Government officials who oversee the nation’s refugee admissions program are hoping that the backlash against allowing refugees into the U.S. in light of Friday’s attacks on Paris don’t ruin a successful program.
“My biggest fear … is we will lose the bipartisan support for this program that it has enjoyed for decades,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday.
The program has resettled more than 3 million refugees from around the world since 1975 across all 50 states, according to the State Department. In September, the State Department pledged to admit 10,000 additional Syrian refugees this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
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Originally, the program’s goal was to admit 75,000 global refugees this year — up from 70,000 in fiscal 2015, which ended Sept. 30. But then, global pressure mounted on the U.S. to take in more refugees after Europe was flooded by desperate refugees over the summer, so the U.S. will now take 85,000 refugees this year in total.
Program officials said they can handle the extra volume but said if the program continues expanding, they will need help from Congress. “We can do that; it’s a bit of a stretch but we can do that,” one senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday about the higher figure.
For now, they have the necessary resources, but they need “continued support from Congress,” the official said. “We’re absolutely dependent on funding from Congress. As we grow [the program], will need more assistance from Congress.”
That could be problematic as GOP lawmakers plan to freshly scrutinize the plan, and Republican governors are rebelling against the idea of accepting Syrian refugees.
According to the State Department, it cost the program’s three administering agencies — State, Homeland Security and the Pentagon — $1.1 billion in fiscal 2015 to process and resettle 70,000 refugees.
The Obama administration officials reiterated that the program is federally run, although it coordinates with liaisons in each state and consults with them on resettlement placement. Beyond lawmakers, the program is “contingent on support of American people,” for its continuation and success, one senior administration official said.
As for security, they underscored that the U.S. has the most rigorous security checks for refugees in the world, and that refugees are the most scrutinized category of people seeking entry into the United States.
Applicants, the bulk of which are referred by a United Nations program, are subjected to multiple levels of biometric verification and in-person interviews conducted by specially trained staff. FBI, DHS, Defense Department and other law enforcement databases are combed. Additionally, Syrian refugees undergo an “enhanced review” process, they said.
Syrian refugees have been processed “in small numbers” since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, program officials told reporters in a similar briefing held on Sept. 11. The United Nations only began referring applicants fleeing that conflict “in large numbers” last June, they said.
During the September briefing, program officials telegraphed that countries other than the U.S. would likely have more trouble weeding out would-be terrorists from among refugee applicants than the U.S. would.
“It has not so far been a fairly significant issue,” one senior administration official said then. The official partially attributed it to U.N. program administrators pre-screening applicants that they then refer to American officials.
The U.N. has been “extraordinarily cautious in the referrals that they have made to us and other resettlement countries, because they know about concerns about this case load because of the ongoing conflict in Syria,” the official said.
“It’s rather unusual that we resettle refugees from ongoing conflicts,” the official added. “Often, refugees are kind of left over from” past conflicts. U.N. workers “have probably set aside the vast majority of cases that they believe would run into problems with the United States in terms of” automatically being designated a terrorist. “In some cases, they were referring those cases to other countries,” the official said.
