Biden to Raise Cap on Refugee Admissions to 125,000

“A robust refugee admissions program is critical to U.S. foreign policy interests and national security objectives, and is a reflection of core American values,” Mr. Price said in the statement. By law, presidents must “consult” with Congress before making the decision about how many refugees to allow each year.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden criticized Mr. Trump for capping refugee admissions at 15,000, calling it un-American and a failure to live up to the country’s long standing obligation as a place of refuge for people around the world.

He promised to let in many more displaced people fleeing violence and disaster. But once in office, Mr. Biden initially declined to immediately raise Mr. Trump’s 15,000-person cap, generating fierce criticism from advocates who said he was endorsing his predecessor’s hard-line stance on refugees.

After intense backlash, the president increased the refugee cap for the current fiscal year from 15,000 to 62,500 and renewed his promise for a 125,000-person cap for the next full fiscal year, which begins next month.

Advocates for refugees cheered Monday’s move. But they noted that the Biden administration will not be able to actually resettle that many refugees during the next fiscal year without hiring more employees in the government agencies that do the work to process them.

During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the government agencies and nonprofit organizations which manage refugee resettlement were dramatically shrunk because of the low cap that the former president placed on the program. As a result, under Mr. Biden, only about 7,500 official refugees have been resettled in the United States even though the cap would allow 62,500.

“Understandably, four years of the Trump administration’s assault on the refugee program coupled with pandemic challenges have hamstrung federal rebuilding efforts,” said Krish Vignarajah, President of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which works with the government to resettle refugees. “But raising the cap without dedicating significant resources, personnel, and policies to streamline the process would be largely symbolic.”

Tens of thousands of Afghans who were flown out of Kabul last month have already arrived in the United States, and many will likely be resettled in communities across the country.

But most have been granted the ability to live and work in the United States temporarily under a humanitarian program that does not consider them to be official refugees. Some may eventually apply for asylum to stay in the United States permanently, and the Biden administration is asking Congress to pass a special law to put all of them on a special path to citizenship.

Many of the Haitians who have crossed the Rio Grande River over the last several days in Texas are also not officially considered refugees. The administration has said they have already begun to quickly process them as illegal border crossers and fly them back to Haiti.

“We look forward to passing this crucial legislation with bipartisan support through both chambers and sending to the president’s desk in the coming weeks,” Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer said in a joint statement.

But it was unclear whether enough Republicans would join Democrats in supporting the bill, even with the added pressure to support relief for their constituents. Democratic leaders have signaled for weeks that they were not willing to offer any concessions to Republicans in exchange for their votes on a debt ceiling increase.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, showed little willingness to compromise on Sunday, even with the potential promise of resources for his state. Some parts of Louisiana were still without power three weeks after the state was hit by Hurricane Ida.

“If you want to come back and meet where we can actually find common ground, where we can actually address needs as opposed to a Democratic wish list, well then we’ll help,” Mr. Cassidy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But not when you’re just trying to tank the economy by fueling inflation.”

A failure to pass the legislation could be financially catastrophic for the country, with just 10 days before the government is set to run out funding. Should lawmakers fail to approve a suspension of the debt limit in the coming weeks, the government could default on its debt for the first time in history. That, in turn, could trigger a financial crisis, or at the least, a crisis of confidence in the creditworthiness and governance of the United States.

The C.D.C. said it expected measles infections to spread among evacuees because only 60 percent of people living in Afghanistan have been vaccinated and the country ranks seventh in the world for measles cases, and because evacuees have been living in close quarters during the evacuation process.

Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, which means the disease is no longer endemic, but travelers continue to bring it into the country, posing an ongoing risk to the unvaccinated.

People vaccinated against measles are usually fully protected after two or three weeks, according to the C.D.C. There were 13 confirmed cases of measles in the United States in 2020, according to the agency, and 1,282 in 2019, which was the largest outbreak in the country since 1992. The disease can be particularly dangerous to unvaccinated children, pregnant women and newborns.

Flights carrying Afghan evacuees to the United States have been paused since earlier this month, when a few passengers were found to be infected with measles.

Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban in a chaotic evacuation this summer are awaiting resettlement in the United States. Most of them have been waiting on military bases for weeks regardless of whether they need to be vaccinated, and the stays could stretch into months as they wait to be resettled.

Most of the evacuees who have arrived in the United States flew into Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and the state has declared a measles outbreak in the northern and central regions in connection with them. According to the Virginia Department of Health’s website, community transmission of measles has not been identified, and officials believe the risk to the general public is low.

The C.D.C. urged doctors to be on the lookout for measles cases in communities near the military bases housing the evacuees, which include Marine Corps Base Quantico, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico; Fort McCoy in Wisconsin; Fort Bliss in Texas; Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey; and Camp Atterbury in Indiana.

The measles virus lives in the nose and throat of people who are infected and is extremely contagious: Around nine out of 10 people who are in close contact and not protected against it will become infected, according to the C.D.C.

“I’m not pro-life,” Mr. Stilley, 58, said in an interview. “The thing that I’m trying to vindicate here is the law. We pride ourselves on being a nation of laws. What’s the law?”

The Justice Department has sued Texas over the law, known as Senate Bill 8, and argued in an emergency motion last week that the state adopted the measure “to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights.”

“It is settled constitutional law that ‘a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’” the department said in the lawsuit, referring to the standard set in the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade. “But Texas has done just that.”

