Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs

The administration said it would accept 18,000 refugees during the next 12 months, down from the current limit of 30,000 and a fraction of the 110,000 President Barack Obama said should be allowed into the United States in 2016, his final year in office.

Even that low figure may overstate the number of slots that could be open for unanticipated crises, since many of the openings have been allocated. The Trump administration will reserve 4,000 refugee slots for Iraqis who worked with the U.S. military, 1,500 for people from Central America and 5,000 for people persecuted for their religion, senior administration officials said. The other 7,500 slots are for those who are seeking family unification and have been cleared for resettlement.

That will eliminate many opportunities for people fleeing war and persecution throughout the world to resettle in the United States, which until Trump took office was the world’s leading destination for refugees.

Administration officials said the change was merely to accommodate that huge increase in people seeking asylum, 350,000 expected in all. The total influx then could reach 368,000.

“President Trump is prioritizing the safety and security of the American people by making sure we do not admit more people than we can vet,” the administration said Thursday evening.

Religious and humanitarian groups reacted harshly. Jennifer Sime, senior vice president at International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, said the order broke with 40 years of precedent.

“This measure completely ignores the welcome that communities have provided to refugees, as well as the important contributions resettled refugees have made to these communities all across the country,” Sime said.

The Rev. John McCullough, president of Church World Service, a resettlement agency, declared, “With one final blow, the Trump administration has snuffed out Lady Liberty’s torch and ended our nation’s legacy of compassion and welcome.”

The cap is not the only change that could limit refugee entries. The number admitted into the U.S. will also depend on the jurisdictions that choose to accept them. Trump signed an executive order requiring state and local governments to provide written consent to the federal government in order for them to accept refugees.

The administration will also no longer have carve-outs for specific regions of the world, with the exception of three Central American countries. Last year, the U.S. accepted 11,000 people from Africa, 4,000 from East Asia, 3,000 from Europe and Central Asia, 3,000 from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 9,000 from Southeast Asia.

Trump’s decision is part of a broader effort, led by Stephen Miller, a White House adviser and architect of the president’s immigration agenda, to reduce the number of legal and illegal immigrants flowing into the country.

Miller and his allies in the administration argue that the drastic reduction of the refugee program is required because of the increase in the number of asylum-seekers trying to enter the United States at the Mexican border.

There is a backlog of almost 1 million cases in the immigration courts in the United States, many of which are asylum-seekers. On a conference call with reporters, senior administration officials argued that the administration’s resources are better spent processing those cases than bringing more refugees into the United States.

“The current burdens on the U.S. immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large number of refugees,” the State Department said in a news release. “Prioritizing the humanitarian protection cases of those already in our country is simply a matter of fairness and common sense.”

But critics of the administration say that the asylum situation at the southwestern border should not be an excuse for abandoning potential refugees from hot spots around the world.

They point out that the backlog in the immigration courts is largely the result of cases where the asylum-seekers’ requests need to be evaluated. Most refugees who arrive in the United States have already been screened and vetted before they arrive.

The critics note that the U.S. was able to process close to 30,000 refugees in the current year even as the number of asylum cases rose in the spring. In recent months, the number of migrants seeking asylum at the border has dropped, which should relieve the pressure on processing cases, they said.

They also say the administration is abandoning a moral duty by the United States to be a world leader in the effort to help people in dire situations. They argue that other countries take their cue from the actions of U.S. presidents.

Administration officials said they had to take tough steps to limit refugees because they were dealing with an ongoing crisis at the southern border. But that crisis appears to be abating. Apprehensions at the border have declined since more than 144,200 migrants were taken into custody in May, the highest monthly total in 13 years. Border authorities arrested more than 64,000 migrants at the southwestern border.

The acting secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, has also signed separate deals with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that would require most migrants to apply for asylum in those countries in an effort to keep the migrants from journeying to the United States.

This article originally appeared in

U.S. Cuts Refugee Program Again, Placing Cap at 18,000 People

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has decided to slash the U.S. refugee program by almost half, greatly dimming the United States’ role in accepting persecuted refugees from most parts of the world, the State Department announced Thursday.

