Holy cow! This storyat the New York Timesyesterday was revealing and that was because, first and foremost, it says to me that there is discord, and there are leakers willing to leak about that discord, inside the Biden/Harris administration!
The entire issue of refugee resettlement had gone into sleep-mode in recent months, so I’m surprised that the topic is now front and center, not so much because of refugee numbers per se, but because it is giving us a window into an extremely dysfunctional (back stabbing) administration.
Is Biden a racist?
Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the foot-dragging and flip-flopping, and I am happy to see so many Open borders pushers with their undies in a wad, but it is disquieting to see such an erratic decision-making process.
Not to mention, if Biden’s rationale is that he doesn’t want to piss-off more voters (or members of Congress) on immigration issues before the mid-term elections, that ship has sailed.
Everyone already knows he has unleashed the invasion.
We are being overrun by illegal aliens and the average American isn’t sitting out there saying, well, we can cut him some slack because at least he isn’t bringing in tens of thousands of legal refugees from across the entire globe.
See my post yesterday about how the border and the refugee admissions program have long ago been “conflated” in peoples’ minds.
Here is a bit of what theNew York Timesis saying in what is likely the first, hopefully not the last, reporting on the bloom-off-the-rose for Biden. It is long, and likely only the wonkiest of refugee wonks will read it all.
Forgive me for my fixation on this, but I have never seen anything quite like this mess in all the years I’ve been writing about the US Refugee Program, and I especially love to see the Lefties at each others’ throats!
An Early Promise Broken: Inside Biden’s Reversal on Refugees
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to President Biden.
(If Biden brings in fewer refugees than Trump did in a year, will they call Biden a “racist?” Just wondering!)
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden.
Ha! Is it Blinken’s team doing the leaking?
In the meeting, on March 3, Mr. Blinken implored the president to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
But Mr. Biden, already under intense political pressure because of the surge of migrant children at the border with Mexico, was unmoved. The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this?
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House, according to an account of his decision making from more than a dozen Biden administration officials, refugee resettlement officials and others.
Mr. Biden was eager for the praise that would come from vastly increasing Mr. Trump’s record-low limit, people familiar with his thinking said, and he decided to increase the cap even earlier than the usual start of the fiscal year, Oct. 1.
If Chief of Staff Ron Klain thinks holding refugee numbers down will bring some bipartisanship in Congress and brownie points for the midterm elections, he has very seriously miscalculated.
But only weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, immigration and the border had already become major distractions from his efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and to persuade Congress to invest trillions of dollars into the economy — issues championed by aides like Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, as more central to his presidency.
[….]
The exchange on March 3 took place shortly after Mr. Biden had dispatched Mr. Blinken and two other cabinet secretaries to formally tell Congress that he would increase refugee admissions during the next six months to 62,500 people from the annual 15,000-person limit set by Mr. Trump.
Instead, the president undercut his emissaries and left hundreds of refugees in limbo for weeks.
For the next month and a half, Mr. Biden’s aides stalled, repeatedly telling reporters and refugee advocacy groups that the president still intended to follow through.
[….]
On Feb. 12, the president delivered on the specific commitment to Congress, pledging to resettle 62,500 refugees fleeing war and persecution at home. Mr. Blinken delivered the message to lawmakers along with Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, and Norris Cochran, the acting health secretary at the time.
Hetfield is surely the leader of the pack as he stirs the political pot and I’m guessing the ringleader in guiding the NYT reporters with the help of his sources in the State Department.
“They went there and presented a really thoughtful plan, and we were so thrilled,” said Mark J. Hetfield, the chief executive of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a resettlement agency.
“And then,” Mr. Hetfield said, “it just evaporated overnight.”
[….]
As the weeks stretched into months, it became clear that Mr. Biden’s presidency would not be the panacea some had thought.
The biggest knife-cut of all! Biden wanted to stick with Stephen Miller‘s cap!
Instead of making good on his promise to significantly expand refugee entry into the United States, Mr. Biden was sticking to the cap engineered by Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.
“This reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses,” Mr. Miller tweeted, adding that if it were still up to him, “Refugee cap should be reduced to ZERO.”
The idea that Mr. Miller and Mr. Biden were in agreement about anything was anathema to most of the president’s supporters, many of whom flew into a rage.
[….]
By Friday evening, the White House was in full damage-control mode.
Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, held an emergency conference call with refugee advocates at 7:30 p.m., emphasizing that the administration would work to welcome in the refugees with haste.
That is enough to show you what a hash the administration has made of the refugee admissions program and immigration in general!
