Tag: Joe Biden

Illuminating Skullduggery Podcast on Biden Refugee Admissions Flip-Flop

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here I go again, another post on the incredibly amusing muddle the Biden Administration has gotten itself into in regards to the flip-flop-flipping on his decision to aim to admit a certain number of refugees into the US this fiscal year.

Since I last wrote here on Wednesday, I posted a piece at Frauds and Crooks on the topic, because I am so fascinated by how the Biden White House has made such an enormous political blunder and that the corporate media has reported on the blowback Biden has received from the liberal wing of his party.

The Frauds and Crooks post focused on how quickly the refugee lobby went into action to slap Biden around on his unforgiveable waffling and announcement that he would leave the refugee ceiling/cap at the Trump level for the remainder of the fiscal year sending HIAS and other refugee pushers ballistic as heads exploded throughout the refugee industry.

See it here:

America First Has No Effective Opposition to Recreating the Third World on American Soil

There are so many things I could have written about today, but instead, I just spent part of an hour listening to a podcast at something called Skullduggery where HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) CEO Mark Hetfield gives Michael Isikoff some inside skinny on what went down last week in the White House implosion over the refugee cap for the year.

Additionally Hetfield reveals a few other nuggets of information that you may find illuminating.  I did.

Hey, and if you think that somehow I pick on Mark Hetfield and HIAS, I don’t.

Mark Hetfield protesting President Donald Trump’s refugee policy decisions.

It just happens that Hetfield appears to be the most political of the refugee contractor CEOs and is out and about talking to the media and organizing protests. (See all contractors*** below.)

He also was the leader of the pack suing the Trump administration every time Trump attempted to reform the Refugee Admissions Program.

Calling all refugee policy wonks! This podcast is worth listening to as Hetfield describes the situation with the White House as “bizarre.”

Here are a few takeaways (some nuggets we already know, but confirmed by Hetfield):

~ The refugee admissions controversy was the first blowback Biden received from the liberal wing of the party.  By May 15th a new refugee ceiling will be announced by the capitulating  White House.

~ We learn that Secretary of State Blinken wants the increase, but some unknown players in the White House are politically “spooked on immigration.”  That tells us that we must, for all its worth, keep talking about immigration and the southern border as a “crisis.”

~ With the refugee program it is the Muslim refugees that most scare the public. There was a few minutes of discussion about the 2015 governors’ revolt when 31 governors told Obama they refused to admit Syrian refugees to their states. Even presidential candidates such as moderates on immigration, Bush and Rubio, became “xenophobic” in their rhetoric.  That really freaked-out Hetfield.

~Hetfield claims the public is mostly positive about bringing in more refugees, but apparently some unnamed advisors in the White House are looking at polling that does not confirm Hetfield’s optimistic view.

~Hetfield is “infuriated” by all of the focus on vetting refugees that delays their arrival in America.  He says that no refugee has committed a lethal terror attack on US soil, but doesn’t mention that many have been stopped and apprehended before they could carry out a planned attack!  And, he doesn’t mention the killers and rapists who have gotten past the screening.

~Isikoff finds Tucker Carlson’s great “replacement” theory “vile.”  And then asks if Hetfield watches Carlson. This is the funny part: Hetfield says he “made the mistake” of going on Tucker’s show a few years ago.

By the way, that did not go well for Hetfield.  If you missed it, here it is:

 

~ Hetfield called the replacement concept “beyond offensive.” He and the podcasters are concerned about whether this “strain of thinking” by the likes of Carlson, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller is “ascendant.”  Hint to you:  Keep it going.

~Hetfield called the administration’s border crisis a “lose-lose” situation for the President.

~As for the ceiling/cap, he wonders how the Biden team got so muddled over it as he said “set the damn cap” and set it higher than Trump’s cap.  It doesn’t matter exactly what it is because it is a cap, a ceiling.  He just wants to get the program moving and then Biden should fulfil his promise for FY2022 which begins on October 1, 2021 to admit 125,000 refugees from the Middle East, Africa, South America and Asia.

For those of you new to the Refugee program there was some useful basic information about how the program works.

Listen to the whole interview entitled ‘Biden’s Refugee Problem.’

 

***If you are new to RRW, here are all of the federal refugee resettlement contractors.

The border crisis is damaging refugee resettlement!

The contractors worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and they lobby for open borders.

From the earliest days of writing this blog it has perplexed me because if they truly cared about the refugees they legally help, they would not encourage leniency toward lawbreakers at our borders because the general public makes no distinctions.

To the average American it is all the same—too many people having too many needs for Americans to pay for.

Americans Last! is their motto!

 

NYT: Biden Himself Blocked Increased Refugee Admissions for the Year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Holy cow!  This story at the New York Times yesterday 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.

Psaki Clears Up Refugee Admissions Confusion (NOT!)

 

Here is a bit of what the New York Times is 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!

Continue reading here.

Is Biden a closet racist? 

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.

See my post from January 2020.

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.

Psaki Clears Up Refugee Admissions Confusion (NOT!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In the wake of a “wave of scorn and fury” as described by CNN no 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.  

CNN at Erie News:

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.

More here.

Psaki to the rescue! 

I’m posting the entire exchange in 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?

Continue reading here.  

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.

Some call it the great replacement!

Say it Out Loud! The Great Replacement is Underway

Secretary of State Dodges and Weaves on Refugee Cap Kerfuffle

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“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 border and 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?

From ABC News:

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.

More here.

And, in the meantime, the World Socialist Web Site says 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.

Biden/Harris Make a Hash of Refugee Plan; Infuriate Their Friends

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update April 18th:  Biden himself commits to increasing the number of 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 Americans with 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 House was when a contractor, the International Rescue Committee, published a report saying Biden was ‘welcoming’ fewer refugees than President Trump.

Biden is on Track to Admit Fewer Refugees Than 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, The Associated 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 here to 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.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

‘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, so keep 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.

Americans Last! is their motto!