- After obfuscating last month, President Joe Biden on Monday announced that he would be quadrupling the country's refugee ceiling to 62,500 for the 2021 fiscal year, with an eye toward expanding it to 125,000 refugee admissions in 2022. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Maegan Vazquez]
- The revisions eliminate the historically low cap set at 15,000 admissions by President Donald Trump last year. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Maegan Vazquez]
- The Biden administration almost didn’t make a change. Last month, it stated Trump’s cap was “justified by humanitarian reasons” and “otherwise in the national interest.” Backlash among Democratic allies was swift. [Associated Press / Matthew Lee, Zeke Miller and Julie Watson]
- In raising the cap, Biden struck a different tone. “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,” he said in a White House press statement. [New York Times / Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs]
- But a lifted cap doesn’t mean the White House will let in quadruple the refugees. Biden acknowledged that the government “will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year." Refugee settlement has been slowed by barriers set up by the Trump administration and by the Covid-19 pandemic, [Politico / Laura Barron-Lopez, Nahal Toosi, and Natasha Korecki]
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