Hussein Malla/AP Photo
Syrians who were displaced by the Turkish military operation in northeastern Syria wait to receive tents and aid supplies at the Bardarash refugee camp, October 17, 2019, north of Mosul, Iraq.
Established in 1992, the Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya is considered one of the largest refugee camps in the world. Most of the refugees fled persecution and violence in Somalia, with a small number from South Sudan. The process of finding refuge can be an ordeal; less than 1 percent of the more than 20 million refugees worldwide are approved for resettlement each year. Hundreds of thousands may live in refugee camps managed by the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for decades, with no end in sight.
For some, the wait is especially dangerous. In the early morning of March 15, unknown attackers launched petrol bombs at Block 13 of the Kakuma camp, where mainly LGBTQ+ refugees and their families live. According to the Black Immigrant Collective, the majority of the more than 130 refugees in Block 13 fled Uganda after the country passed anti-gay legislation in 2014.
Two organizers barely survived the attack, and others were severely traumatized. UNHCR airlifted two gay refugees to a hospital in Nairobi. Shifra, an 18-year-old refugee living in Block 13, described the area as “burning like a piece of food” on a press call March 24. “In the confusion I thought that we were all going to die. Every day I relive this horrible experience that I have.”
This was not the first incident at Block 13. In July 2020, more than 30 LGBTQ+ refugees were hospitalized after an attack. During the March 24 press conference, Block 13 residents said that they have endured discrimination, harassment, and violence for years.
Under the Trump administration, two executive orders that barred travel from several Muslim-majority countries also blocked LGBTQ+ refugees seeking resettlement in the U.S. And Trump severely limited the number of refugees able to resettle to a low of 15,000 this fiscal year.
On February 4, President Biden announced a new effort to protect vulnerable LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers, who were disproportionately impacted by many Trump immigration policies. The White House has also promised to raise the refugee cap over fourfold. But because Biden has not formally issued a new refugee cap and guidelines for eligibility, known as the “presidential determination,” many LGBTQ+ refugees, among others, remain stranded, waiting for the president to simply sign a piece of paper.
Some speculate that the refugee cap, a completely separate program from the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, has become wrapped up in border politics. Whatever the reason, until Biden finally fulfills his promise, potentially hundreds of thousands of refugees will not get the chance to come to the U.S., or it will take much longer.
UNLIKE ASYLUM, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), established in 1980, requires refugees to go through years of screening and background checks. The president determines the refugee cap and admissions goals each year. Trump’s presidential determination specified eligibility by category rather than by region, which is more typical. Only refugees who faced religious persecution, Iraqis who aided the U.S. military, and embassy-referred refugees were eligible for resettlement. This left out thousands of refugees who were already processed.
Trump’s restrictionist eligibility criteria are sometimes seen by advocates as another anti-African and anti-Muslim ban. In other words, even if the Block 13 refugees were in line for resettlement, they wouldn’t be eligible under current policy.
The Biden administration has taken the new guidelines for USRAP nearly to the finish line. More than a month ago, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented their arguments for a midyear emergency raising of the refugee cap. In the report submitted to Congress February 12, the administration stated, “A revised target of 62,500 [refugees] is proposed and is justified by grave humanitarian concerns and is in the national interest. At the present time the global refugee crisis continues unabated, and the extremely low number of refugees resettled worldwide is the lowest in decades.”
There is precedent for a midyear change to the refugee admissions goal. “Current law grants the president clear legal authority to admit additional refugees through a revised mid-year presidential determination,” states a report from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). Changes require an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation,” which IRAP determines has historically had a relatively flexible definition. In 1980, President Carter adjusted the numbers to welcome more Cuban refugees. Just a few years later, President Reagan allocated 15,000 more spots for Eastern European and Soviet refugees. President Clinton adjusted his refugee admissions goal in 1999 to welcome more Kosovar refugees.
Some speculate that the refugee cap, a completely separate program from the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, has become wrapped up in border politics.
With the new cap proposed in February, all that remains for a new presidential determination is the president’s signature. “Candidate Biden partially campaigned on this process of reopening the refugee pipeline and returning the U.S. to the international table as a leader in refugee protection,” said Erol Kekic, senior vice president for Church World Service (CWS).
Critics hammered the administration when they canceled flights for hundreds of refugees to enter the U.S., because Biden had not issued a new presidential determination or raised the cap. For the more than 715 refugees who have airplane tickets, the window in which all their paperwork was valid at the same time is tiny. The cancellation of their flight doesn’t necessarily mean they will be able to come to the U.S. as soon as Biden issues a new presidential determination.
