According to two sources who spoke to Fox News Digital, the Biden administration will on Thursday begin a new pilot program that will let American organizations sponsor refugees directly.
If they gather enough money, pass background checks, and develop a strategy for how to help the refugees, groups of private American citizens will be able to sponsor them under the Refugee Resettlement Program under the State Department’s Welcome Corps program.
The program’s specifics, which call for groups of at least five people to raise a minimum of $2,275 per refugee, were first revealed by Reuters.
The program’s goal, according to the agency’s report, is to increase and strengthen local communities’ participation in effective refugee resettlement. This is done in recognition of the important and influential roles that local community actors have long supported in the welcome and integration of refugees who are admitted to the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
The program’s goal is to enhance the Reception and Placement Program by giving people and organizations around the country new and additional opportunities to contribute directly to refugee resettlement.
According to the department, the program is being implemented as a pilot to enable the agency to test and evaluate various program elements and “identify the successful pilot elements that will serve as the foundation of an effective, sustainable private sponsorship that will be a fundamental part of U.S. refugee resettlement.”
The restrictions on refugee resettlement put in place under the Trump administration have been drastically lifted under the Biden administration. The annual refugee cap was lowered by the Trump administration to 15,000 per year. In a U-turn, the Biden administration raised it to 125,000, but thus far, resettlements of refugees have not even come close to reaching that number.
As part of a larger effort to provide legal options for migrants and refugees fleeing violence, it has also let private persons to sponsor evacuees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the administration started a program last year to use humanitarian parole authority to bring in 100,000 Ukrainians, but that program does not count toward the refugee threshold.
Of response to an increase in migrants at the southern border, the administration recently announced an expanded humanitarian parole program that permits up to 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to fly into the United States if they have a U.S.-based sponsor.
Be the first to comment