
During the campaign, President Joe Biden promised to support refugee resettlement. He repeated the promise after his inauguration and sent a message to Congress saying he intended to increase the cap for this year to 62,500 and for next year to 125,000. He has not done so.
Biden’s inaction is blocking his own policy and imposing more suffering on refugees who have already been vetted and approved to come. At the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell writes:
Continue reading“So, roughly 715 desperate refugees whose travel arrangements were made by Biden’s own State Department — many of whom had given away their possessions and vacated their homes in anticipation of relocation — had their tickets abruptly canceled.
“At least one family in a Tanzanian refugee camp was booked on a flight for February and rescheduled for another flight in March, because Biden hadn’t completed his bureaucratic task in time for their original itinerary, according to the International Rescue Committee, the nonprofit resettlement agency assigned to receive them in Idaho. Ultimately, their travel was canceled, a sign that even State Department officials hadn’t anticipated Biden’s repeated and unexplained paperwork delays. Many families had similar experiences during Trump’s presidency, when they were also booked and subsequently unbooked for flights.
“Which suggests how little has changed since Trump left office, despite Biden’s warm-and-fuzzy rhetoric.
“Asked repeatedly (by me and others) what accounts for Biden’s delay, White House officials have struggled to answer. Sometimes they try to blame Trump, complaining that his administration left a system in ‘disrepair’ that requires ‘rebuilding.’ No doubt, Trump wrought a lot of damage upon the immigration system, and more resources would be necessary to reach the much higher refugee admissions that Biden claims he wants for the next fiscal year (125,000); currently, there aren’t enough people sufficiently far along in the refugee-screening pipeline to meet that goal.
“But none of this explains why the few thousand already fully vetted and deemed ‘travel-ready’ by the State Department as of early March have not been allowed in. The only thing preventing their entry is Biden — who refuses to do the right thing and sign a simple document.”