WASHINGTON — After hearing graphic stories of suffering directly from persecuted young people who fled to the United States, President Bush intervened personally to sharply increase the number of refugees admitted to the country -- undoing the severe limits placed on such admissions for security reasons after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The move to restore the world's largest refugee assistance program, and the president's role in it, has gone largely unnoticed amid recent squabbles in the Republican Party over related questions of post-Sept. 11 immigration and asylum policies.
But the details were visible in the thick budget proposal released by the White House last week. The State Department, the documents show, would aim to admit about 20,000 additional refugees next year -- bringing the total admissions closer to the 70,000 level admitted in the years before the terrorist attacks.
The White House involvement over the last several months helped overcome security concerns, refugee advocates say. And they point to an encounter the president had with two refugees in June -- arranged by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives -- as a moment that motivated the president to apply pressure where it was needed.
"Those meetings jump-started a serious government effort to increase admissions last year," said Sarah Petrin, government liaison for a leading refugee advocacy organization, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
In the closed-door session with the president, organized by James Towey, a top aide to Bush and director of the faith-based office, two young refugees who arrived several years ago recounted their stories of bloodshed and escape.
A 21-year-old Liberian woman, Veronica Braewell, broke down in tears as she told Bush about her experience at age 13 of being left for dead on a pile of bodies by militants, of having watched them slice open the bellies of pregnant women and kill unarmed schoolchildren.
As she sobbed, the president handed Braewell a handkerchief and embraced her, Braewell recalled in a tearful interview from her home in Allentown, Pa.
She told the president of her plans to become a nurses' assistant, and thanked him for her rescue.
"Thank the American people," she said the president responded. "Lots of people make this possible," he said, and specifically mentioned the work of organizations like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities, two religious groups that resettle refugees in the U.S.
