The Wall Street Journal: U.S. Refugee Backlog Swells, Leaving Families Waiting to Reunite
Originally Published in The Wall Street Journal by Michelle Hackman
The U.S. has admitted just under 11,000 refugees during the fiscal year ending Wednesday, the smallest number in the refugee program’s 40-year history, according to State Department data.
Each year President Trump has been in office, he has set the annual cap on the number of refugees the U.S. would accept at a record low. The cap for this year was 18,000 refugees, but the number was further reduced by a temporary moratorium due to the coronavirus pandemic and by other limits the administration imposed.
The slowdown has compounded a backlog of refugees who have been vetted but are waiting, sometimes years, for a place in line. As of this month, about 120,000 refugees are on a list for possible resettlement in the U.S., according to State Department data provided to resettlement agencies.
“The annual refugee admissions ceiling is not a target but rather an upper limit on refugee admissions for the fiscal year,” a State Department spokesman said.
Among those affected by the slowdown are the Sayhoons, a Pakistani Christian couple waiting to reunite. Arooj Nirmal Sayhoon, 33 years old, said she fled her native Pakistan in 2012 when her husband, who ran a blog that told stories of fellow persecuted Pakistani Christians, sent her to Sri Lanka with the little money they had.
Her husband, Sunny Sayhoon, had promised to join a few days later, she said. When he didn’t, she assumed he had been killed.
Mr. Sayhoon had been captured by Muslim extremists, Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon said, though he eventually escaped. By the time he found his wife in Sri Lanka in 2017, she was preparing to move to Spokane, Wash., as a refugee, she said. It was too late for him to join her.
Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon spoke in an interview from Spokane. Mr. Sayhoon, still in Sri Lanka, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Mr. Sayhoon has since passed an interview certifying him as a refugee eligible to come to the U.S. and cleared the requisite security and medical checks, according to Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon. All he awaits is a visa and a spot in the line.
Meanwhile, Christian refugees have become targets of bombings in Sri Lanka: A series of coordinated attacks at churches and luxury hotels on Easter Sunday 2019 killed more than 250 people and wounded more than 400.
Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon said she has spent the past three years in school and working for a local cabinet-building company. She is saving up for the home she hopes to buy for herself and Sunny, and for the nursing degree she must redo in the U.S., she said. All the while, she exchanges anxious WhatsApp messages with her husband.
“It’s been so painful and hard, waiting for him,” Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon said. “I can’t say he’s safe where he is, but at least he’s surviving.”
Mark Finney, Ms. Nirmal Sayhoon’s case manager at World Relief, the resettlement agency of the National Association of Evangelicals, said it isn’t clear why Mr. Sayhoon’s case has taken so long. Before the Trump administration, such processing typically took about two years, according to resettlement agencies. Under refugee-program rules, Mr. Sayhoon’s background check and medical screening are each valid for about six months, so he will need new ones the longer he waits.
The reductions in the refugee-admission ceilings have come as the number of refugees fleeing violence and persecution around the world has swelled to 71 million people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the highest number of displaced people since World War II.
The slower pace of resettlements has affected the displaced world-wide, including Muslim-minority Rohingya fleeing persecution in majority-Buddhist Myanmar, which now faces a genocide case at the top U.N. court, and Congolese people fleeing ethnic and sexual violence there. The U.N. reported a 34% increase in conflict-related sexual violence in Congo in 2019.
Mr. Trump has made restricting refugee admissions a key piece of his broader effort to reduce nearly all forms of immigration. He has said the program might allow terrorists to enter the country, though refugees face more security checks than other immigrants. His administration has also said that, given its limited resources, its energy is better put toward resolving conflicts abroad that cause people to flee their homes and funding refugee resettlement in other countries.
Mr. Trump has also referred to refugees in campaign speeches. Last week, he told a crowd at a rally in Minnesota that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would turn the state “into a refugee camp.” Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest population of Somali refugees.
“I’m your wall between the American dream and chaos,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Biden has pledged to raise the refugee cap to 125,000 a year, higher than it was during the Obama administration. One reason the number of refugees admitted this year falls short of the cap, experts say, is a new system of category-based limits the administration introduced beneath its overall ceiling. The administration reserved 5,000 of its 18,000 slots for people fleeing religious persecution, a cap that has nearly been filled. That is the category under which Mr. Sayhoon would likely be able to come.
Government data shows other category-based caps remain unfilled. The U.S. set aside a combined 1,500 slots for refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the Northern Triangle countries which together make up the largest source of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to seek refuge. The U.S. has accepted 575 refugees from the three countries combined.
Of the 4,000 slots the administration earmarked for Iraqis who aided the American military, 123 refugees have been resettled, though about 107,000 people have entered the resettlement pipeline as of last year.
“Operationally, the final number was always going to come under 18,000, and the administration knew that,” said Matthew La Corte, government-affairs manager for immigration policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
The number of Central American refugees referred to the U.S. for resettlement has always been low, said Jen Smyers, director of policy and advocacy at the refugee program of Church World Service, a faith-based humanitarian group. The U.S. and the U.N. have never kept a large presence in that region, she said, despite an Obama administration effort to invest there. I
n Iraq, the U.S. has run a program since the Bush administration to vet Iraqis who aided the U.S. military in the conflict there, but the Trump administration has conducted very few refugee interviews in the country, and those who were vetted and approved before Mr. Trump took office have since seen their clearances expire, Ms. Smyers said.
PHOTO CAPTION: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash