US to welcome more refugees refused by Trump

As part of the process of undoing Trump administration’s tough immigration rules, Biden will announce new refugee policy which would welcome large number of refugees to the country, Associated Press reported.

Earlier Trump had significantly reduced the number of refugees to just 15,000. According to AP, some officials related with this matter said that Biden would increase the number of refugees  to 125,000, AP said.

The officials and others, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the formal announcement, said Biden will make his plan public during a visit to the State Department on Thursday, the report said.

Biden may also address asylum claims for residents of Hong Kong there, according to one official. He indicated during his campaign that he was interested in providing protection to people persecuted by the Chinese government.

The sources said Biden would not necessarily override the record low cap of 15,000 that Trump set for the current budget year. Instead, the 125,000 figure would be proposed for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The president is required by law to first consult Congress on his plans before making a determination.

Advocates had said that the backlog of tens of thousands of cases by the Trump administration had made it unlikely Biden’s target of resettling 125,000 refugees could be reached this year. It will take time to rebuild the pipeline. More than one-third of U.S. resettlement offices were forced to close over the past four years with the drop in refugee arrivals and hundreds of workers were let go.

But some say Biden should not wait to raise the annual target for admissions.

“We hope that President Biden will substantially raise the refugee admissions goal immediately, as he consistently committed to on the campaign trail,” said Sunil Varghese of the New York-based International Refugee Assistance Project. “The president has the authority to raise refugee admissions mid-year to address the many humanitarian crises in the world, including those that have emerged or escalated recently, such as the situation facing pro-Democracy protesters in Hong Kong,” AP reported.

Another issue that may be addressed Thursday is a review of vetting procedures, according to the officials and others.

The Trump administration had put in place extreme background checks that had brought the program to a standstill, advocates say.

The Trump administration also narrowed eligibility this year, restricting which refugees are selected for resettlement to certain categories, including people persecuted because of religion and Iraqis whose assistance to the U.S. put them in danger.

Biden is expected to do away with those categories at some point and have the program return to using the long-standing referral system by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that makes selections based on a person’s need to be resettled, the AP said.