But, the radicals in the White House, including Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted the refugee ceiling bumped up to 62,500 for the remainder of the year.
Years ago, care for the Unaccompanied Alien Children was shifted to the Office of Refugee Resettlement which is in the Department of Health and Human Services and is thus the root of today’s problem—an agency in crisis as it attempts to deal with thousands of children who are not refugees illegally arriving at our borders at the express invitation of the Biden administration when its original mission was to manage refugees selected for admission to the US.
Here is Politicoon the internal scuffle using just the nicest tones they can muster so as not to make it sounds like the Biden ship is foundering.
I am laughing to myself because this sort of internal squabbling during the Trump years would have been blown sky high by corporate media with the help of deep state leakers in a way to make Trump look foolish.
Somebody, other than Saint Joe, has to be the fall-guy in the dream administration’s first major public relations fiasco and it looks like the long knives in the White House have found their man.
For a little chuckle, watch Biden announcing his pick for HHS Secretary butcher the name of the Department of Health and Human Service before butchering Becerra’s name in the first minute of this youtube video.
Becerra’s cautious border play rankles White House
Xavier Becerra spent decades urging congressional leaders to support liberalized legal immigration. But he’s sounding a different note as Health secretary, responsible for caring for upwards of 21,000 migrant children.
Biden’s kids in cages!
Becerra has argued for maintaining the historically low Trump-era cap on refugee admissions to the U.S., according to two people with knowledge of the matter, for fear of stretching the already-thin resources of his department’s refugee office.
His insistence on a more cautious approach to immigration policy has, moreover, contributed to his shaky standing with some quarters of a fast-paced White House where senior aides have spent weeks pressing the Health department to speed its intake of thousands of children at the southern border, and bristled at what friends and skeptics alike described as Becerra’s at times deliberate manner.
“He cares about raising the caps — but let’s take one challenge at a time,” one person close to Becerra said of his mindset. “Emotionally, he’s there. But he’s always a pragmatist.”
Becerra apparently had some common sense!
President Joe Biden in April initially agreed to keep the refugee limit in place, siding with Becerra and overruling top officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But the blowback from immigration advocates and Democrats on Capitol Hill was immediate and intense, and Biden has since reversed course.
Becerra in the meantime has been privately frustrated by the White House’s rush to ease a series of immigration guardrails well before he was confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, allies said, including a key decision to allow unaccompanied immigrant children to remain in the country.
[….]
That responsibility for caring for unaccompanied children has landed chiefly on HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which also handles foreigners seeking refugee status, though the two operations are not intertwined.
[….]
For Becerra, a relative latecomer as one of Biden’s last Cabinet officials to be confirmed, it represents an early and steep management test.
And it comes after years in Congress and state government as a vocal immigrant-rights advocate who pressed both Democratic and Republican administrations to take more aggressive efforts to overhaul the immigration system and “open the doors of opportunity” for those coming to the U.S. Becerra frequently invokes the experiences of his immigrant Mexican parents and once chided fellow Latinos for “running from their heritage” in advocating for tough immigration restrictions.
Although we have no idea where large numbers of the ‘children’ will be placed in facilities around the US (unless information leaks out like in this North Carolina case), you can see where some of the mostly teenagers have been placed with sponsors through the end of March.
State and county data is available. Don’t miss the fact that tens of thousands were placed during Trump’s tenure.
Where have the refugees, placed via the US Refugee Admissions Program, gone so far this fiscal year?
Call your local elected representatives at the city or county level and ask if your community is being selected to ‘welcome’ either the illegal aliens invading our southern border now, or are being asked to become a refugee resettlement site as I reported recently about Winchester, Virginia.
If the answer is yes, you must get to work to create controversy where you live.
Where have the refugees, placed via the US Refugee Admissions Program, gone so far this fiscal year?