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Maimuna Barkad, 21, entered a grocery store in Mogadishu, Somalia, in June 1991 to buy food for her parents and 11 siblings. She has not seen them since. "Bombs started exploding," Barkad told Christianity Today. "The people at the store told me not to go home, that I would be killed. They told me to start running."

She ran, and then walked, with three other refugees for three months—homeless, hungry, thirsty, and tired. As the refugees crossed a river into Kenya in small, makeshift boats, one of the crafts sank, drowning two of her companions.

After a year in refugee camps, Barkad found a safe haven in the United States with the help of the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program. She later received help from World Relief, an evangelical relief agency. Barkad, a Muslim, settled in the Atlanta area, married, and had two children.

But Barkad's 13 family members have been stuck in squalid refugee camps in Kenya, where they have been threatened by malaria, malnutrition, and violence. They finally received approval in 2001 to come to the United States under a family reunion program.

They were scheduled to depart when the 9/11 attacks occurred. The State Department immediately instituted a two-month freeze in refugee admissions, and then security concerns caused more delays. As a result, Barkad and her family have not seen each other for more than a decade.

Barkad's family, unfortunately, is not alone. About 85 percent of World Relief's pending cases out of Africa are "special interest"—involving families or individuals whose U.S.-based relatives have filed paperwork in order to be reunited. Experts don't believe that their situation will improve soon.

On October 16, the Bush administration announced new and tighter restrictions on admissions of refugees (people displaced outside their home countries). It doesn't look bad on paper. The guidelines allow for up to 70,000 refugees to enter this county, the same as last year. But 20,000 slots are designated as "unallocated reserve," meaning the government is not likely to admit those 20,000, except in extraordinary circumstances. Refugee advocates liken this reserve to "unused lifeboats."

Furthermore, refugee advocates say the U.S. government will admit no more than 50,000 refugees through the end of this fiscal year, which ends in October. But even that projection may be optimistic. Although the administration authorized 140,000 refugees during the past two years, no more than 78,000 have been admitted.

The United States resettles more of the world's 12 million refugees than does any other country. According to the United Nations, America resettled 68,400 refugees in 2001, followed by Canada (12,200), Australia (6,500), Norway (1,300), and Sweden (1,100).

But World Relief said the U.S. admission numbers for the last two years are the lowest in the 22-year history of the program. "President Bush has turned his back on refugees," said Galen Carey, director of advocacy and policy for World Relief. "[It] is one of the most mystifying failures of this administration. It is unconscionable to allow even one refugee to die unnecessarily in a refugee camp when we have the capacity to help."

Advocates point out that many refugees have been victims of religious persecution—though this is sometimes difficult to prove. "I am not aware of any reliable statistics on the numbers of refugees fleeing religious persecution, or how many of those would be Christians," said John Arnold of World Relief's Atlanta office. "In many cases, such as Sudan or Bosnia, religion is intertwined with race, culture, tribe, and ethnicity."

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January 2003, Vol. 47, No. 1