I’ve wondered for over a decade why Biden’s Delaware never welcomed refugees in any numbers.
Only a handful have ever been placed there and no one seems to know why. It isn’t because it is a small state, because Rhode Island is smaller and has welcomed thousands more than Biden’s home state.
According to the US State Department data base at the Refugee Processing Center, Delaware has only ‘welcomed’ 171 refugees since the beginning of fiscal year 2003. (Data before 2003 is not easy to access.)
Well it is a small state you say!
It is twice the size of Rhode Island which took in 3,122 poor third worlders in the same time period.
In the wake of a “wave of scorn and fury” as described by CNNno less, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki attempted so set the record straight yesterday.
But, first see what CNN is saying.
The important takeaway is that the administration has screwed-up royally on immigration across the board as they blame the public for conflating the border crisis with the refugee admissions program.
Is it any wonder the average American, the average news reporter as I saw yesterday, doesn’t understand the difference?
For over a decade that I’ve been following the refugee program, the Open Borders Left has tried to make you think that the illegal border jumpers are REFUGEES.
They, the socialists/progressives, have conflated the two things because they want you to have sympathy for illegal aliens. Now, their propaganda has come back to bite them.
Americans don’t want legal refugees anymore than they want the illegals invading the border.
Progressive backlash on refugee cap puts Biden on notice
Joe Biden’s swift reversals on raising the nation’s refugee cap over the past 48 hours marked a rare moment of uncertainty for the new President within a carefully choreographed first 100 days — one that underscored the power of progressives to force Biden to change course, even as they face legislative setbacks in a deeply divided Washington.
[….]
By way of explanation Saturday, Biden hinted at the difficult politics he is facing as his administration attempts to halt the surge of migrants, particularly unaccompanied minors, across the southern border.
He inferred that his plans to raise the cap, which he affirmed in a speech in February, had been complicated by what he referred to as the “crisis” on the border “with young people,” uttering a word that his administration has tried to avoid in relation to the influx on unaccompanied migrant children.
“We’re going to increase the number,” Biden told reporters of the refugee cap as he left the Wilmington Country Club. “We couldn’t do two things at once. But now we are going to increase the number.” [So what now makes it possible to do the two things at once?—ed]
[….]
It was a victory for progressives who, along with humanitarian groups, directed a wave of scorn and fury at the President on Friday the likes of which he has not seen during his nearly three months in office.
[….]
The Biden administration’s equivocation [aka deliberate evasiveness —ed] on the refugee cap reflects the heat they are facing about the crisis on the southern border in the middle of a pandemic — and the fear that Americans will conflate the two issues, even though they are distinctly different policy areas.
Here is the boogeyman in the closet!
A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s border policy, or lack of policy, and the 2022 midterm elections are around the corner.
A Quinnipiac poll released last week showed that just 29% of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the situation at the southern border, while 55% disapprove. With no immediate solutions in sight, that immigration issue once again looms large for Democrats as they seek to hold onto and grow their congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections.
I’m posting the entire exchangein the White House briefing room between press secretary Psaki and an unidentified reporter as Psaki tries to explain the flip-flopping Biden refugee policy; and, throws the blame to who else—President Trump.
Q Thanks, Jen. Can you explain where things stand right now when it comes to the refugee ban? First off, the White House said on Friday that, actually, the 15,000 cap that was set by the Trump administration was — remained justified. But then later, you said, “Actually, no, the number is going to go up by May 15th.”
MS. PSAKI: I wouldn’t — I would dispute that being our characterization on Friday, but let me walk you through what we did announce.
Last week’s announcement — or Friday’s announcement, I should say, was an effort — an important step forward, in our view — to reverse the Trump policy that banned refugees from many key regions of the world. So there were many parts of the Middle East, parts of Africa where refugees could not apply and could not come into the United States. And part — as a result of that, there were very limited number of refugees — in the low thousands — that had come over in a extensive period of time during the Trump administration. That was an important step, on — in our view.
In addition, there had been refugee flights that had not traveled, that had not been taking off to come to the United States, and we resumed those flights. This was always meant to be just the beginning.
In the announcement we made on Friday, we were clear in the emergency presidential determination that if 15,000 is reached, a subsequent presidential determination would be issued to increase admissions as appropriate. And that is certainly our expectation.
In addition, we also announced on Friday that the President — while we are assessing right now what is possible in terms of — given the fact that the processing — the asylum processing has been hollowed out from the State Department, and also the ORR — the Office of Refugee Resettlement — has also been hollowed out in terms of personnel, staffing, and financial and funding needs, we are — have every intention to increase the cap and to make an announcement of that by May 15th at the latest. And I expect it will be sooner than that.
