Family in limbo as US slows refugee admissions

Mica Rosenberg & Elias Biryabarema -

Somali refugee Ramlo Ali Noor will never be reunited with her 16-year-old son in her new home in Columbus, Ohio.

She had been waiting since applying to the US government in 2015 to bring over her three boys from Uganda, but their cases faced hold-ups in refugee processing under the Trump administration. On September 22, the youngest of the three teenagers — Abdiaziz — died suddenly from a brain infection.

Now Noor, 37, fears the window for her two surviving sons to make it into the United States is shrinking.

The US government plans to slash the refugee ceiling to 18,000, its lowest since the modern refugee programme began in 1980. More than half the places for refugees in the 2020 fiscal year are reserved for Iraqis, Central Americans and religious minorities, leaving only 7,500 for everyone else, according to a White House proposal. President Donald Trump has yet to finalise the refugee number for next year.

At the same time — as of this summer — nearly 30,000 refugees had passed resettlement interviews abroad with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Of those, more than 8,800 had been approved for travel, according to a July 2, 2019 State Department report seen by Reuters.

Some of those approved in July have likely been resettled in recent months and the State Department said it could not comment on the current refugee admissions pipeline.

But immigrant advocates and former officials said it will now be impossible for all of the cases already far-along in the approval process to make it into the country this year.

Trump has made curbing legal and illegal immigration a priority. Shortly after taking office, he halved his predecessor Barack Obama’s plans to resettle 110,000 refugees in 2017 and has been whittling down the numbers ever since.

Explaining its latest cut, the administration said it must shift resources to processing a backlog of hundreds of thousands of asylum cases, mostly filed by Central American migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border.

“The workload with the southern border has been immense in the last couple of years. And yet we are still getting to tens of thousands of asylum cases,” Ken Cuccinelli, the Acting director of USCIS, told reporters at the White House on Friday, after the refugee ceiling was announced.

But Barbara Strack, former chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at USCIS, who left the administration in early 2018, said that the low cap “is a policy-driven decision, not a resource-based decision.”

“These refugees who have already been interviewed and approved could travel to the US over the next 12 months,” said Strack, since most of the administrative work on their cases has been completed.

“The real issue here is this Administration’s desire for lower levels of legal immigration, and their hostility to refugees as part of that flow,” she said.

LONG SEPARATIONS

Noor’s sons are from a previous marriage and their father is not involved in their lives. She has been separated from them since 2010 when she left strife-torn Somalia for Malaysia, where she could apply for resettlement as a refugee with the United Nations.

The United Nations refers most refugee cases to the United States and other countries around the world for resettlement, but that route to the United States could become more difficult under the new ceiling according to a presidential document seen by Reuters.

Noor could only afford to travel alone, so left her children with two of their aunts in the hopes of reuniting when she found a new home.

Soon after Noor left, one of the aunts was killed and the other injured in a militant attack on a village south of Mogadishu, the boys said in an interview with Reuters and Noor swore in an affidavit to the US government.

Once she was resettled in Ohio in 2015, she applied for her sons to join her. With a job as a home health aide, she was able to pay for them to move to Kampala, Uganda. But since passing a DNA test in 2016 to prove they were her sons, their cases have been stuck. — Reuters