WASHINGTON, United States — For the past
eight years, Ahmed Mohamed Aden has been trying to reunite with the sons he
left behind when he fled Somalia.
اضافة اعلان
He sought help from immigration advocates in
Wisconsin, where he was legally resettled. He filed reams of paperwork with the
United Nations refugee agency. He submitted DNA samples to prove he shares a
genetic relationship with his children, which he hoped would speed up
processing.
But last month, he learned that their applications
were still pending, stuck in a backlog of people fleeing violence and
persecution who hope to find sanctuary in the US.
“I did everything I can,” an emotional Aden said,
holding his head in his hands as the social worker assigned to his case
explained that his children would not be joining him in Milwaukee any time
soon. “I tried”.
Aden’s sons are among thousands of people living in
limbo as delays in the US refugee system stretch to an average of five years or
more, according to government estimates.
The average wait used to be roughly two years,
before the Trump administration gutted the refugee program with the intention
of sealing off the North American nation from refugees and other immigrants.
And the coronavirus pandemic forced many
US embassies to close or curtail their
operations, allowing cases to back up even more.
Many of the people who have been in the pipeline for
years have grown increasingly frustrated, saying they are being pushed to the
back of the line as the Biden administration prioritizes those fleeing crises
in Ukraine and Afghanistan.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the CEO of Lutheran
Immigration and Refugee Service, said she understands that the
Biden administration is working with an overburdened system inherited from the Trump
years.
But, she said, her patience is wearing thin.
“We’re at a point in the administration that while
we recognize how the Trump administration decimated the infrastructure, it
can’t be an excuse for too much longer,” Vignarajah said. “Because lives depend
on the administration stepping up.”
Loved ones,
languishing in camps
President Joe Biden, who has
promised to rebuild the refugee program, issued an executive order last year
that directed his administration to cut the processing times to six months.
But in a report submitted to the US congress last
month, the White House acknowledged that the effort to provide temporary
protection to roughly 180,000 people escaping
Ukraine and
Afghanistan “required
a significant reallocation of time and resources” and “hampered the program’s
rebound”.
Last week, the administration said it would offer a
similar status for up to 24,000 Venezuelans looking to escape their broken
country, even as many more who cross the border would be expelled under a
pandemic-era rule put in place by former president Donald Trump.
The shift means people in desperate conditions in
countries like Somalia, Eritrea and Myanmar are facing the prospect of even
longer waits. More than 76,000 prospective refugees were in the system’s
pipeline waiting to be cleared for travel as of this summer, according to State
Department data obtained by the New York Times.
Mulugeta Gebresilasie, a case manager at a
resettlement agency in Columbus, Ohio, said that refugees already in the United
States have felt penalized as their loved ones languish in camps for displaced
people.
“Suddenly, the resettlement agencies were focusing
on Afghan people,” Gebresilasie said. “The African refugees told me: ‘They
forgot about us. We have been waiting so many years.’”
Crossing the border
The US refugee system was
designed to provide a legal pathway for displaced people to find protection in
America. Applicants must be recommended by the
United Nations, a US embassy, or
a nonprofit; undergo interviews with US consular officers overseas; and gather
documents that can be difficult or impossible to procure in failed states:
birth certificates, marriage certificates, travel documents, school records.
They also undergo extensive medical and security vetting.
Once they are resettled, the refugees can petition for
their immediate relatives to join them in the US.
But millions of people are being admitted into the
US outside the traditional refugee program, diverting resources from those who
have been waiting for years.
Much attention has been paid to migrants crossing
the border in record numbers, in part because of decisions by republican-led
states like Florida and Texas to send some of them to liberal bastions like
Martha’s Vineyard as a way to provoke outrage.
Those migrants can secure asylum if they can prove
they would be persecuted at home; otherwise, they face deportation. More than a
million have been turned away on the basis of a
Trump-era public health measure
called Title 42, which allows the US to expel people who would have otherwise
been admitted for an evaluation of their asylum claims or placed into
deportation proceedings.
In special circumstances, the US government can
grant “parole” to people from other countries, a legal tool that allows them to
enter the country but does not automatically confer a green card or
citizenship. That is what Biden’s administration has done in the cases of many
refugees from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now Venezuela.
Over the past two years, the Biden administration
has taken some steps to rebuild the overburdened refugee system, even as the
president and his senior aides have debated how to unwind the Trump
administration’s anti-immigration agenda.
The White House named Andrew Nacin, a former
WordPress developer who worked on immigration issues for the Obama administration,
to lead the effort. Nacin is streamlining the White House’s digital services
and is trying to apply some lessons learned from the scramble to assist Afghans
and Ukrainians.
Nowhere near the
quota
The president has said he is
committed to fulfilling a campaign promise to reverse Trump’s limits on
accepting refugees. The administration recently informed congress that it would
set the annual cap on the number of refugees at a maximum of 125,000 people,
the same level as last year.
Trump, by contrast, set the limit at 15,000, the
lowest it has been in the history of the refugee program.
The refugee numbers include only those who are
legally resettled in the country; asylum-seekers who cross the border from
Mexico, for example, do not count toward the limit. Nor do the Ukrainians,
Afghans, or Venezuelans who come in under humanitarian parole.
But the US has not even come close to hitting the
125,000-person limit, in part because it simply has not had enough personnel to
get through the backlog.
By the end of 2021, the US had tallied just 11,411
refugees, the smallest number since the establishment of the refugee program.
The Biden administration resettled about 25,400 refugees this past fiscal year,
according to the State Department.
In interviews, senior administration officials said it was
unlikely they would hit their target in the coming year.
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