Faith groups are calling on Congress to stop the Trump administration's plan to cut the number of refugees allowed into the United States to a record low for 2021.

In a notice sent to Congress late Wednesday, the government unveiled its proposal to allow 15,000 refugees into the country in the new fiscal year that started Thursday. President Donald Trump previously slashed the maximum number of refugees allowed into the United States from the the 110,000-refugee cap former President Barack Obama left behind to just 18,000 for fiscal year 2020.

The proposal will now be reviewed by Congress, where there are strong objections to the cuts, but lawmakers will be largely powerless to force changes.

World Relief president Scott Arbeiter called the move “unconscionable," alleging Trump broke his promise to protect persecuted Christians around the world.

“Instead, we’ve seen the resettlement of refugees from countries known for persecution drop about 90% in some cases over the last four years,” Arbeiter said in a statement to the Associated Press.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, denounced the chipping away of the refugee program as part of “the ongoing Trump administration effort to maintain systemic anti-Black racism and white supremacy."

The administration's plan was released as Trump claimed refugees place an unwanted burden for the country at a campaign rally this week in Duluth, Minnesota. He assailed his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, who has vowed to raise the ceiling on refugee admissions to 125,000 if elected.

“Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp, and he said that — overwhelming public resources, overcrowding schools and inundating hospitals. You know that. It’s already there. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to your state,” Trump told supporters.

The 18,000 cap was already the lowest in the history of the program, which had seen an average annual quota of about 95,000. Then Trump froze refugee admissions in March amid the pandemic, citing a need to protect the U.S. job market suffering from the coronavirus-induced economic fallout.

As a result, the U.S. allowed in just over 10,800 refugees during the 2020 fiscal year.

The State Department said the president's proposed cut reflects the administration's “continuing commitment to prioritize the safety and well-being of Americans, especially in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic."

Refugee advocates have said the Trump administration is dismantling a program that has long enjoyed bipartisan support and has been considered a model for protecting the world’s most vulnerable people.

“The number of refugees that the United States welcomes each year is a measure of who we are and where we stand in the world in terms of our commitment to human rights," Ryan Mace, a senior policy advisor at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement.

Scores of resettlement offices have closed because of the drop in federal funding that is based on the number of refugees arriving in the U.S.

And the damage is reverberating beyond American borders as other countries close their doors to refugees. Meanwhile, the number of people displaced by war, famine and persecution has swelled to 80 million worldwide.

“We’re talking about tens of millions of desperate families with no place to go and having no hope for protection in the near term,” said Krish Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a federally funded agency charged with resettling refugees in the U.S.