President Joe Biden directed the federal government to accelerate processing of refugees, but didn’t lift the historically low ceiling set by former President Donald Trump amid a surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biden’s order reallocates refugee slots to make them more readily available to people living in hot spots abroad, according to a senior administration official.
The Friday announcement came amid pressure from human-rights groups and some Democrats, who called on Biden to fulfill a pledge to raise the cap to 62,500 for the second half of the fiscal year. In his last year in office, Trump set the cap at 15,000 the lowest number since Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980.
Some expressed concern Biden delayed the increase for weeks due to the political crisis surrounding the influx of migrants at the southwest border.
Representative Ilhan Omar, a former refugee, sent a letter to Biden this week along with other Democratic lawmakers that said until the president officials lifts the cap, “our refugee policy remains unacceptably draconian and discriminatory.”
The U.S. in March saw the highest number of apprehensions at the border in almost two decades, including a record number of children and teens traveling alone.
The situation at the border, which involves migrants seeking asylum, is not directly related to the refugee program, under which people apply overseas to resettle in the U.S. But White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the hold-up was in part due to capacity issues at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which both handles refugees admissions and sheltering children and teen migrants traveling alone.
“It took us some time to see and evaluate how ineffective, or how trashed in some ways, the refugee processing system had become. And so we had to rebuild some of those muscles and put it back in place,” Psaki said.
