The Joe Biden administration is dancing like Fred Astaire, attempting to use its common sense as it also attempts to placate its far left base that does not care about common sense.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the administration could not commit to its pledge to admit 125,000 refugees into the United States in the next fiscal year, despite making that pledge, which came after Biden refused to lift the cap on refugees from Donald Trump’s historically low number.
If it appears that the administration is dancing in a circle and chasing its own tail. That is because it is, CNN reported.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that it would be “very hard” to meet the 62,000 refugee cap pledged by President Joe Biden, arguing that the refugee system that was in place when the administration came in lacked “the means to effectively process as many people as we hoped.”
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“I think what the President has and the White House has said today is that based on what we’ve now seen from in terms of the inheritance and being able to look at what was in place, what we could put in place, how quickly we could put it in place, it’s going to be very hard to meet the 62,000 this fiscal year,” Blinken said to ABC News. But, he said, that theTrump-era policy that prohibited refugees from some Middle East and Africa nations “has now been lifted,” and those refugees are now eligible to seek asylum in the US.
But when he was asked if Biden would meet the 125,000 refugee cap for the next fiscal year, Blinken would not give a straight answer.
“Look, the president’s been clear about where he wants to go, but we have to be, you know, focused on what we’re able to do when we’re able to do it,” he said.
“We’re able to start to bring people in who’ve been in the pipeline and who weren’t able to come in,” he said. “That is starting today, and we’re going to revisit it in the middle of May.”
The comments from the secretary come as Biden faces heat from refugee groups and congressional Democrats over an announcement on Friday that he would keep this fiscal year’s refugee cap of 15,000, and not raise the cap as he had promised to do — a significant reversal from the Biden administration’s proposal in February to lift the cap to 62,500.
The President again reversed course on Saturday, saying his administration will increase the refugee cap.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan could not say on Sunday how many refugees Biden would ultimately allow into the country, but insisted the President is “not breaking that promise” to allow more refugees into the US.
“President Biden’s ultimate target is going to reflect very much his commitment to bringing refugees to the United States to the maximum extent possible consistent with our ability to process them,” he said to Dana Bash on the CNN show “State of the Union.”
“What will drive our determination are the practical questions of whether we can fix the absolutely shattered system we were left with to process refugees,” he said.
His administration first announced that it would not raise the cap on the Donald Trump administrations limit on refugees but, after facing scrutiny, relented, The New York Times reported.
After a backlash from Democrats and human rights activists, the White House abruptly reversed course on Friday on the number of refugees it will allow into the United States, a reflection of President Biden’s continuing struggle with immigration policy.
At midday on Friday, the administration had said it would limit the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year to the historically low level of 15,000 set by the Trump administration, breaking an earlier pledge to greatly increase that number and let in more than 60,000 people fleeing war and persecution.
But that announcement drew immediate criticism from Democratic leaders. In a statement, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the majority whip, called the administration’s admissions target “unacceptable.”