The White House is acknowledging some serious challenges to meeting President Obama’s goal of taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees during the current fiscal year, and suggested the U.S. government might speed up the process to admit more than 8,000 in the next five months.
The State Department has resettled just 1,734 Syrian refugees through the end of April, less than one-fifth of the 10,000 that Obama promised to admit during the 2016 fiscal year that ends Oct. 1, according to government data.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday acknowledged that the administration has “some work to do” to meet the 10,000 goal but said Obama is still committed to reaching it without “cutting any corners” when it comes to security and the screening of refugees.
“The president’s made clear that both publicly and privately, that this is a priority,” Earnest said. “And the national security officials that are responsible for implementing this program understand exactly what the commander-in-chief’s priorities are.”
But the administration will need to rapidly speed up the pace of Syrian refugee admissions if it hopes to be within reach of the goal at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in mid-September.
During that gathering of world leaders, Obama and United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, plan to make a concerted diplomatic push to encourage other countries to accept 480,000 Syrian refugees in the next few years. That’s just 10 percent of the refugees living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and they already have pledges to resettle 178,000.
Reporters on Wednesday pressed Earnest on how the president will have enough credibility on the issue to ask world leaders to do more when the United States cannot meet its one-year goal of admitting 10,000.
“There are several more months left in the fiscal year,” Earnest responded, noting that at the same time last year there was skepticism about whether the administration would meet its goal for admitting refugees set the previous year.
“In the last few months of the fiscal year, the pace ramped up and that goal was met,” he said. “The administration is focused on doing that again, but we will not do that in a way that results in a weakening of security standards.”
State Department spokeswoman Julia Mason told the Washington Examiner that the administration remains committed to Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 refugees from Syria by the end of the fiscal year. State and the Department of Homeland Security have worked together over the last few months to increase staff in Jordan to interview applicants for refugee resettlement in the United States, she said.
“This increase in processing … will not curtail any aspects of the process, including its robust security screening,” she said. “Refugees are the most thoroughly screened category of traveler to the United States.”
From February through April, the State Department posted additional staff to Jordan, where they conducted interviews for about 12,000 refugee applicants, she said.
She noted that some of applicants approved by DHS in the February-April period will be admitted to the United States in the next fiscal year, although she did not say how many.
In addition, Mason said State and DHS restarted refugee resettlement interviews in Beirut, Lebanon in mid-February and began processing new cases in Erbil, Iraq in December.
The campaign to convince more countries to resettle displaced Syrians faces an uphill slog even as the flood of millions of refugees into Europe, Turkey and Jordan continues to grow. Despite Pope Francis calls for stepped up admissions of Syrian refugees, new terrorism fears, sharp divisions over the issue on the presidential campaign trail, and GOP opposition in Congress and among a bipartisan group of governors are all working against the message.
The Syrian refugee cause already faced a major setback after the Paris terrorist bombing in November, after it was revealed that one of the suicide bombers entered Europe with a wave of Syrian war refugees.
After Paris and additional terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif. and Belgium, public opinion has shifted against resettling refugees in the United States, which has historically taken in more refugees than any other nation.
Most voters don’t want the U.S. to admit the 10,000 slated to arrive, and fear they are a threat to the country, according to a Rasmussen poll released Tuesday.
The survey found that 59 percent of likely U.S. voters oppose allowing the Syrians in while 31 percent favor admitting them.
That figure is up from a Bloomberg poll taken shortly after the Paris attacks in November, which found that 53 percent of those surveyed didn’t want Syrian refugees resettled in the United States, compared to 44 percent in a September CNN poll.
