GOP Governors Push for Refugee Resettlement as Trump Lowers Acceptance Cap

by Eric Lendrum

Republican governors around the country are working closely with refugee resettlement NGOs and contractors to circumvent President Trump’s efforts to lower the amount of refugees admitted to the United States, according to a memo obtained by Breitbart.

President Trump is set to lower the national refugee cap again in 2020, bringing it to a maximum of just 18,000 refugees for the entire year. This is a reduction of more than 80 percent from the rates of the Obama Administration, and the lowest total by far in the history of the nation’s refugee policy. The 18,000 number is also a limit, not necessarily a goal that the government has to reach, meaning it is more than likely that even fewer than 18,000 will actually be accepted.

However, 18 Republican governors are actively working to resettle refugees in their own states. One example is Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who is the focus of Breitbart’s memo. The internal memorandum was sent by state legislators to Governor Hutchinson, explaining how the state governments are working directly with refugee contractors, and planning to give access to numerous government benefits to resettled refugees, including Medicaid and food stamps.

Hutchinson has defended the state’s refugee resettlement efforts as taking in Middle Easterners who are allegedly “under persecution because they cooperated with the United States of America.” The memo confirms this defense, describing most of Arkansas’s refugees as being from “African countries and those countries in which the United States has engaged in military actions, and cooperating nationals are at risk.”

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Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22).

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