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.

There are growing questions in Washington, D.C. as to why President Biden is not taking action to increase the flow of refugees into the U.S.

To be clear, this is a separate question from the current situation on the U.S.-Mexico border.

During the presidential campaign, Biden made it clear he would move to raise the cap on the number of refugees allowed into the U.S.

While he was president, Donald Trump dramatically reduced the number of refugees allowed into the U.S.

“Democrats are pushing the administration to explain why President Joe Biden has not signed paperwork raising the cap on the number of refugees allowed in the United States, which has put hundreds in limbo even as the Biden administration had promised to reverse former President Donald Trump’s policies,” CNN reported on March 24.

“There are fewer refugees being resettled to safety in the U.S. right now than there were during the last year of the Trump administration. Read that again,” wrote Mary Elizabeth Margolis, Acting Managing Director of Voice for Refuge Action Fund, in a recent opinion piece for the Hill.

She notes that Biden “quickly signaled his intent to follow through on his commitment to support refugee resettlement” and through executive action, he “rescinded the previous administration’s wrongful refugee bans and laid the foundation to strengthen refugee protections and increase refugee admissions.”

It has been almost two months since his announcement “and more than one month since the consultations, and President Biden has still not signed on the dotted line to allow more refugees to travel. Seven hundred flights have been canceled, and there is now an indefinite suspension on booking travel for refugees who are not in the restrictive categories,” Margolis wrote.

“With increasing needs for protecting asylum seekers at the border, it appears the administration is holding the resettlement program hostage as it figures out what to do next. History has clearly shown that the U.S. has the resources and the will to have both a robust resettlement program and a humane system for protecting asylum seekers and unaccompanied children. This is an excuse based only on optics, and ignores the reality that resettlement and asylum protections are complementary,” she said.

Vermont’s Republican governor is asking the State Department to at least triple the number of refugees expected to arrive in the current fiscal year, the Associated Press reported.

Gov. Phil Scott said in a letter to the State Department that Vermont is scheduled to receive 100 refugees this year and he would like to see at least three times that number next year, the story noted.

“Refugees are an integral part of our efforts to grow Vermont’s economy, which include a workforce development strategy to attract new workers and meet the demographic challenges faced by a declining population,” Scott wrote.

More than 715 refugees from around the world “who expected to start new lives in the United States have had their flights canceled in recent weeks because President Biden has postponed an overhaul of his predecessor’s sharp limits on new refugee admissions,” reports Miriam Jordan in the New York Times.

Jordan notes that in his first foreign policy speech last month, the president said he would lift the refugee ceiling to 125,000 in the 2021 fiscal year. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken notified Congress on Feb. 12 that the administration planned to allow up to 62,500 refugees to enter the country in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

“President Biden has talked the talk on refugees, but he refuses to walk the walk. Or, more specifically, sign some basic paperwork,” writes Catherine Rampell in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.

“If the refugee-ceiling paperwork delay is about avoiding more headlines alleging Biden’s softness on persecuted peoples, well, he already got those headlines — a month ago, when he announced the new policy. The public believes Biden has already lifted the refugee ceiling; only those desperate refugees who were recently unticketed know otherwise,” Rampell points out.

In a Fox 2 News story, the work of St. Louis-based Oasis International on behalf of refugees is profiled.

The story notes that every year 500 to 1000 refugees come to St. Louis from 35 different nations with the promise of starting a new life.

“St. Louis is a city of immigrants and refugees,” said Joanie Akers, who founded Oasis International with her husband.

In the wake of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, local communities are preparing for an influx of refugees, with Biden’s promise to significantly raise the cap for refugees admitted in the country.

Over the past four years, the yearly cap for refugees allowed into the U.S. has been drastically cut under Trump. Biden has pledged to set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time.

“The thing with getting restarted is so many systems are dismantled,” Leslie Aizenman, director of refugee and immigrant services at Jewish Family and Community Services, one of two agencies in Pittsburgh that currently resettle refugees, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “A lot of us are not equipped to go big fast.”

While the Biden team hasn’t detailed its plans, “Ms. Aizenman has heard speculation from her agency’s national affiliate that there might be some increases later in 2021, with a higher ceiling in 2022,” reports Peter Smith.

Megan Meagher, refugee resettlement director for Catholic Social Services of Southern Nebraska, told Nebraska’s Lincoln Star-Journal that “The landscape of refugee resettlement, we assume it’s going to change pretty drastically” with a new presidential administration. 

In an announcement for the 40^th anniversary celebration of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), President-Elect Joe Biden “stated his intent to multiply the number of refugees accepted by the U.S. in 2021” (National Catholic Register, Nov. 13).

“The Biden-Harris administration will restore America’s historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere, in raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000,” Biden said last week, the National Catholic Register reported.

Biden “chose the setting of one of the Catholic Church’s leading refugee support organizations’ events to state for the first time as president-elect that he will dramatically increase the target for refugee admissions to the United States, offering a stark contrast to the historic lows under President Donald Trump that were long protested by Catholic leaders,” reported the National Catholic Reporter.

“The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response,” Biden said in a prerecorded video that aired during the virtual event celebrating the 40^th anniversary of JRS, Religion News Service reported.

The video is available here.

In yet another stark policy difference between President Trump and Joe Biden, the Trump Administration has “slashed the number of refugees it will allow to resettle in the United States in the coming year, capping the number at 15,000, a record low in the history of the country’s modern refugee program” (Reuters, Oct. 28, 2020).

The level of 15,000 will be limited to refugees from specific categories of admissions, potentially leaving out more than 1.4 million of the world’s most vulnerable refugees still in need of resettlement, the International Refugee Committee said in an Oct. 28 news release. “This late announcement came a full month into the fiscal year, causing undue delays to thousands of vulnerable people left in harm’s way,” the IRC noted.

The administration also included a restriction on individuals from Somalia, Syria, or Yemen, requiring that individuals from these three countries “shall not be admitted as refugees” unless they meet specific humanitarian carve-outs, the IRC said.

Biden says he will restore the program to around 125,000 refugees a year should he be elected President of the United States.

President Trump’s “rollicking abuse of refugees and the answering jeers of his fans are a frank confession of moral rottenness,” writes George Packer in a new column for the Atlantic magazine. “His contempt for people who have given up everything to become Americans fully displays his fundamental unworthiness as a president and a human being,” Packer says of Trump.

Under Trump, notes Packer, the U.S. refugee program has almost collapsed. “Last year, the administration set a ceiling of just 18,000 refugees. It actually admitted 10,000. Several weeks ago, the administration announced that the ceiling for fiscal year 2021 will go down to 15,000.”

Becca Heller, the executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told Packer, “I think if Trump is reelected, it’s the end of the U.S. refugee program.”

In stark contrast to Trump’s hostility to refugees, Joe Biden has pledged to raise the ceiling of refugees admitted to the U.S. to 125,000 in his first year as president.