As the chaos at the southern border draws national attention, President Biden has been steadily rebuilding legal routes for immigration that were destroyed during the Trump administration.
The United States has registered more than 40,000 refugees in the first five months of the fiscal year after going through a rigorous, sometimes years-long vetting process that includes security and medical examinations and interviews with American officers overseas. was allowed to enter the country.
The numbers mark a significant expansion of the refugee program, a centerpiece of U.S. law that provides desperate people around the world with a legal way to find safe haven in the United States.
The United States has not granted refugee status to so many people in such a short period of time in more than seven years. White House press secretary Angelo Fernandez Hernández said the Biden administration aims to admit 125,000 refugees this year, the most in 30 years.
By comparison, approximately 64,000 refugees were admitted during the past three years of the Trump administration.
“The Biden administration has been talking a lot about resettling more refugees since Biden took office,” said Julia Gelatt, deputy director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “Finally, we are seeing the results in higher numbers.”
But as the presidential campaign heats up, immigration advocates worry that their gains could be undone if former President Donald J. Trump is elected. The former president vowed to suspend the program for 120 days if he takes office again, as he did in 2017.
Trump has characterized the program as a national security threat, even though refugees undergo extensive background checks and screening. He redeployed officers, closed overseas posts, and reduced the number of refugees allowed into the country each year.
As a result, Biden was left with an under-resourced system when he took office.
“The refugee program hangs in the balance with this election,” said Barbara L. Strzok, former chief refugee officer for U.S. Immigration Services.
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The refugee program has received far less attention than the country's asylum system, which is struggling to bear the weight of millions of new arrivals at its southern border.
The path to applying for asylum and being recognized as a refugee are separate. Potential refugees apply for the program abroad and remain there while the process is reviewed. People seeking asylum apply when they set foot on American soil, and their applications must go through a bogged down immigration court system.
Biden has taken a tougher stance on asylum in recent months as he faces growing pressure to bring some order to the southern frontier.
Refugee programs have historically had strong bipartisan support, in part because they were seen as the “right way” to come to the United States.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in a congressional hearing last year that the refugee program process was “sound.” He said he did not consider the program to be a “significant” security risk and said the program's strong checks were “in contrast to the chaos we are seeing at the southern border.”
Still, some of that bipartisan support is eroding as the number of people crossing the southern border reaches record levels. Trump has made an anti-immigrant platform a symbol of his political identity, advocating closing off the country to both legal and illegal immigrants.
But for people like Machar Maris Gou, who spent most of his life in refugee camps in Kenya, the opportunity to come to America felt like the only hope for the future.
It took six years, but my application to resettle in the United States was approved and I arrived here in February. His new home is in Wichita, Kansas.
“Being allowed to come to the United States felt like another birthday, because I knew I was leaving behind my life as a refugee,” said Gou, whose family fled what is now South Sudan in the 1990s. ” he said. .
Mr. Gu, 33, said he had no plans to head to the U.S.-Mexico border and cross illegally. In recent years, the southern border has seen an increase in migration from African countries such as Mauritania, Senegal and Angola.
“I have never had the courage to come to America or anywhere else illegally,” he said. All he wanted was to “stay alive,” he said.
He is currently applying for a work permit and hopes to become a security guard before bringing his wife and three daughters to the United States. While he waits, he finds solace in playing pickup basketball with refugees from Sudan and Congo.
Once refugees are approved for resettlement, the U.S. government funds cultural orientation classes and connects them with local organizations that help them become self-sufficient with job training, food, and housing.
Refugees must apply for a green card within one year of arriving in the United States. They can then obtain American citizenship.
Rebuilding
The Biden administration inherited a program that was gutted during the Trump administration.
Trump has repeatedly warned that refugees are a threat. At a rally in Minnesota in 2020, he said refugees come from “the most dangerous places in the world, including Yemen, Syria and your favorite country, Somalia.”
Trump at one point allowed states and cities to refuse to admit refugees, but the move was later blocked in federal court.
The International Rescue Committee said that contrary to Trump's claims, “the most difficult way to come to the United States is as a refugee.”
“Refugees are screened more rigorously than any other group seeking entry to the United States,” the group said in a statement. “Everyone who wants to come here must first register with the United Nations refugee agency, which identifies families most in need of help. The United States then manually processes everyone who is allowed into the country. Please select.”
By the end of his administration, Trump had lowered the “refugee cap,” or the maximum number of refugees allowed in a single fiscal year, to 18,000 in 2020, and then to a record low of 15,000 in 2021. It had been proposed.
Because funding for local programs is tied to that number, the money quickly dried up.
Many organizations that help resettle refugees have been forced to close. By the end of the Trump administration, the corps of officers tasked with interviewing refugees had declined from about 170 to 107, according to government data.
Sandra Vines, senior director of refugee resettlement at the International Rescue Committee, said the Trump era was “pretty demoralizing.” She said, “Every day I came into the office, it felt like there was a new administrative attack on the program. We called it Death by a Thousand Papercuts.”
The pandemic also contributed to a decline in refugee admissions during the early days of the Biden administration. The U.S. took in just over 11,000 refugees in fiscal year 2021, which includes part of the Trump administration. The following year, more than 25,000 were approved.
The Biden administration has been working to rebuild the infrastructure for the program. Approximately 150 refugee resettlement offices have opened across the country, and the number of refugee staff conducting interviews has increased.
More than 60,000 refugees were admitted last year, signaling a stronger refugee program. Although far from the 125,000 cap set by Biden, the program proved to be handling more cases.
In addition to the added resources, the Biden administration has streamlined processing and opened so-called safe movement offices in Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica to accept applications from migrants and help expand refugee processing from the region. .
“A lot of people were hoping for more admissions soon, but I think they understood what it would take to make the program a success. Those hopes weren't realistic,” said Strzok, a former refugee official. said.
“We are now seeing the fruits of our labor.”
audio creator Patricia Zurbaran.