The President also remains committed to pursuing the aspirational goal of reaching 125,000 refugees by the end of the next fiscal year.
Q And what role has the situation at the border, which the President called a “crisis” this weekend — what role has that played in decision making around the refugee cap?
MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, if I walk you back just a little bit — and hopefully this will be helpful to you — during the transition, our team was — made an assessment of what our refugee cap should look like.
And we looked back at the last few years and assessed that, because of the very low numbers — the restrictions I just mentioned that were in place, restricting refugees from coming from the Middle — parts of the Middle East — most of the Middle East, I should say, and Africa — we needed to go big and have a bold goal.
And so that’s why we set the 125,000 cap objective by the end of fiscal year ’22. 62,500 was a down payment — meant to be a down payment in this year. That was why we set that goal. Now, that’s an a- — that was an aspirational increase of 10 times what was being led in by the Trump administration.
In that period of time — we came into office; the President made that announcement, made those — put those aspirational goals out there — there were a couple things that happened: One, as you alluded to, there was an increase of unaccompanied children at the border. Our policy was always going to be to welcome those children in, find a place where they can be sheltered and treated humanely and safely. That increase and that influx, as you all know, was higher than most people, including us, anticipated.
The second factor was that we did not — it took us some time to recognize how hollowed out these systems were. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees — while there have been different pots of money and different personnel — has both the resettling of refugees as well as unaccompanied children. And there is — there are questions and have been assessments about reprogramming of funds and how we can address both at the same time. And certainly, that ability and ensuring we can do that effectively has been on the President’s mind.
As I have pointed out previously, nearly two decades ago Congress gave the job of dealing with Unaccompanied Alien Children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement because it was part of the goal of making you, and the media believe that the illegal alien children are legitimate refugees.
LOL! You might be noticing that the word “alien” has been removed throughout government websites—more progressive propaganda techniques at work. Saying “illegal alien” is forbidden in Joe Biden’s America, so use it every chance you get!
The unidentified reporter continues….
Q And then, finally, on a somewhat related matter: The President has said that climate change is one of the factors that has created this surge at the border, but there are no Central American countries that have been invited to the Climate Summit that the White House is putting on. Is there — how did you decide which countries to invite? And has it been considered whether or not to invite some Central American countries?
I included that last question because it is related.
The socialists are working hard now to convince the media and the public that the next big wave of refugees will be the so-called climate refugees as they conflate weather-related migration to the issue of legitimate persecuted refugees.
Lesson for you: Immigration is Chairman Joe’s Achilles heel.
Conflate! Conflate! Conflate!
They, the Leftwing language propagandists, conflated legal refugees with illegal aliens for decades, so you must continue to conflate the refugee program with the border invasion because it is all part of one major socialist/progressive goal and that is to change America by changing the people.
“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity.”
(Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus)
Big mistake—they let Biden talk to the media!
You surely know by now that Chairman Joe blabbed to the media over the weekend that the reason he hasn’t moved on flying more of the third world to America via the US Refugee Admissions Program he helped create in 1979 is because the Administration has a crisis at the borderand can’t do two things at once.
The primary agency of the federal government for refugee admission decisions is the US State Department. Here we see that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is trying to clean things up, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he already approved the 62,500 cap increase for this fiscal year in February and it was sent to the Hill by the President via the State Department for consultation as the law requires.
The only thing missing to start the flow for these last two months was Biden’s signature.
As I mentioned on Saturday, Biden and Harris have made such a hash of the refugee program (okay by me!) that it begs the question—what else are they screwing up?
Blinken defends Biden’s refugee cap, Afghanistan withdrawal in exclusive interview
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration amid a barrage of criticism from Democratic lawmakers and refugee advocates for maintaining a Trump-era limit on refugee admissions for now.
While President Joe Biden pledged to admit 125,000 refugees in the new fiscal year next fall, Blinken wouldn’t commit to a number, telling ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz, “Look, the president’s been clear about where he wants to go, but we have to be, you know, focused on what we’re able to do when we’re able to do it.”
That wait-and-see language from Blinken and the White House, citing the “decimated” state of the refugee resettlement program, enraged several prominent Democrats, as well as refugee resettlement agencies (aka the contractors***) who said they are ready to accept Biden’s pledge of 62,500 for the rest of this fiscal year.
Jayapal represents Seattle.
