White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller reportedly once said that he "would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America's soil." His evil vision now continues to slide closer to that reality. The Trump administration’s State Department has announced that it seeks to again slash the number of refugees that will be admitted to the U.S. in the new fiscal year to just 15,000, the lowest number yet in the refugee program’s history.
The administration quite literally waited until the last possible hour to notify Congress as required by law, making the announcement “just 34 minutes before a statutory deadline to do so,” the Associated Press reported. Officials further refused to consult with legislators, as also required by law. “The proposal will now be reviewed by Congress, where there are strong objections to the cuts, but lawmakers will be largely powerless to force changes.” That is, unless Democrats regain control of the federal government.
Prior to impeached president Donald Trump, administrations typically set an average refugee cap of 95,000, the Church World Service said. But on the watch of officials like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has steadily taken a sledgehammer to our nation’s refugee program, drastically lowering the cap in the 2020 fiscal year to 18,000, the previous historic low (in every sense of the word).
But the administration also isn’t required to hit that cap, and it didn’t: “[o]nly a little more than 9,000 refugees had been admitted to the US as of August 31, according to the Refugee Processing Center,” CNN reported. Advocates further noted that the administration misleadingly used asylum numbers in trying to justify the new cap of 15,000.
“Not only is Trump slashing refugee admissions levels to record lows, he's using the fact that the US expects ‘more than 290,000 asylum claims’ in the coming year as justification,” Amnesty International USA Americas advocacy director Charanya Krishnaswami tweeted. But, those claims are “literally impossible to make because he's simultaneously gutted the right to seek asylum.” The Dallas Morning News reported last month that in one immigration court hearing cases of asylum-seekers forced to wait in Mexico by the administration, only 128 out of more than 15,000 applicants have won protections.
The Trump administration “continues to conflate refugee admissions and asylum in order to use one system to shut down another,” American Civil Liberties Union senior legislative and advocacy counsel Manar Waheed said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “[O]ur immigration laws provide for both, not one or the other.”
We can try to ensure that. On World Refugee Day this past summer, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden pledged to set an annual refugee target of 125,000, higher than a 110,000 goal set by former president Barack Obama. And, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted, Biden further pledged “to work with Congress to establish a minimum admissions number of at least 95,000 refugees annually,” which would then prevent a future white supremacist in chief from again slashing admissions to such horrific lows.
Trump, Biden said at the time, “has made clear that he does not believe our country should be a place of refuge.” But even if Biden’s plan is implemented, restoring refugee admissions will also require a reconstruction of refugee agencies that have for years worked with the government to resettle families but were then decimated by Trump and Miller’s cuts. Much damage has been done, and much work will need to be done to repair it.
“America has historically raised its refugee admissions in order to provide help during crises around the world,” Waheed continued in the statement. “America must play a role in the protection of people seeking safety from persecution, torture, and genocide as our laws demand. That is the America we fight to be.”
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/36qBYbu
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