Zaatari Refugee Camp by Amali Tower
As part of the President-elect’s plan to reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees, in his first year in office, Joe Biden plans to raise the annual refugee admissions cap to 125,000, slowly increasing it over time.
Upon taking office in 2017, the Trump White House slashed the refugee admissions number from the previous year’s 110,000 to 45,000, then the lowest in the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), actually resettling only 22,491 refugees - almost 60% fewer refugees than the 53,716 refugees, (not accounting for Syrian refugees), resettled in the Obama administration’s last year.
In the next three years in office, the free fall in admissions caps continued, eventually reaching yet another historic low of 15,000 for fiscal year 2021.
Becca Heller from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is correct in pointing out the time it will take to restart the heavily dismantled program in order to meet that ambitious target. Having worked many years in the USRAP, we can attest to the highly secure and contiguous series of security checks, medical clearances, inter-agency coordination and logistics it takes to make the entire vetted program work from overseas referral and processing to US arrival, resettlement and integration. The process is so thoroughly secure and vetted that the average refugee case process is well over two years.
Resettlement agencies that receive refugees in the US do so via cooperative agreements with the State Department. Their budgets are set according to the refugee admissions numbers. The lower admissions numbers then, meant lower budgets, causing many agencies to trim staff and operations or close entirely.
There is a huge backlog of cases - by now well over the 120,000 reported in September. This includes Iraqis who worked for the US military, who are at extreme risk, are qualified refugees, but have been denied assistance by this current administration. In 2020, of the 4,000 Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), reserved for Iraqi refugees and included within the USRAP, only 123 Iraqis were resettled in the US.
Refugees are the most vetted group that arrives in the US. This backlog comprises of people who have passed every clearance required: interviews with UN agencies, US processing staff, official US government immigration and security officers, and a series of security checks, medical and more.
And yet, to further stymie processing, the Trump administration added “Extreme Vetting” to the process, doing nothing more than extremely slowing down the process. Worse yet, the new vetting rules were kept secret until legal action forced the government to disclose its details. (NPR)