The official said that President Donald Trump ordered a shake-up of his top immigration officials in recent days because they were moving too slowly, or even actively obstructing, the president’s desire to confront the surge of migrants at the southwestern border. The asylum changes are among one of many policies the president wants to put into effect with a new team in place, the official said.

Trump denied on Tuesday that one of those changes would be to restart his policy of separating migrant families at the border, though he said that the act of taking children from their parents — which drew global condemnation before he abandoned it last summer — was effective.

“Now I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming,” Trump said. “They are coming like it’s a picnic, because, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’”

The administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity even as Trump was making his remarks, said a modified version of family separation, in which parents are given a choice of whether to be separated or to accept indefinite detention alongside their children, continues to be under consideration.

But the so-called binary choice proposal is “not ripe for White House consideration” right now, he insisted, because the government does not currently have the detention space to hold families if the policy were put in place.

The asylum changes being envisioned could drastically alter the role that the United States plays as a refuge for people fleeing poverty, violence and war. U.S. and international laws require it to allow migrants to request asylum once they come to the country.

But the official said that an initial assessment of an asylum-seeker’s claim — known as a “credible fear” screening — too often accepts the claim that the migrant was persecuted. The official also said that many more asylum-seekers should be rejected during that first step.

Out of 97,728 completed interviews with migrants in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed a credible fear of persecution 74,677 times, according to an agency official.

Changes in the screening process could drastically lower those findings by requiring more proof from asylum-seekers that they would be persecuted in their home countries. Screeners could also try to verify migrant claims by using State Department assessments of the threats that exist in those countries.

Immigrant rights advocates have feared for months that the administration would try to change the standards by which asylum-seekers are judged in an effort to prevent more of them from coming into the United States.

The administration official blamed the delay in that effort on “deep state” bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security and even the president’s own political appointees in the department, whom the official described as lacking the management skills to push Trump’s agenda.

The official declined to name specific administration officials who have failed. But he made thinly veiled references to two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security: John Mitnick, the department’s general counsel, and L. Francis Cissna, the head of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

He said there was “clearly a track record” in which the president’s policies have not been advanced.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Trump falsely said that President Barack Obama had embraced the same policy of routinely separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

“President Obama had child separation,” Trump said during brief remarks in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt. “I’m the one that stopped it.”

Under Obama and President George W. Bush, immigration officials sometimes separated families when they had reason to question parentage or when there was evidence of child abuse. The Trump administration instituted a policy in which all families who crossed the border illegally were separated in order to allow the parents to be prosecuted under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents at the border before Trump ended the policy in June 2018.

The president’s comments come a day after he shook up the senior ranks of the Department of Homeland Security, forcing the resignation of the secretary and top immigration officials in a move that signaled a pending shift in immigration policies.

On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection officials underscored Trump’s concern about illegal immigration by announcing that more than 103,000 migrants crossed the southwestern border in March, an increase from the more than 76,000 migrants who crossed in February.

“Just last month, we saw record numbers of family units and unaccompanied juvenile apprehensions in February, and unfortunately, March apprehension numbers are again record-setting and cause dire concerns for us,” said Brian Hastings, the chief of law enforcement operations for the Border Patrol.

Most of the migrants — 92,000 of the 103,000 — were apprehended by Border Patrol agents, meaning they crossed in between the ports of entry.

More than 53,000 of those migrants were members of a family, Hastings said, and most of those families were from Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador.

In the first half of fiscal year 2019, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 385,000 migrants on the border, more than double those apprehended during the same time last year.

Hastings said the Border Patrol can generally maintain 4,500 people in its custody. But it recently counted 13,000 migrants in its facilities, and he said the overflow has led to the release of families into cities along the border.

“Backups have resulted in individuals spending additional time in Border Patrol custody in increasingly crowded conditions,” Hastings said.

On Tuesday, White House officials announced that the president would appeal a judge’s ruling that blocked the administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols,” which require some asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while they wait for their court cases.

