Obama Holdover to Return as Director of Refugee Resettlement for Trump

A top State Department official who worked for President Obama will return as the director of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which handles refugee resettlement in the United States.

Lawrence Bartlett was removed temporarily from his position as the director of the refugee resettlement agency last December as President Trump promised swift hiring changes with his famous “drain the swamp” commitment.

Less than a year later, though, Bartlett is returning to run the refugee resettlement program despite his working for Obama since 2010 as the agency’s director, Reuters confirmed.

Bartlett is at great odds with Trump’s “America First” agenda for the refugee resettlement program, instead favoring the refugee policies of Obama where he oversaw the resettlement of nearly 100,000 foreign refugees or more every year.

Grassroots activist Ann Corcoran, a critic of mass immigration and the refugee resettlement program, wrote online that Bartlett’s return to directing the agency is “a sign that there will be no serious reform of the US Refugee Admissions Program.”

“Personnel is policy,” Corcoran wrote.

The Trump administration has raised the Christian share of the refugee inflow from under 50 percent in 2016 up to 71 percent in 2018, Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the Muslim refugee share dropped from 50 percent in 2016 to 15 percent this year.

For fiscal year 2019, starting October 1, the Trump administration will not resettle more than 30,000 foreign refugees, the lowest refugee cap in nearly four decades. This is merely a cap for refugee resettlements and does not represent the number of refugees that the administration will resettle.

Since 2000, more than 1.5 million foreign refugees have been resettled across the U.S. since — outpacing the population of Philadelphia. Additionally, there have been more than 4.1 million legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. from refugee-producing countries since 2000.