President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that President Joe Biden will raise the cap on refugees allowed to enter America by former President Donald Trump, which Sullivan said was rooted in “racism.”
Anchor Chris Wallace said, “On Friday morning, the president indicated that he was going to stick with the refugee cap set by President Trump last year. Not the 62,500 refugees the administration promised in February to allow into the U.S., but instead just 15,000 refugees this year. Then, under a storm of criticism, the president backed down within hours Friday afternoon and said he would set a higher cap in May. What happened?”
Sullivan said, “Well, first of all, we faced two problems when we came in. There was the problem of the cap, 15,000, and there was a problem of the allocation, which was that the Trump administration had said zero people can come from Africa, effectively zero people could come from the Middle East, and so the president wanted to go with this into steps. The first step was to change the allocation so that people in Africa could literally get on planes this week, and the second would be to raise the cap as we were fixing the system and its processing. He took the first step this past week, he will take the second step in the weeks ahead, and I think there was some misunderstanding on Friday about the import of his decision Friday morning, which was focused on the allocation, not on the cap.”
Sullivan said, “The Office of Refugee Resettlement is the same office that handles both unaccompanied children at the border and refugees coming in from around the world. So as it turns out, President Biden and his team had to dig into whether we could allocate the resources effectively to be able to get folks into the refugee pipeline and into the United States. He is absolutely committed to making sure that not only is America welcoming to refugees, not only do we get people on planes immediately by changing those allocations, which were rooted in xenophobia and even racism, but also that we raise the cap. He is committed to that, and he will follow through on that.”
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