Vox reports:

President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he will sign an executive order to rebuild the US’s refugee resettlement program, raising the annual cap on admissions to 125,000 starting in October.

In a speech at the State Department, he acknowledged that the US refugee program suffered under former President Donald Trump, who slashed the cap on refugee admissions to just 15,000 this fiscal year — the lowest number since the refugee program was created in 1980 and down from 110,000 just four years earlier. Increasing the US’s capacity to accept more refugees will be a gradual process, Biden said.

“The United States’ moral leadership on refugee issues was a point of bipartisan consensus for so many decades,” he said. “It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged.”

His executive order would enable the State Department, in consultation with Congress, to begin ramping up refugee admissions in the months before October, but it’s not clear how quickly that could occur. Under Trump, refugee agencies saw their federal funding decrease, forcing them to substantially scale back their infrastructure and staffing to keep their resettlement programs afloat. More than 100 resettlement offices closed, and many government staff tasked with processing refugees abroad were laid off or reassigned. [Continue reading…]