It takes on average three years to process, vet, and ready refugees for resettlement. According to Kekic, there’s a roughly six-week window in that three years where the paperwork is all up to date, as it changes daily. For those on the recently canceled flights, it may take months or years to update all the paperwork. “When you’re living in a refugee camp and you’re given a glimpse of what could be and then that’s taken away, it’s if not equivalent to their suffering in the first place, then close to it,” Kekic said.
Biden’s executive order may make the general public think he’s already taken action, when in fact he balked just shy of the finish line. At this point, refugee advocates say, the only thing stopping Biden is Biden himself.
“This is not a policy decision,” said Mark Hetfield, president and chief executive officer of the refugee resettlement agency HIAS. “In fact, there are policy reasons for not holding this up. This is clearly a political determination that we can only guess at.”
He continued: “What’s ironic is the administration keeps saying there’s no crisis at the border but they’re acting like it’s a crisis, and then they say to Congress there is an urgent refugee crisis in writing and they’re acting like there’s no crisis.”
Although refugee resettlement has historically been a bipartisan issue, in recent years it has become collateral damage for divisions over immigration and foreign policy writ large. During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, Repulicans running for president, including formally pro-refugee candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, came out against welcoming Syrian Muslim refugees. On the other side, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton said then-President Obama wasn’t welcoming enough. “We haven’t recovered from that,” Hetfield said.
Media outlets, including the Prospect, keep asking the administration about the delay, to no avail. The administration has not yet responded to the Prospect’s request for comment.
The Biden hesitation has echoes of Obama’s approach to immigration. Obama, whom immigrant rights groups gave the moniker “Deporter in Chief,” acted tough on immigration in the hopes Republicans would come to the negotiating table. They never did, and Biden has publicly said he thinks Obama misjudged the politics. But now the same kind of calculus is preventing a better life for hundreds of thousands of refugees.
With the new cap proposed in February, all that remains for a new presidential determination is the president’s signature.
AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2021, the U.S. had admitted just 1,779 refugees since last October, well below the pace to hit Trump’s FY2021 refugee cap of 15,000. That was already the lowest admissions cap in the four decades since the refugee resettlement program was formally created in 1980.
Not only has Biden failed to sign the paperwork raising the emergency cap to 62,500, but he’s making little effort to pick up the pace to fulfill the current, meager admissions goal. “We’ve seen lower monthly arrivals [of refugees] under the Biden administration than last summer under the Trump administration,” said Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy for Voice for Refuge.
The refugee resettlement infrastructure suffered under the Trump administration. According to Owen, about one-third of domestic resettlement sites were closed and overseas infrastructure also saw huge staff cuts. “It’s hard to even describe the last four years in terms of the amount of disruption and dismantlement and really just the shrinking of staff because sites just couldn’t hold on,” said Alicia Wrenn, senior director of resettlement and integration for HIAS. HIAS and the eight other refugee resettlement agencies lost nearly 100 resettlement sites, and HIAS lost more than 20 staff members.
Then COVID-19 hit. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers typically conduct refugee interviews in the field, but the pandemic has effectively ended international travel, and there’s no indication yet when USCIS will return to in-person interviews. “The capacity of USCIS has been very deliberately decimated by putting pressures on the agency to send their staff to the southern border to do asylum hearings and really refusing to engage in additional capacity planning for the future,” explained Kekic of CWS.
Should Biden raise the refugee cap and sign the presidential determination tomorrow, it would swiftly alter the prospects for thousands of refugees, though the 62,500 cap would still be mostly an aspiration, as resettlement infrastructure may take months to be rebuilt. Nevertheless, the resettlement community wants a presidential determination as soon as possible. Congress has appropriated enough funds to resettlement agencies to begin to meet a higher admissions goal in fiscal year 2021 through existing capacity, Owen said. The administration is expected to raise the cap the following year to 125,000, and resettlement agencies will need additional resources.
But without a new cap, agencies cannot even begin building toward a specific goal. “It’s only making their job and our job harder by holding it up,” Hetfield said.
Refugee resettlement is labor-intensive and requires a lot of up-front investment. Community volunteers get a profile of the family in advance and prepare specifically for that family. “I have multiple offices that have lists of community members ready and they’re just waiting to be assigned refugees so they can start welcoming,” said Stacey Clack, Midwest faith community organizer for CWS. Already, the canceled flights mean communities eager and ready to welcome refugee families are struggling with logistics, and some expenses are unrecoverable.
“From the refugee side, if the paperwork expires, it can set you back months or years,” Clack said. She recalled welcoming a refugee family whose child was severely injured. The doctor told her that if the child had arrived just a week later, he would not have survived. Each day the administration delays, she said, endangers lives.
“If I could have a cup of coffee with Biden and have that moment of conversation, I would tell him the story of that little boy and how lifesaving it is and how some of these families don’t have another day to wait,” she said.
