Biden walks back pledge to increase US refugee admissions

New order lifts Trump restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen but keeps global cap at 15,000.

President Joe Biden on Friday walked back from an earlier pledge to increase refugee admissions to the United States and will keep in place a Trump administration cap of 15,000 for this year. The reversal comes as the Biden administration confronts a surge of migrants trying to cross the US-Mexico border and wrestles with a thicket of bureaucratic gaps in the US’s resettlement program left over by the Trump administration. While the new US administration is not increasing the number of refugees it will accept, an executive order signed by Biden on Friday lifts restrictions the prior Trump administration had placed on where refugees can come from as part of a rebuilding effort, White House National Security Advice Jake Sullivan said.