President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reassert America’s commitment to refugees after the Trump White House’s slashing of the resettlement program, part of the current president’s anti-immigration drive.

In 2016, President Barack Obama aimed to admit 110,000 refugees. President Trump lowered the cap on refugee admissions every year of his presidency. For fiscal year 2021, he set the cap at 15,000, the lowest on record.

Biden promises to take a starkly different approach from his predecessor: to “set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time.”

For decades, the United States led the world in offering protection to people fleeing persecution in other countries. Now the Biden presidency will mark a return to the political consensus that the U.S. should continue to do so, refugee policy experts say.

But while the president has the authority to set refugee admissions numbers, it will take time to rebuild the nation’s resettlement program after four years of the Trump administration largely dismantling it, according to Becca Heller, executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

“The point is not to hit 125,000 — the point is to signal both to the rest of the world and also to the domestic population in our own government that this is a priority again,” Heller says. “It’s less relevant if we hit the exact number and more relevant that we say, ‘Admitting refugees is really important. We are going to aim at this high number and invest in infrastructure and get as close as we can.’ “

Here’s a look at some of the main challenges ahead for the Biden presidency as it seeks to roll back the sweeping changes to the refugee program.

Budget cuts have gutted the infrastructure for resettling refugees

Nine religious or community-based organizations known as resettlement agencies have contracts with the State Department to resettle refugees.

The agencies’ budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Low admission levels reduced government funding, which decimated programs supporting newly arrived refugees. After the State Department told them to pare their operations, many agencies had to shutter or scale back offices and lay off workers.

“We’re looking at a very big ramp-up because over the last four years, there’s been an 85% cut and an effective demolition of the refugee resettlement program,” says David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the largest of the nine resettlement agencies.

The backlog is huge

More than 120,000 refugees are in the pipeline, passing rigorous security and medical checks, waiting in line, sometimes for years. In addition, thousands of Iraqis who worked for the U.S. military and are now at risk are waiting too. In 2020, there were 4,000 slots for Iraqis who aided the U.S. military, but only 123 were resettled.

Those seeking refuge in the U.S. have to submit to interviews with immigration officers and security officers. In Iraq, interviews slowed to a trickle last year with the withdrawal of nonessential employees from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Refugees are scrutinized more thoroughly than any group that comes to the United States.

The Trump administration added new “extreme vetting” requirements, and that is swelling the backlog of applicants, says Heller, of IRAP.

“Extreme vetting is really inefficient. It’s not better vetting by redundancies that are unnecessary or busy work for the intelligence community,” Heller says. The new vetting rules were kept secret until IRAP sued to force a disclosure.

“Now, you have to be able to provide every address you’ve lived at for the last 15 years and every passport number you had for the last 15 years, every social media handle that you’ve had for the last 15 years,” says Heller. “There’s no indication that it does anything for anybody’s safety.”

A divided Congress has to set the budget for refugee resettlement amid a pandemic

The Refugee Act of 1980 established the mechanism for resettlement, including the president’s annual determination on refugee arrivals and a provision for consultations with Congress that sets the annual budget for the resettlement program.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work — but the Trump administration consistently ignored the provision to confer with lawmakers, according to refugee advocates.

So far, the election has produced a divided Congress. Members may not have the appetite to take on immigration policy amid the coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession, says Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. The Biden administration will also be consumed by the COVID-19 crisis.

“For the first 100 days, there will be very little bandwidth for a Biden administration to deal with anything other than COVID. We have never faced a crisis like this before,” Chishti says. “We can’t expect a huge leap on immigration policy. If people expect that this is going to happen tomorrow, they will be in for a big disappointment.”

If Texas was a country instead of a state, it would rank in the top 10 nations with the most overall coronavirus cases.

That’s according to data from Johns Hopkins University, which also revealed that the state, the second-most populous in the U.S., surpassed 1 million cases on Tuesday.

Texas is the first U.S. state to record this number of cases. California is not far behind with 991,162 cases; Florida has 852,174. The rest of the states have each recorded under 600,000.

As of Wednesday, 6,779 patients were in Texas hospitals with the coronavirus, according to state data. More than 18,800 people in the state have died from the coronavirus.

The record number comes as the nation is battling its most widespread surge since the pandemic began. The U.S. recently recorded 10 million cases, meaning the Lone Star state accounts for about 10% of all U.S. cases.

It’s also worth noting that Texas’ own case dashboard has not yet exceeded 1 million. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services there have been 985,380 recorded as of Wednesday.

Mobile morgues in El Paso

El Paso County in Texas is among the hardest hit areas in the U.S.

Hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, and the county has summoned 10 mobile morgues to hold dead bodies, according to The Texas Tribune. The Department of Defense sent medical teams to help in early November.

The El Paso region, which is near the border between west Texas and Mexico, recorded 40% of people in hospitals were positive for the virus, the most in Texas, according to state data.

“Hospitals have been overwhelmed by sick patients pouring into ERs. And local officials there have had to bring in four mobile morgues to deal with deaths,” Texas Public Republic health reporter Bonnie Petrie told NPR on Tuesday. “But it’s not just an urban problem. Smaller towns and communities all across Texas are getting hit hard, too.”

Texas jails

More people have contracted the coronavirus in Texas prisons than any other prison system, according to a new report from the University of Texas at Austin.

The report notes the “prison death curve in Texas has remained stubbornly high” with 231 coronavirus-related deaths occurring in prisons. Most of the people who died did not have a life sentence and were eligible for parole. About 80% who died weren’t convicted of a crime.

“COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on prisons and jails across the country, and especially in Texas,” said Michele Deitch, the study’s lead author and criminal justice policy expert, in a statement.

The data “shows the urgency of taking steps to reduce the risks of additional COVID deaths in Texas prisons and jails.”

The death count is likely higher than found in the report, researchers say. Some people in jails died without testing for the coronavirus or from a “pre-existing medical condition worsened by COVID.” The report also says some could have died after being released.

“Because of high levels of ‘churn’ in the jail population, it is possible that individuals contracted the virus in jail, were released, and then died on the outside,” the report stated. “Some jails may have intentionally released people at risk of dying so that the death would not be recorded as a jail death.”

Mask wearing

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasized the importance of masks in one of its strongest endorsements of their effectiveness. Wearing masks can both prevent asymptomatic carries from spreading coronavirus, but it also offers protection against the infection, the organization stressed.

Yet as Petrie of Texas Public Radio explains, there’s resistance to mask wearing especially in rural areas.

“For instance, in a rural place like Kerr County, there’s been a lot of pushback on mask mandates. It’s often framed in these areas as an issue of freedom and liberty,” she explained.

As the pandemic has stretched along, many people have experienced pandemic fatigue and relaxed precautions.

“In July, everybody’s wearing masks. It was 100%. If somebody wasn’t wearing a mask, you could just feel the stares at them — and you’d see people like picking up their shirts and covering their noses with it,” said Galveston County health authority Dr. Philip Keiser in a late October interview, according to The Texas Tribune.

But now, some people wear masks, some pull it under their nose or chin, he said, which renders them ineffective. And occasionally, there’s open defiance, he said.

“There are many instances where our personal liberties have been impugned because of greater good. Wearing a seat belt is one. Driving the speed limit is one. Placing a child in a child carrier in a vehicle,” said Will Rector, a doctor in Kerr County. “Those are all things that are against our personal liberties, but we do them because we realize that they save lives.