The U.S. is on pace to take in about 20,000 refugees this year — less than half the number President Donald Trump has authorized — at a time when the U.N. says the world’s refugee crisis is the worst it has been since World War II.

Trump said he’d allow 45,000 refugees into the country in the current fiscal year, about half the 85,000 settled in the final fiscal year of Barack Obama's administration. But with only 6,700 refugees arriving in the first four months of the fiscal year through Jan. 31, it appears the year will close with the total number far below the cap.

The International Rescue Committee, one of the nation's nine resettlement agencies with State Department contracts, is among human rights groups and experts critical of the Trump administration's call for temporary refugee suspension and "extreme vetting" of people from certain countries.

“These are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable,” said Daley Ryan, deputy director of the Dallas IRC office. “The IRC is in strong favor of vetting." But the increased scrutiny and delays for suffering refugees makes for a drawn-out process that is “just cruel,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the State Department, which handles some refugee resettlement, defended the increased scrutiny.

"Additional vetting procedures are enabling departments and agencies to more thoroughly review applicants to identify threats to public safety and national security,” Cheryl Harris said. “Processing time may be slower as we implement additional security vetting procedures."

Congolese who crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo wait to be registered as refugees at the Nyakabande transit center in the village of Nyakabande in western Uganda. Since December, about 300 Congolese per day have been fleeing from the Mai Mai militia's attacks in the Kivu region of the eastern part of DRC to this border area. (Sumy Sadurni / Agence France-Presse)

Harris said each refugee's case is different, and processing is affected by security checks and the "operational capacity" of the Department of Homeland Security and its agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services.

As for the plunge in refugee arrivals, Harris said, "It is too early to determine what final FY 2018 refugee admissions will be."

Trump targeted the United States' refugee policies while running for president in 2016, saying the U.S. didn’t know if “these people have love or hate in their hearts.”

Within a week of taking office in January 2017, Trump issued a multipart executive order that suspended refugee resettlement for 120 days, halted the resettlement of Syrians indefinitely, and slashed admissions to 50,000 from Obama’s 110,000 ceiling for the previous fiscal year.

Multiple court fights broke out in different parts of the country, and Trump issued new executive orders. In October, one of those called for increased scrutiny of refugees from 11 countries, most of which are majority Muslim.

Trump's cap is also the lowest since the 1980 Refugee Act gave the president the power to determine a ceiling on how many refugees the U.S. welcomes every year.

“This administration has made its intent that this is about ending legal immigration to the United States, with refugees being one aspect of that,” said Chris Kelley, the spokesman for Refugee Services of Texas.

But others defend the reduction on refugee admissions.

"The ceiling is just a ceiling; it is not a quota," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C.-based think tank that favors immigration restrictions and whose proposals have gained influence with the Trump administration.

"Given all the tumult with the travel ban thing, it is not a surprise that the number is actually lower than the ceiling the White House set," Krikorian said.

Krikorian favors spending resettlement money on refugees to help them overseas, rather than after they arrive in the U.S.

Local impact

About 500 refugees have arrived in Texas this fiscal year, according to State Department data from its Refugee Processing Center. For years, Texas has been a top resettlement state; so far this year, it is second. Dallas-Fort Worth has been the nation's second-largest destination, refugee resettlement leaders said.

For over two years in Texas, more refugees have been resettled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo — which has been torn by civil conflict — than from any other nation. For fiscal 2017, about 1,050 people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo out of 4,800 were resettled in Texas.

The shift comes as fewer Muslims are allowed into the U.S. The Congolese refugees generally are classified as Christian, Catholic, Methodist and Baptist, according to State Department statistics from this fiscal year.

From 2007 to 2016, Dallas-Fort Worth was the second-largest resettlement area in the nation behind the San Diego region, said Ryan of the Dallas IRC office, citing a 2017 study by the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute of New York.

A Congolese man holds his child after he crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo to be refugees at Nteko village in western Uganda. (Sumy Sadurni / Agence France-Presse)

Key to that had been the abundant employment opportunities and the affordability of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, refugee resettlers said.

But during the last fiscal year, the IRC of Dallas resettled about 700 refugees, down from nearly 1,000 the previous year. Ryan expects the slide to continue.

Last fiscal year, Refugee Services of Texas resettled about 430 refugees in the Dallas area. They expect to resettle about 300 this year.

The declining numbers of refugees have meant staff cuts at both of the refugee resettlement offices. They've also tried to expand the services they offer to the new arrivals and the large refugee population that arrived in North Texas over the last decade. The IRC of Dallas, for example, is offering more mental health services.

Refugee Services of Texas is offering more citizenship classes. Refugees can apply for a green card to become a legal permanent resident after a year in the U.S., and for citizenship five years after that. The agency also is expanding efforts to assist human trafficking victims, who often are foreign-born.

“From the outside looking in, it seems like a lower level of arrivals would have some drastic impact on what we do,” said Mark Hagar, a resettlement manager for Refugee Services of Texas in Dallas. “But really, we are still working eight-hour-plus days.”