State Department Opens Up Refugee Sponsorship to Individual Americans

[James48]

The Biden administration is launching new opportunities for individual Americans to house and support refugees as it seeks to fulfill its promise to drastically increase the number of foreign nationals it admits through the program.

The departments of State and Health and Human Service announced on Thursday it is standing up the Welcome Corps, an initiative through which vetted Americans who make certain promises can sponsor refugees coming into the country. State has historically only relied on nonprofit organizations to resettle refugees and officials called the change the most significant update to the program in 40 years.

President Biden has pledged to welcome 125,000 refugees into the country annually in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, but has consistently fallen short of its goals. State has cited the Trump administration’s cuts to its own workforce and efforts to dismantle the nonprofit resettlement community as cause for its shortfalls, but has vowed to rebuild the entire system. The Biden administration resettled just 25,000 refugees in fiscal 2022, far short of its goal but an improvement on the 11,000 it welcomed in fiscal 2021. In the first three months of the current fiscal year, State has resettled less than 7,000 individuals, putting it on pace to once again fall well shy of its target.

“We have a lot of rebuilding to do because the program was decimated by the previous administration,” Brian McKeon, the department’s deputy secretary for management and resources, told lawmakers in May. “The president has given us an ambitious target. We’re not going to hit it this year but we’ve got to make progress so we can hit it in the next couple years.”

More:
https://www.govexec.com/management/2023/01/state-department-opens-refugee-sponsorship-individual-americans/381967/

(You’re chance to work with others locally and sponsor a family).