promised to suspend the Syrian refugee resettlement program On the campaign trail, Trump, as well as the resettlement of refugees from countries that are hostile to the United States.

Breitbart Trump also stated that “a Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local community where they are being placed,” Two days before the election, at a rally in Minnesota,a policy that will simply enforce the “consultation clause” of the Refugee Act of 1980, an element of the statute the Obama administration has largely ignored.

Refugee resettlement is profitable to the organizations involved in it. They receive money from the federal government for each refugee they bring over. They have almost no real responsibilities for these refugees. After 4 months the “sponsoring” organization is not even required to know where the refugee lives.

Even refugee resettlement industry executives acknowledge that President-elect Trump will have the legal authority to implement these policy changes on his own.

“Mr. Trump has made clear his intent to end the resettlement of Syrian refugees, and it will be within the president’s authority to set refugee allocations by country and overall,” Doris Meissner of the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute told the Thompson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday.

more than $1 billion a year told “If [Trump] decide[s] to cut the state funds or federal funds for refugees, refugee resettlement will collapse and we won’t be able to bring in any refugees to this country,” Vidhya Manivannan, formerly with Church World Services, one of the nine voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) who receivein federal funding,Newsweek on Wednesday, one day after Trump’s election.



“In the U.S., there’s not a quota that has to be filled. The U.S. has a budgeted amount of money to do refugee resettlement, but there’s no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee, and there’s no legal obligation to do it,” Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch’s refugee program, told Newsweek.

told said It would be “fairly easy” for President Trump to suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States, FrelickNewsweek, “because this is discretionary.” FrelickTrump’s victory left him “shell-shocked,” a word that described the reaction of the entire refugee resettlement industry.

In FY 2016, 85,000 refugees were resettled in the United States. The Obama administration has proposed resettling 110,000 refugees in FY 2017, which began on October 1, but Congress has not approved the budget for the full fiscal year. The current interim budget deal, which in theory only authorizes the resettlement of 85,000 refugees annually, expires on December 9.

interactive website Early indications from reports on the Department of State’ssuggest that the federal bureaucracy may already be responding to the election of Donald Trump by reducing the number of newly arriving refugees.

Opponents of the Obama administration’s policy to increase refugee resettlement also agree that President-elect Trump will have the authority to dramatically decrease the flow of refugees after his inauguration.

“Donald Trump promised to limit the flow of Muslim refugees. Current law leaves refugee admissions up to presidential discretion, and he could accomplish this on Day One. Compared to a religious test, barring refugees from countries with large Muslim populations would be easy to enforce and, assuming no reallocation, could reduce refugee flows by 40 percent,” David Bier of the Cato Institute told the Thompson Reuters Foundation.

“Regarding legal immigration, refugee resettlement from the Middle East is likely to be suspended, pending a bottom-up review of the system,” Mark Krikorian, executive director, Center for Immigration Studies told the Thompson Reuters Foundation.

receive more than $1 billion a year in federal funding, On Election Day, Lavinia Limon, Executive Director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), one of the nine leading volunteer agencies whosaid “I’ve been working with refugees for 43 years through Republican and Democratic administrations, and I’ve never ever seen refugees and immigrants as under attack as they are in this campaign by Mr. Trump. I think it’s very divisive and it’s very frightening for refugees and immigrants,” Limon said.

After the voters resoundingly rejected Hillary Clinton and her support for increasing refugee resettlement in the United States on Tuesday, Limon took another tack. “We encourage our new President to continue the tradition of the best of American values including equal protection and respect for every member of society.