and Oct. 1, the end of the fiscal year.
She said “given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited,” it’s now “unlikely” Biden will be able to boost that number to 62,500, as he had proposed in his plan to Congress two months ago.
But Biden, she said, was urged by advisers to “take immediate action to reverse the Trump policy that banned refugees from many key regions, to enable flights from those regions to begin within days; today’s order did that.”
The allocations provide more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and lift Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Critics from both sides of the political spectrum had accused the president of bowing to political pressure that has been mounting over the record pace of unaccompanied migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trump’s immigration policies, tweeted that it “reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses.”
The White House indicated the border situation was partly why Biden had not acted before now, even though migrants at the border do not go through the same vetting process as refugees.
“It is a factor,” said Psaki, noting that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “has personnel working on both issues and so we have to ensure that there is capacity and ability to manage both.”
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who also serves on the Judiciary committee, said he didn’t buy that.
“This cruel policy is no more acceptable now than it was during the Trump Administration,” Blumenthal said. “To be clear: the asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear.”
Since the fiscal year began last Oct. 1, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S.