President Donald Trump and his administration are still deciding whether and how to escalate the US’s military presence in Syria, after another chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians that has been linked (though not definitively) to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. But there’s a basic recognition that the war is horrific and it needs to end soon.

Defense Secretary James Mattis illustrated the horror of the Syrian conflict Thursday by telling the House Armed Services Committee, “I’ve seen refugees from Asia to Europe, Kosovo to Africa. I’ve never seen refugees as traumatized as coming out of Syria. It’s got to end.”

But while the plight of the 5.5 million refugees who have fled Syria is apparently a factor in US policy, it doesn’t appear to be inspiring the Trump administration to let in very many refugees.

In the last years of the Obama administration, the US resettled tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. When Trump took office, that number plummeted — partly because of the 120-day “refugee ban” that prevented nearly any refugees from being brought into the US over the summer of 2017, and partly because of specific scrutiny facing refugees from several countries, including Syria.

The result is that the US is on pace to resettle fewer than 100 Syrian refugees in the fiscal year that ends September 30. And it might not even be that many.

The US had just started bringing in large numbers of Syrian refugees when Trump slammed the door on them

The global refugee crisis is, by some measures, worse than ever. And the Syrian civil war, and the world’s response to it, is a big part of why. Syria accounts for 24 percent of the world’s 22.5 million refugees recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. (Before the war, Syria had about 21 million people, or 0.3 percent of the world’s population.)

But what truly distinguishes the current refugee crisis is that now, more than ever before, refugees are likely to remain displaced for years or even decades, instead of being able to either return home or be permanently resettled in a third country. While resettlement has always been relatively rare — only 1 percent of global refugees get resettled — it’s most likely to be used in cases where it’s clear that the situation in the refugee’s home country will never get better, and the refugee needs to stop waiting and make a new life.

The Obama administration attempted to prioritize Syrian refugees early in Obama’s second term, as it became clear that the Syrian civil war wasn’t getting any better and that Assad’s soldiers were attacking civilians. But because of concerns about carefully vetting refugees to ensure that no terrorists snuck into the US, it took until the last couple of years of Obama’s presidency for Syrian refugee admissions to the US to really increase.

Then, almost as soon as Trump took the oath of office, his administration slammed the door shut.

First, there was the original travel ban, which banned all refugees and all arrivals from Syria. Even after that ban was put on hold in court, refugee admissions were stop-and-go for months. In December 2016, the last full month of the Obama administration, 1,318 Syrian refugees were admitted to the US; in February 2017, the first full month of Trump, the numbers dropped to 282 and just kept dropping from there.

The 120-day refugee ban officially expired in October but was replaced with a pause on refugee admissions for 11 countries — including Syria — while the US government reviewed vetting procedures. Admissions for Syria restarted at the end of January, and nine refugees have been admitted since then. So while the US has admitted 44 Syrian refugees over the last fiscal year (which started in October), only 11 of those have come since January 1 — putting the US on pace to resettle only 44 Syrians over all of 2018.

That’s still slightly more Syrians than were resettled during some years of Obama. The difference is that the Obama administration was resettling other refugees instead: about 70,000 a year from 2013 to 2015, and 85,000 a year in 2016. (The Obama administration set a target of 100,000 refugees for the 2017 fiscal year, but Trump prevented that from happening.) The Trump administration, meanwhile, has set the lowest refugee target in modern history — no more than 45,000 — and it’s not even on pace to meet it.

President Trump and his administration fundamentally don’t believe that there is such a thing as the “global refugee crisis” — that a war that displaces millions of people in one part of the world creates any obligation on a country in another part of the world to help them. Mattis’s comments make it clear that at least some members of the administration think the US has some responsibility to stop the horrors of the Syrian civil war. It’s just that those responsibilities appear not to include giving the war’s victims a new home.