“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity. We cannot turn our back on refugees around the world, including hundreds of refugees who have already been cleared for resettlement, have sold their belongings, and are ready to board flights,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.
Big mistake: saying they would keep anything Trump ever did!
As a result, after the White House had announced Friday that Biden would keep former President Donald Trump’s historic low cap of 15,000 refugees, the administration backtracked and said it would raise the cap next month.
“We’re able to start to bring people in who’ve been in the pipeline and who weren’t able to come in. That is starting today, and we’re going to revisit it in the middle of May,” Blinken said.
Some 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved for resettlement in the U.S., according to the International Rescue Committee, a resettlement agency.
Handy fall back! Blame it all on Trump!
With Biden’s order, those resettlements can begin again, but they will be limited, with the administration saying Friday it would set a “final, increased refugee cap” next month after a few weeks of arrivals and blamed the Trump administration for leaving the program “broken,” in Blinken’s words.
[….]
Refugee resettlement agencies agreed that Trump left the nation’s program in tatters through funding cuts and onerous vetting measures, but they’ve said they could scale up quickly to meet Biden’s original target of 62,500, if the administration helped provide resources.
“Provide resources” is code for send more of your tax dollars to the contractors!
Instead, Biden on Saturday blamed the historic number of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border for keeping the refugee cap low for now — a reason Blinken didn’t cite.
And, in the meantime, the World Socialist Web Sitesays they are all weaving and dodging because Biden is trying to appease the ultra-right! Huh!
Biden seeks to appease ultra-right with refugee policy
Let me ask you: are any of you right-wingers appeased by the delay in resettlement as the border is being overrun?
Again, this was an amusing unforced error on the part of the disorganized administration since the cap is just that, a cap, a ceiling, that they could have left at 62,500 while knowing they weren’t going to get anywhere near that number before the fiscal year ends on September 30th. I am not complaining, just noting the rookie political blunder.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Americans Last! is their motto!
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the contractors’ lobbying push that actually begins today on the Hill.
Update April 18th: Biden himself commits to increasing the numberof refugees to be admitted; references the border saying we couldn’t do two things at once, but now we can (oh really! so what changed?).
“This is a breathtaking betrayal of the plan to ‘build back better.’”
(Matthew Soerens World Relief, a refugee contractor)
Don’t get me wrong. I am just fine with it. In fact, I find it hilarious.
However, Biden/Harris have now so screwed-up the US Refugee Admissions Program (which I know a little about) with their ham-handed incompetence that it makes me ask how badly are they screwing-up elsewhere—-like handling the pandemic or dealing with Russia and China?
We know they are creating a catastrophe and angering most Americanswith their policy, or lack of a policy, at the southern border!
And, that is not so funny.
Now, by not going forward with his promise to reset the annual refugee cap to 62,500 for what remains of the 2021 fiscal year, RRW readers know that Biden has been pissing-off his friends in the NO Borders community.
Leading the pack of the pissed-off are the refugee contractors*** whose business it is to place third world clients in your towns and cities while being paid by you, the taxpayer, to do it.
And, see here that the final straw for those who helped Biden steal the White Housewas when a contractor, the International Rescue Committee, published a report saying Biden was ‘welcoming’ fewer refugees than President Trump.
If that wasn’t bad enough, yesterday all hell broke loose when the White House announced it would leave TRUMP’S CAP of 15,000 (or fewer) refugees to be admitted by September 30th in place.
The “faith groups” (aka contractors) were “outraged.”
Nothing Trump did should ever be left in place!
A few hours later Biden/Harris backtracked and said they would set a new higher cap/ceiling in mid-May.
Keep in mind that while running for the presidency Biden promised his 80 million (ha! ha!) voters that he would admit 125,000 annually.
There is a lot of coverage of the “betrayal.” Here is one account at Religion News Service:
Biden reverses course on refugee cap after faith groups express outrage
WASHINGTON (RNS) — President Joe Biden’s administration has reversed a decision to keep in place a historically low cap on refugee admissions left by Donald Trump, saying it will raise the ceiling next month after faith-based groups initially decried the move as an “abandonment of our ideals.”
Matthew Soerens of World Relief
Biden signed a memorandum Friday (April 16) aimed at speeding up refugee admissions this year — but that memorandum does not increase the so-called refugee ceiling, something the president has pledged to do when speaking to religious audiences.
Although the memorandum leaves open the possibility of raising that number should the United States resettle the maximum 15,000 refugees this year, news that the ceiling will at least temporarily remain at that historic low was met with disappointment by many religious communities, including the faith-based groups that partner with the federal government to resettle refugees.
