On top of utterly destroying the U.S. border, decimating thousands of American jobs, driving up the price of oil, and making an absolute bungle of the situation in Afghanistan by pulling out all U.S. troops, President Joe Biden, now just three months into his presidency, is also ticking off his own base by breaking a promise he’d made to expand the country’s refugee cap.
And it turns out, it might be his own border policies that are to blame.
The president is now catching the ire of many of his own supporters for reportedly deciding to keep the current cap on refugees at 15,000, a historically low limit set by the Trump administration, and which Biden had campaigned on reversing. At the time, Biden had vowed to up the cap to 125,000, calling it the "moral" thing to do.
"Today, I'm approving an executive order to begin the hard work of restoring our refugee admissions program to help meet the unprecedented global need," Biden said in February, saying the Trump administration had "badly damaged" the program.
“It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged.”
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) February 5, 2021
ICYMI: Biden said he will raise the cap on refugee admissions in the next fiscal year to 125,000 — more than 8x the 15,000-person limit Trump implemented during his last year in office https://t.co/vuVE7FEHjS pic.twitter.com/NJwZukRWfs
But now, according to senior officials, the current catastrophe at the Southwest border, which the Biden administration still refuses to label a “crisis,” is at least partly to blame for Biden deciding now isn’t the time to open up the door to more refugees.
The New York Times reports:
A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the decision-making, said the administration grew concerned that the surge of border crossings by unaccompanied minors was too much and had already overwhelmed the refugee branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. But migrants at the border seeking asylum are processed in an entirely separate system than refugees fleeing persecution overseas.
And his fellow liberals are furious.
In a letter signed by multiple Democrat members of Congress, far-leftists including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted Biden for keeping in place refugee limits that are “unacceptably draconian and discriminatory.”
"Having fought for four years against the Trump Administration's full-scale assault on refugee resettlement in the United States, we were relieved to see you commit to increasing our refugee resettlement numbers so early in your Administration," the letter’s nearly 40 signees stated, according to NPR.
"But until the Emergency Presidential Determination is finalized, our refugee policy remains unacceptably draconian and discriminatory,” they wrote. "We must keep our promises to people who have fled unthinkably brutal conditions in their home countries and live up to our ambition to provide them a safe haven to re-start their lives.”
On Twitter, AOC slammed Biden's decision as "completely and utterly unacceptable," saying, "Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise. Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, [including] the historically low [and] plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong."
But perhaps rolling out the red carpet for tens of thousands of refugees while also blowing open the doors of our Southern border to the some 1 million-plus illegal aliens who're expected to cross this year alone is a bridge too far even for Biden, who spent much of his campaign making promises he's so far struggled to keep.