As Refugee Crisis Grows, U.S. Strains Under Asylum Backlog, Report Says

The federal government is buckling under a surge of asylum cases, a dilemma that could only get worse as the United States allows more refugees into the country, the U.S. immigration agency’s own watchdog said Wednesday.

The backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has ballooned by 1400 percent since 2011, with more than 128,000 asylum cases still pending at the end of 2015, the agency’s ombudsman Maria M. Odom, said in her annual report to Congress. And the flow isn’t letting up: New applications have more than doubled in five years, to 83,197, the report said.

As it struggles to keep up, CIS has been forced to reassign asylum officers to its Refugee Affairs Division to handle a larger influx of people fleeing violence and persecution around the world.

Last year, the Obama administration said it would accept 85,000 refugees from around the world in 2016, up from 70,000, a number that will rise to 100,000 in 2017 to help alleviate the worst global refugee crisis since World War II. Most of those added people will be Syrians displaced by a brutal civil war. Others will come from Central America.

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The government, meanwhile, has fallen way behind its goal. State Department data released in April showed that the United States had accepted only 1,285 new refugees.

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