By Friday afternoon, TheAssociated Press and CNN reported the Biden administration has reversed course, announcing plans to lift the Trump-era refugee cap next month in the wake of widespread pushback from allies.
The White House confirmed to Religion News Service on Friday that officials intend to revisit the refugee ceiling sometime in the coming days, saying in a statement, “We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”
Keep reading hereto see what the other Christian contractors, in addition to Soerens, had to say about their man Joe yesterday.
In a more tempered response, see what the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is saying about the flip-flopping from the White House.
‘Relieved but disappointed’: How America’s Jewish refugee aid agency is doing 3 months under Biden
“We’re relieved but disappointed,” said HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield following Friday’s initial announcement that the cap, also known as the refugee ceiling, would not be raised.
Following the second statement, Hetfield added, “There’s no reason to delay raising the refugee ceiling. It’s just a ceiling, it’s not a floor. They should be focused on what’s the goal and how are you going to reach it?”
It is all Trump’s fault!
The fight over the refugee cap encapsulates a dilemma confronting HIAS as the agency moves from Trump to Biden. On one hand, HIAS leaders are glad that the United States no longer has a president who opposes refugees, separates families at the border and fires up his base with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
On the other hand, they say that Trump did so much harm, and made immigration so heated an issue, that it will be a challenge just to bring the immigration and refugee systems back to where they were before Trump.
Returning to a point in which the U.S. allows hundreds of thousands of refugees a year, and passing immigration reform through Congress, these leaders say, feels even more daunting. [HIAS was heavily involved in lobbying for failed Comprehensive Immigration Reform some years ago.–ed]
“It’s just a relief to have that administration in the rearview mirror,” said Melanie Nezer, vice president for public affairs at HIAS. She dubbed the Trump era “the fire swamp.”
But Nezer is cognizant as well of “the sheer amount of time, effort and creativity it’s going to take for the new administration and those of us who work on these issues to unravel and fix it.”
“The prior administration really decimated our infrastructure, our systems, our staffing,” she said. “It’s stunning to think about the damage that was done.”
[….]
Trump’s actions on immigration, beginning with the travel ban, spurred a flood of donations to HIAS.Since Trump’s term, the agency more than doubled its annual budget to $90 million. But resettling refugees — how the organization had once spent the majority of donations — became unprecedentedly controversial and difficult.
With its windfall, HIAS sued the Trump administration over its travel ban, increased its advocacy work and shifted its weight outside the U.S.
For refugee resettlement nerds there is a lot of useful information in this article, sokeep reading.
Here is the data from the State Department showing the paltry number of refugees admitted in the first half of the fiscal year.
This is what has the contractors hopping mad.
Notice (sorry the screenshot isn’t clear, but take it from me) that although we are admitting hundreds of thousands of illegal border jumpers from Central America, more are being admitted as refugees through this legal avenue.
2050 total for six months. They will have a hard time getting to even 15,000 at this rate.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
“We cannot and we must not fall victims to politics of fear and hatred that drives the far-right…..[Biden] “must follow through on his promise.”
(Rep. Ilhan Omar)
In addition to abysmally low numbers, Biden hasn’t re-started the flow of refugees from Muslim countries, the flow Trump halted for a handful of countries that hate us.
Syrians, Somalis, Iraqis are waiting and frustrated, but not nearly as frustrated as the refugee contractors*** and their friends in Congress like Minnesota Somali Rep. Ilhan Omar.
As I have said before, the mystery for me is this:
How do the contractors who have been paid since at least 1980 to place refugees in your towns and cities and who have had a pipeline to the US State Department via their swamp dwelling bureaucrats (even as Trump was in the White House) not know what is going on?
Apparently they don’t and the guess is that Biden doesn’t want to look too pro-immigration as the southern border is being overrun.
Well, duh!
It is too late for that as most of America sees Biden as the most open borders President ever!
And, besides the average American voter does not even fully understand the difference between fake asylum seekers (illegal aliens!) at the southern border and the Refugee Admissions Program.
It is ludicrous to think that voters are sitting around saying, gee it’s good of Biden to stop the refugee flow right now so let’s give him some brownie points because he is slowing, by a tiny bit, the Great Replacement!
Biden’s delay on refugees baffles and frustrates allies
Senator Ted Kennedy created the present refugee and asylum system with the help of Joe Biden in 1979. Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act into law in 1980. A question I have asked for over a decade is this: Why has Biden’s Delaware resettled only a handful of refugees since then? Maybe Joe doesn’t like foreigners in HIS neighborhood!
