State Department slashes refugee cap

WASHINGTON—The United States refugee program will accept fewer people in the next year than at any time in the program’s 50-year history, the State Department announced Thursday. “This proposed cut to the refugee resettlement program not only denies safety and freedom to people fleeing religious persecution, war, and genocide but also further dismantles our ability to demonstrate Christ-like hospitality toward the vulnerable,” World Relief CEO Tim Breene said in a statement.

How many refugees will the United States take? The State Department set the refugee ceiling at 18,000 people for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Both Republican and Democratic administrations historically set the cap at more than 90,000, but the Trump administration has gradually cut that number. The United Nations refugee agency estimates there are nearly 26 million refugees worldwide, and about half of those are children. World Relief noted that in the past five years, Christians have accounted for the majority of all refugees resettled in the United States.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Stew about the bipartisan pushback against the Trump administration’s 2018 refugee cap.