The United States Refugee Admissions Program or USRAP is a consortium of federal agencies and nonprofit organizations, both overseas and domestically, to identify and admit qualified refugees for resettlement into the United States of America. Each year, a huge number of refugees are welcomed into the United States and given the opportunity for a better life than their home nation for themselves. It is this way that the USRAP demonstrates the commitment of a people to humanitarian principles.
However, under the Trump government, the system seems to be undergoing changes. After a brief ban of refugee admission in 2017, admissions for resettlement have reopened. However this time, there are new constraints. About 11 separate nations have been picked out and the screening for the refugees there will be more tedious than the others. “We will be rolling out new security measures for applicants from high-risk countries which will seek to prevent the program from being exploited by terrorists, criminals and fraudsters,” US homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a release this Monday.
Even though the official and final list haven’t been declared, speculations are that these countries are mostly Middle Eastern and African namely higher-security screening was required for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It is important to note that in the last three years, 40% refugees have been admitted from the above list of nations.
The reviews for such a change in the security measures has had mixed reviews. “Adding yet more hurdles to an already overly-bureaucratic process will burden those seeking safety for themselves and their families,” said Ashley Houghton, tactical campaign manager at Amnesty International USA “Placing additional scrutiny on people based simply on what country they come from is discriminatory and arbitrary and will only leave people exposed to unimaginable violence and persecution with nowhere to turn.”