MEXICO CITY (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. Government drastically cut short the number of refugees it will admit a year under the refugee program. The Trump administration's new policy is to promote merit-based legal immigration and discourage refugee inflow.
The White House announced Thursday that due to the ongoing security and humanitarian crisis on the border and the massive asylum backlog, which has reached nearly one million, the Trump administration is limiting the annual intake of refugees to 18000.
It is the lowest admission cap since the U.S. government launched its refugee program in 1980 for those fleeing persecution in their home countries.
'The overwhelming backlog is completely unsustainable and needs to be addressed before we accept large numbers of refugees', the White House said in a statement.
In an additional major blow to potential refugees, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order giving state and local authorities the option not to allow refugees to settle in their areas.
The order says that local governments that do not have the resources to support refugees in becoming 'self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance' have been granted the option to reject their asylum applications.
The number of refugee admissions has been marked by a steady decline under the Trump regime.
His government admitted 53,716 refugees in fiscal 2017. For fiscal 2018, refugee admissions were capped at 45,000. In Fiscal 2019, the government set the cap at 30,000.
The State Department said in a press release it expects more than 350,000 people to seek asylum to the United States over the next year.
'The United States spends billions of dollars resettling refugees that could be invested in our citizens here at home', the White House said.
'Many refugees come from countries that are known sources of terrorism or lack the modern record-keeping to help us identify their nationals,' it said in a fact sheet.
Acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan said in July that expedited deportation of undocumented immigrants has become necessary to address the ongoing crisis on the southern border.
He noted that there is a backlog of more than 900,000 cases in the Justice Department's immigration courts.
U.S. detention centers are overcrowded with illegal migrants from South American countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The authorities are forced to release hundreds of thousands of people arrested on the Mexican border with notices to appear in immigration courts.
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