President Biden on Monday reversed himself and said he would allow as many as 62,500 refugees to enter the United States during the next six months, eliminating the sharp limits that President Donald J. Trump imposed on those seeking refuge from war, violence or natural disasters, The New York Times writes.
The action comes about two weeks after Mr. Biden announced that he was leaving Mr. Trump’s limit of 15,000 refugees in place, which drew widespread condemnation from Democrats and refugee advocates who accused the president of reneging on a campaign promise to welcome those in need.
Mr. Biden quickly backtracked, promising only hours later that he intended to increase refugee admissions. With Monday’s announcement, the president formally bowed to the pressure.
“This erases the historically low number set by the previous administration of 15,000, which did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued by the White House.
His sharp reversal underscored the difficulty he has had on issues involving immigration since taking office. Mr. Biden has struggled to unwind what he calls Mr. Trump’s “racist” immigration policies while also managing a surge of migrant children at the southwestern border.
His initial hesitation to allow tens of thousands of additional refugees into the country was a recognition that he was already being criticized for failing to stem the flow of illegal immigration from Central America.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden promised to restore the country’s reputation for welcoming those seeking safety, saying he would allow as many as 125,000 refugees to enter in his first full year in office. He took a step toward that goal in February, promising to allow as many as 62,500 refugees into the United States for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
So an announcement on April 16 that he was keeping the Trump-era limits in place for the time being was all the more baffling for those expecting a significant increase.
White House officials have insisted that Mr. Biden’s intentions in mid-April were misunderstood. The president says he always intended to raise the refugee cap “should the pre-existing level be reached and the emergency refugee situation persist.” The Biden administration has resettled roughly 2,360 refugees out of the initial mandate of 15,000, according to Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a resettlement agency.
Administration officials also argued that increasing refugee admissions could overwhelm the Department of Health and Human Services’s office that is also responding to thousands of young asylum seekers crossing the border.
That logic, which was also adopted by the Trump administration to sharply cut refugee numbers, drew criticism from refugee advocates who accused Mr. Biden of conflating two different immigration systems.
In his statement on Monday, Mr. Biden appeared to acknowledge that he had fumbled his handling of the issue by sending the wrong signal to the world.
“The United States Refugee Admissions Program embodies America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world,” he said. “It’s a statement about who we are, and who we want to be.”
Still, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the government was unlikely to reach the limit of 62,500 refugees, blaming budget and staffing cuts during the Trump administration. But he said the decision to raise the limit was necessary “to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world” that the United States would help them.
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who made clear that Republicans intended to seize on Mr. Biden’s immigration agenda to galvanize the party’s base ahead of the midterm elections next year, criticized Mr. Biden on Twitter.
“Increasing the refugee admissions cap will put American jobs and safety at risk. The Biden administration should be focused on getting Americans back to work,” Mr. Cotton tweeted, despite multiple studies showing that immigrants work jobs that employers historically struggle to fill.
The back-and-forth about the refugee program is the latest turn in the president’s struggle to deal with the immigration system. On his first day in office, Mr. Biden proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws and issued a number of executive orders aimed at rolling back Mr. Trump’s policies.
But after about 100 days, immigration legislation still has not advanced in Congress. And for weeks, Mr. Biden delayed raising refugee admissions, despite a plea from his own secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, to make good on his commitment.
The administration has also had to defend its response to a surge of migrants at the border with Mexico, even as Mr. Biden has continued to rely on a Trump-era health rule to rapidly turn away many migrants from entering the United States without providing them a chance to apply for asylum. The administration has said the rule is necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The president’s Republican critics have seized on the issue as a political weapon, accusing Mr. Biden of making poor policy choices that opened the floodgates to illegal immigration during a pandemic.
The administration, however, has made progress in safely processing migrant children and teenagers out of border detention facilities and into temporary shelters. While more than 5,000 minors were stuck in facilities run by the Border Patrol in March, on Monday, the administration recorded roughly 600 minors in such jail-like facilities.
White House officials have urged migrants not to come to the United States now, but have promised that Mr. Biden will work to increase legal opportunities to live, work and visit the United States. Eleanor Acer, the director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, said the president must continue to do that.
“Upholding values — rather than continuing Trump administration policies that block refugees from the country — is the right step forward,” she said.
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