With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people of the Biden administration Shortly before the Syrian refugee REFAAI HAMO came to Washington in 2016 to be one of President BARACK OBAMA’s guests at the State of the Union, ANNE RICHARD, the assistant secretary of State for population, refugees and migration, asked in a meeting of top State Department officials whether any of them would be interested in meeting him. Only one person said yes: then-Deputy Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN. The meeting was moved to Blinken’s office. “Tony was really interested in Dr. Hamo’s story,” Richard said in an interview. The chat with Hamo was an illustration of Blinken’s long-standing commitment to refugees in the U.S.—a commitment that has put him at odds, at times, with President JOE BIDEN. Blinken has been one of the foremost advocates within the Biden administration for rescinding President DONALD TRUMP’s policies capping the number of refugees allowed into the country at only 15,000 a year. The administration has struggled over how quickly to raise the number. Biden announced last month that he would keep Trump’s cap in place, only to backpedal the same day. This afternoon, he announced he would raise the cap to 62,500, as he had promised on his first day in office even as he acknowledged he would fall short of the number due to Trump's cuts to the resettlement program. “The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year,” Biden said. Blinken had backed raising the cap to 62,500 all along and told Biden as much, as POLITICO and other outlets have reported. But as he’s talked about the issue in public in recent days, he’s left out one important autobiographical detail. His stepmother, VERA BLINKEN , was a refugee who fled Hungary in 1950 after the Communist takeover. Not just that, she spent a lifetime devoted to refugee causes and served on the board of the International Rescue Committee for decades. She has given the IRC more than $1 million, according to its annual report. Vera traveled to Bosnia and Croatia in 1996 “to observe the devastation and refugee displacement,” she wrote in “Vera and the Ambassador,” a memoir she co-authored with Blinken’s father, DONALD BLINKEN, who served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. “Hungary undertook a mass relocation scheme to switch the ‘disloyal’ and ‘rebellious’ city bourgeoisie with presumably more loyal country peasants,” Vera wrote of her own childhood in Hungary before her family fled. “We knew several families who were given just two hours to pack up whatever they could and move out of their houses to distant farms.” Whether driven by his family’s own stories or not, Tony Blinken’s interest in refugees predated his time in the Obama administration. Richard recalled meeting with him while she worked for the IRC and Blinken was Biden’s top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Once he became deputy secretary, his staff was in “constant contact” with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, “looking for opportunities for him to be helpful,” Richard said. Blinken took a leading role in a summit that Obama convened in 2016 to try to convince other countries to do more to help refugees. He even recorded a video with Sesame Street’s GROVER explaining the importance of helping refugees (and clarified that they are not, as Grover believed, “the ones who wear striped shirts and blow whistles at soccer games”). One former Blinken aide worked with him on refugee issues at the State Department, ARIANA BERENGAUT, now works in the White House as a senior adviser to national security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN. She co-wrote a New York Times op-ed with Blinken in 2018 bashing Trump for “strangling the refugee admissions program to death.” Berengaut recalled in a 2017 tweet that she and Blinken met with overworked staffers at refugee resettlement agencies in Oakland, Calif. “We cautioned them that the challenge would only get harder because President Obama was committed to raising the number of refugees the U.S. admitted in this time of great global need,” she wrote. Berengaut and another Obama administration veteran, ERIC HYSEN, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s chief information officer, also wrote a report for the Penn Biden Center that called for setting “a higher refugee admissions target” in the first 100 days. Biden missed the deadline by four days. Blinken applauded Biden’s move to raise the refugee cap this afternoon. “A robust refugee admissions program is not only critical to U.S. foreign policy interests and national security objectives, it is a reflection of core American values,” he said in a statement. Blinken values, too. PSA: We’re going to be experimenting with some new items and sections. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you JEN KLEIN? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: transitiontips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. You can also reach Alex and Theo individually. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! | 
