U.S. Refugee Program Faces Challenges To Rebuild : NPR - 0 views
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Among the more daunting challenges President Biden faces in the coming year will be to make good on his goal of admitting 10 times as many refugees — 125,000 — as former President Donald Trump allowed to enter the United States last year.
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"One hundred and twenty-five thousand refugees being resettled this [next] year is unrealistic," says Krish O'Mara Vignarajah,
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"Our refugee resettlement has been on life support for the past few years," Vignarajah says. Seventeen of her agency's 48 resettlement sites have closed due to budgetary cutbacks in the U.S. government's refugee program.
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"It involves reopening offices that were closed, rehiring staff we lost, and regaining crucial institutional knowledge," Vignarajah says. The staff members who were let go, she says, represented decades of experience.
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"No back home again," Pathy says. "From the hospital, we leave and run away." At that point, they had no idea whether their daughters were alive or dead.
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With other refugees, the Mulemas made their way to Ghana. The refugee camp there was administered by the United Nations. They spent five years living in miserable conditions, with little or no shelter.
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In a sign of the interfaith character of refugee resettlement work, Jewish Family Services of Delaware partnered with a local Christian church, Calvary Baptist, to accommodate the Mulema family. Over the next three years, about a dozen volunteers from the church helped the Mulemas deal with the new challenges they faced.
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Given how much work is necessary to resettle a single refugee family, however, the prospect of vastly and suddenly increased refugee admissions is barely feasible, in large part because the refugee resettlement infrastructure has been eroded over the past four years.
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Trump allowed fewer than 12,000 refugees to enter the country last year, the lowest number in the history of the U.S. refugee program.
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Across the United States, about one out of three resettlement sites have closed. Jewish Family Services of Delaware was informed it would not be assigned any more refugee families.
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"The Trump Administration really did some serious damage to the infrastructure of the refugee program," Hetfield says. "Also, obviously, the pandemic put some really serious restrictions on."
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A renewed government commitment to refugee admissions is not enough on its own to bring the program back to full strength.
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The United States was founded as a nation of ideals, with almost a religious obligation to welcome the tired and homeless. The country has met the commitment before. It's now challenged to do so again, hard though it may be.