POLITICO
In trying to minimize a political backlash on refugees, the Biden administration triggered an even bigger one.
The Biden administration has argued that both the situation at the border and the refugee admissions cap are intertwined because of the federal resources that they drain.
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Avoiding an escalation of conservative attacks against President Joe Biden’s immigration policies was one of the factors the White House considered when it initially decided to keep his predecessor’s controversial cap on refugees.
Though the issues are separate, administration officials predicted raising the number of refugees, as Biden had promised to in February, would turbocharge the false claim on the right that the administration was “opening” its U.S. borders.
Includes Jewish, Evangelical, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu commentary
On January 20th, America begins the next chapter of our national story. In recognition of the particular challenges that face President Joseph Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, IFYC invited fifteen top civic and religious leaders of different faith traditions and political perspectives to offer their assessment of where our nation is and where we must go.
The resulting essays comprise IFYC’s newly published “State of the Interfaith Nation” on the media site “Interfaith America.” Contributors include Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL who writes on the Hate Landscape, Reshma Saujani, from Girls Who Code who draws from her Hindu tradition and her belief in the power of women, Galen Carey from the National Association of Evangelicals who writes about Evangelical understandings of freedom, Manar Waheed from the ACLU who writes on the current state of Muslim legal rights, and John Wood, Jr. from Braver Angels who r
Presider Vice President, National Program and Outreach
FASKIANOS: Good afternoon and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar series. I m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, today s webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel,
Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We re delighted to have a distinguished panel with us today to talk about reconciliation in the United States. We ve shared their long bios with you, so I m just going to give you a few highlights and then we ll get to the conversation.
As states begin to roll out their plans for COVID-19 vaccination, the limited number of doses have prompted tough public conversations about how to prioritize vulnerable populations. Most states agree that health care workers, nursing home residents, and people with high-risk comorbidities should be at the top of the list. But another vulnerable population has proved more controversial: incarcerated people.
Medical and public health experts, including the American Medical Association, agree that incarcerated people face tremendous danger from the virus, given that social distancing in America’s overcrowded prisons is impossible. Prisoners also face inadequate testing, a shortage of soap and masks, and substandard health care. As a result, the virus has already spread widely in prisons. The Marshall Project reported that, as of December 8, at least 249,883 people in American prisons had tested positive, a 10 percent increase over the past week, including 1,657 fatalities. Contracti