Department of Homeland Security officials have “surged resources” to meet President Obama’s goal of settling 10,000 vetted Syrian refugees in the United States this year.
“We’ve just crossed the 5,000 mark,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., during a Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday. “Last year it was about 1,600, this year we’ve surged resources to deal with this population and vet them and its around 5,000 right now, for this fiscal year.”
President Obama has committed to resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees as part of an international effort to ease the humanitarian crisis caused by the civil war in that country. That policy has alarmed many Republicans who worry the refugees cannot be properly vetted to ensure that ISIS-affiliated terrorists can’t enter the United States posing as refugees.
DHS has enhanced the security process for vetting Syrian refugees, Johnson said, which has delayed the resettlements in many cases. “We have just about crossed the 5,000 mark in terms of Syrian refugees and approximately 5,000 have been approved for resettlement and just have not been physically resettled yet in the United States, and another five or six thousand have been conditionally approved subject to those security checks, so I believe we will make the 10,000 [target],” he told Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
U.S. Customs and Immigration Services officials are struggling to keep up with the pace of asylum requests, however, due to crises in the Middle East as well as the influx of unaccompanied Central American children on the southern border.
“The volume of affirmative asylum cases pending at USCIS has reached well over 100,000 and continues to grow. Sustained surges in high-priority credible and reasonable fear claims and a boom in new affirmative asylum filings drive this backlog,” the DHS ombudsman wrote in a report to Congress published Wednesday. “Despite significant efforts by the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate’s Asylum Division to respond to this pending caseload, such as doubling the Asylum Officer corps, the backlog of cases and processing delays continues to expand.”
