re: Xi the Spineless

On Saturday, Biden also addressed his administration's backtracking.

"The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people,” Biden said, according to a pool report. “We couldn’t do two things at once. But now we are going to increase the number.”

The episode marked a rare flip-flop-flip for the president, and it yielded a barrage of denunciations from key allies who’d previously heaped praise on the administration for promising to rebuild the refugee resettlement program. Faith-based organizations that had lent valuable weight to Biden’s moral case against Trump during the election, said they still felt betrayed even after the White House issued its clarifying statement.

“He's basically broken his promise, and he's abandoned his commitment,” Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, said in an interview earlier on Friday. She later called the White House statement a “walk back” that changed little.

“That is the same excuse the Trump administration used,” said Nate Bult, vice president of government affairs for Bethany Christian Services, an evangelical nonprofit. When issuing its refugee admission determinations the Trump administration would add up “the total number of refugees resettled with the number of people seeking asylum in the US, and tried to conflate the two categories,” said Bult. “The Biden administration knows that asylum seekers and refugees are vastly different populations processed under two completely different paths, using different staff members and different federal agencies.” LINK