President Biden sent a stark message in February to foreigners fleeing oppression, persecution and danger: The United States stands ready to help them once again. He pledged an eightfold-plus increase in the annual cap on refugees set during the Trump administration, saying he would aim for a “down payment” on that promise “as soon as possible.”
More than two months later, Biden has not made good on his vow. He has yet to sign a directive that would lift the cap for the next fiscal year or enact more-immediate changes to the Trump limits.
His advisers have provided little public clarity on why, angering many human rights advocates who say the delay is inflicting growing harm on refugees desperate to take flight to the United States.
[….]
People close to the White House’s decision-making attribute the delay to several factors. Some point to the administration’s ongoing struggles to contain a massive increase in migrants arriving at the southern border, saying they detect political concerns from the White House about expanding the refugee program at a moment when there is increasing pressure on Biden to be tougher on immigration and border security.
Jenny Yang of World Relief
“What’s missing is the political will of the president,” said Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy and policy at World Relief, one of a handful of resettlement agencies working with the government.
The result, Yang said, is that “the program is effectively operating as if President Trump were still in office.”
[….]
Before becoming a highly paid refugee contractor CEO, Vignarajah worked for Michelle in the White House.
“Unfortunately, I think it shows that President Trump may have been effective in conflating refugee resettlements and the asylum program,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, another resettlement agency working with the government.
She said there “is no substantive reason” why Trump’s directive should remain in place, given that changing it is “not a herculean task” for Biden.
I don’t know why Lutheran CEO Vignarajah is complaining as her organization is raking in millions of your tax dollars to take ‘care’ of the Unaccompanied Alien (mostly teens) Children invading the border.
Biden cautious on immigration!
Biden’s careful posture underscores the broader caution with which he and his advisers are approaching immigration.
Keenly aware of how the issue has sparked impassioned divisions in recent years, Biden, who ran as a unifier, did not emphasize it as a candidate. As president, he and his aides have treaded lightly, wary of inflaming a polarizing debate that could threaten to his appeal to a broad swath of voters.
He didn’t emphasize it as a candidate because controlling immigration appeals to most Americans and plays in Trump’s favor!
Some of the most fervent concern has come from Democrats in the House. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who lived in a refugee camp in Kenya as a child after her family fled a civil war in Somalia, warned in a recent statement that “We cannot and we must not fall victims to politics of fear and hatred that drives the far-right.”
Biden, she said, “must follow through on his promise.”
[….]
Biden announced that he would raise the annual cap on refugee admission to 125,000 for the first full fiscal year of his administration, which begins in October. He informed Congress that his target for the current fiscal year was 62,500.
But he never signed a new presidential determination, a decision that has left Trump’s directive in place. Now, Biden is on pace to accept the fewest refugees this year of any modern president, according to a report the International Rescue Committee released last week. The Biden administration has admitted only 2,050 refugees at the halfway point of this fiscal year, according to the nonprofit organization’s report.
Data from the Refugee Processing Center.You can readily see that if Biden follows through on what he said, his numbers would eclipse anything George Bush or Barack Obama ever did.
Six months into the fiscal year and only 2,050 refugees have been admitted. They have to do some real hustling if they want to beat Trump’s lowest year of 11,814.
The report says Biden’s inaction means “tens of thousands of already-cleared refugees remain barred from resettlement and over 700 resettlement flights have been cancelled.”
Absent a reversal of Trump-era restrictions, most refugees from civil war-ravaged Syria, who have the highest resettlement needs according to the report, do not have a chance of coming to the U.S.
Refugees from other Muslim countries are also being hit hard by current rules, according to the report
[….]
Some White House allies find the president’s delay perplexing because the refugee program has attracted bipartisan support in recent years. Even some of the Republicans who have been critical of Biden’s handling of the border have called for raising the refugee cap to expand the legal pathways for immigrants to come to the United States.
Republican Senator Portman: Increase the refugee cap! Any Republican wanting to increase the cap is making the Chamber of Commerce types happy!
“The refugee program is much more of an orderly and legal process that is entirely distinct” from the situation at the border, said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “I would increase the refugees cap from where it was in the Trump years, and I would make the asylum system work as it should.”
Returning to a point in which the U.S. allows 
Here is the 
In addition to abysmally low numbers, Biden hasn’t re-started the flow of refugees from Muslim countries, the flow Trump halted for a handful of countries that hate us.
Data from the 