Dr. Braid was also sued on Monday by an Illinois man, Felipe N. Gomez, who described himself in his complaint as a “pro-choice plaintiff.” Mr. Gomez could not be immediately reached for comment about his lawsuit, which was earlier reported by KSAT news in San Antonio.

Both suits were filed in state court in San Antonio and both men are representing themselves.

“Neither of these lawsuits are valid attempts to save innocent human lives,” said John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, which lobbied for the new abortion law. “Both cases are self-serving legal stunts, abusing the cause of action created in the Texas Heartbeat Act for their own purposes.”

He added that he and others at Texas Right to Life “believe Braid published his Op-Ed intending to attract imprudent lawsuits.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group that represents Dr. Braid, said he had not been formally served and declined to make him available for an interview. In a statement, the group’s senior counsel, Marc Hearron, said the Texas law “says that ‘any person’ can sue over a violation, and we are starting to see that happen, including by out-of-state claimants.”

In his opinion essay for The Post, Dr. Braid said he had decided to violate the Texas law, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest, out of a firm belief in abortion rights. “I have daughters, granddaughters and nieces. I believe abortion is an essential part of health care,” he wrote. “I have spent the past 50 years treating and helping patients. I can’t just sit back and watch us return to 1972.”

Mr. Braid wrote that on the morning of Sept. 6, he had “provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit.”

After reading that, Mr. Stilley said he decided to file suit. His complaint includes a description of his own legal troubles, which he said included a federal conviction for tax evasion and conspiracy; he was released to home confinement after a decade in prison.

Mr. Stilley said in the interview that he believed in a woman’s right not to have an unwanted child, and that because his lawsuit was a win-win for him, he rushed to file it.

“I’m going to get an answer either way,” he said. “If this is a free-for-all, and it’s $10,000, I want my $10,000. And yes, I do aim to collect.”

Ruth Graham contributed reporting from Dallas.

Six in 10 Americans in the new Monmouth poll wanted the court to leave the Roe decision as it is, with only one in three saying the precedent, dating to 1973, should be revisited.

A ruling in the Mississippi case is expected next year, in the heat of the midterm races for control of Congress. Striking a blow at Roe could outrage and engage Democratic voters, but it also has the potential to rally Republicans.

That much was apparent in the partisan divide over abortion that the new Monmouth survey reaffirmed. Most Democrats, 73 percent, opposed the court’s decision in the Texas case, which effectively banned abortions after a point at which some women are not even aware that they are pregnant. Most Republicans, 62 percent, supported the court.

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U.S. to Require International Travelers Be Fully Vaccinated

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said strict protocols would be put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as the Biden administration prepared to lift travel restrictions for fully vaccinated international travelers in November.

Starting in November we will be implementing, I should say, in early November we’ll be putting in place strict protocols to prevent the spread of Covid-19 from passengers flying internationally into the United States by requiring that adult foreign nationals traveling to the United States be fully vaccinated. Obviously, this is the conclusion of a policy process on that particular issue, an important one facing many people around the world. This was an ongoing process, as you all know, that we discussed pretty extensively here. C.D.C. is going to issue a contact-tracing order that will require airlines to collect comprehensive contact information for every passenger coming to the United States and to provide that information promptly to the C.D.C. upon request to follow up with travelers who have been exposed to Covid-19, variants or other pathogens. And these requirements will apply globally.

On Monday, Mr. Vincenti’s wife, who is a Polish researcher on vaccines, was already on her computer trying to book a flight for her mother. “We are going to cook something nice tonight,” Mr. Vincenti said, “but for Champagne we are going to wait for the grandparents.”

The changes announced on Monday apply only to air travel and do not affect restrictions along the land border, Mr. Zients said. He referred a question about which vaccines would qualify under the new rules to the C.D.C., which did not directly answer inquiries on the topic.

“International travel is critical to connecting families and friends, to fueling small and large businesses, to promoting the open exchange of ideas and culture,” Mr. Zients said. “That’s why, with science and public health as our guide, we have developed a new international air travel system that both enhances the safety of Americans here at home and enhances the safety of international air travel.”

But along with opening up travel for some, the new rules shut it down for others. Unvaccinated people will soon be broadly banned from visiting the United States even if they are coming from countries such as Japan that have not faced restrictions on travel to America during the pandemic.

The Trump administration began enforcing the bans against foreign travelers in January 2020 in the hopes of preventing the spread of disease. The effort was largely unsuccessful.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome, and Stephen Castle from London.

But on the heels of the United States’ calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan last month that drew condemnation from allies and adversaries alike, the effort to rally world leaders will be closely watched by public health experts and advocates who say Mr. Biden is not living up to his pledges to make the United States the “arsenal of vaccines” for the world.

Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.

In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results.

Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.

Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.

“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”

Mr. Gableman added that he did not plan to release information to the public on a regular time frame but would do so when he found it appropriate.

“My job as special counsel is to gather all relevant information and, while I will draw my own conclusions, my goal is to put everything I know and everything I learn before you, the citizen, so that you can make up your own mind,” he said.

The chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, said the Gableman video was evidence that state Republicans were at odds with one another over how far the election investigation should go.

“Robin Vos and his far-right ‘investigator’ Michael Gableman are clearly upset that the most extreme fringe doesn’t think they’re going far enough to entertain conspiracy theories,” Mr. Wikler said. “They’re wasting taxpayer funds to serve the political interests of a small group of Republican insiders who want to erode the freedom to vote. It’s a sham, a waste of time and money, and it’s damaging our democracy.”