Trump has recently commended Mexico for doing more to stem migration to the border, but the officials said they have not seen any effect on the number of people crossing it. “The numbers aren’t declining; in fact, we’re still seeing 3,000 apprehensions per day,” Hastings said.

Officials also revealed that among the tens of thousands of family members approaching the border each month, just 3,100 people who said they were traveling with relatives were found to have a fraudulent claim. Those people either said they had a child when the individual was over 18 or the group’s members were not really related.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/trump-obama-family-separation.html" id="4480944f-ec5c-3433-af7a-461885cf9c05">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to aggressively push for tougher screening of asylum-seekers that will make it vastly more difficult for migrants to win protection in the United States from persecution in their home countries, a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday.

The announcement, made on Twitter as Trump was meeting with aides at Camp David, was the president’s latest attempt to pressure his adversaries into making immigration changes. In May, he threatened to levy tariffs on Mexico unless it did more to stop the flow of migrants into the United States.

Immigration agents had been planning to sweep into immigrant communities in 10 major cities — including Miami, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago — beginning Sunday. Officials said Friday that they had targeted about 2,000 families in a show of force intended to demonstrate their strict enforcement of immigration laws. Children of immigrants — some of whom were born in the United States — had faced the prospect of being forcibly separated from their parents.

Mark Morgan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had announced this month that his agency would begin the raids at some point in the future. But Monday, Trump revealed on Twitter that they would start the following week, claiming officials would deport millions of people and sending panic through cities across the country.

The president’s abrupt reversal Saturday came as lawmakers were considering a measure to send $4.5 billion in humanitarian aid to the border, money the Trump administration has said is desperately needed to handle a huge influx of migrants.

Some Democrats, including members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, had threatened to withhold their support for the funding package when it comes to a vote in the House this week, in protest of Trump’s immigration policies. The specter of high-profile immigration raids had risked imperiling its chances of passage.

The Senate has reached a bipartisan deal on a similar measure, although Democrats have conditioned their support on assurances that none of the money would go toward Trump’s threatened raids.

Trump made clear he planned to use the threat of family deportations to extract concessions from Democratic lawmakers. He said he had delayed the raids “to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

“If not, Deportations start!” he tweeted.

Trump delays deportation raids on immigrant families

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday delayed plans for nationwide raids to deport families in the country illegally, but he threatened to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in two weeks if Democrats do not submit to changes in asylum law that they have long opposed.

The official said that President Donald Trump ordered a shake-up of his top immigration officials in recent days because they were moving too slowly, or even actively obstructing, the president’s desire to confront the surge of migrants at the southwestern border. The asylum changes are among many policies the president wants to put into effect with a new team in place, the official said.

But the official said that an initial assessment of the basis for a request for asylum — known as a “credible fear” screening — too often accepts the claim that the migrant was persecuted. The official also said that many more asylum-seekers should be rejected during that first step.

The president’s comments come a day after he shook up the senior ranks of the Department of Homeland Security, forcing the resignation of the secretary, Kirstjen Nielson, and top immigration officials in a move that signaled a pending shift in immigration policies.

Also on Tuesday, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, Claire Grady, who was next in line by law to become the acting secretary, submitted her resignation, according to a Twitter post by Nielsen. Grady’s resignation paves the way for Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, to take the role.

Customs and Border Protection officials this week underscored Trump’s concern about illegal immigration by announcing that more than 103,000 migrants crossed the southwestern border in March without permission, an increase from the more than 76,000 migrants who crossed in February.

This article originally appeared in <a id="17f6f769-b790-4b02-b31a-be384131e15d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/trump-obama-family-separation.html">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to aggressively push for tougher screening of asylum-seekers that will make it vastly more difficult for migrants fleeing persecution in their home countries from winning protection in the United States, a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday.

Trump administration to push for tougher asylum rules

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Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Articles written by the author

U.S. Cuts Refugee Program Again, Placing Cap at 18,000 People

Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules

Trump delays deportation raids on immigrant families

Trump administration to push for tougher asylum rules