In the wake of President Biden’s recent move to revise the United States’ annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year, towns, cities and states are preparing to help refugees who will soon arrive in the country.

“With the country opening to more refugees, the five-year-old Hyde Park Refugee Project is entering a new phase of its existence: a time of great expansion and a rapidly spreading web of partnerships,” reported Andrea Holliday, a contributing writer for New York’s Hyde Park Herald.

“Their new goal, in tune with the Biden administration, is to multiply the number of families who come directly to Hyde Park after escaping desperate situations overseas,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, two programs dedicated to resettling refugees in Idaho “are preparing for more people to call Idaho home,” reports KTVB’s Katija Stjepovic.

But raising the annual refugee resettlement cap “is just the first step in rebuilding a complex program that involves coordination among several U.S. government agencies, the United Nations refugee agency U.N.H.C.R. and nongovernmental organizations in the United States and abroad,” note Melanie Nezer and Leon Rodriguez in a recent New York Times opinion piece.

“This will take serious effort and resources. After all, the prior administration did all it could to dismantle the infrastructure that supported every step in the refugee resettlement process,” they wrote.

Nezer is the senior vice president for public affairs at HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides services to refugees and asylum seekers around the world. Rodriguez was the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014 to 2017 and is a board member of HIAS.

Rebuilding the refugee resettlement program in the U.S. “is not a problem for Biden to solve. It is an opportunity for the U.S. to seize,” writes David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Time Magazine.

“For that to happen, the country needs more than a signature of a Presidential Determination. Successful social change depends on public engagement as well as policy smarts. There are lessons here for other parts of the immigration debate,” writes Miliband.

He argues that the U.S. should expand the use of community, family, and co-sponsorship models of resettlement. “By building on the existing public-private partnership model, community sponsorship will expand the number of refugee families that can safely resettle, build community buy-in towards the program, and improve the welcome and integration offered to these families when they arrive in their new communities.”

President Biden on Monday “reversed himself and said he would allow as many as 62,500 refugees to enter the United States during the next six months, eliminating the sharp limits that President Donald J. Trump imposed on those seeking refuge from war, violence or natural disasters,” the New York Times reported on May 3.

Biden is raising the cap from 15,000 to 62,500 “after outrage from progressives and refugee agencies,” the BBC reported.

Refugee resettlement agencies “have waited for Biden to quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year since Feb. 12, when a presidential proposal was submitted to Congress saying he planned to do so,” the Associated Press reported.

Since the fiscal year began last 1 October, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S., the Guardian reported.

“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden said in a May 3 statement.

The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year. We are working quickly to undo the damage of the last four years. It will take s”ome time, but that work is already underway. We have reopened the program to new refugees. And by changing the regional allocations last month, we have already increased the number of refugees ready for departure to the United States,” Biden said.