As President Trump threatened to deport "millions" of people who are in the country illegally, a threat made as he officially started up his re-election campaign this week, updated numbers from two organizations that study refugees offer sobering context on the state of people fleeing war or persecution worldwide. 

The number of people displaced around the globe topped 70 million in 2018, according an annual report released Wednesday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It's the highest number of displaced people the agency has ever recorded.

Well over half of those displaced by conflict or human rights issues remained in their own country. More than 40 percent were people fleeing their countries from conflict or persecution. 

"These numbers are huge, by the way," said Ninette Kelley, director of the New York office for UNHCR. "It's the equivalent of the population of France or the population of Thailand."

She said that conveying the human side of these statistics was a persistent challenge.

"Every number represents a human life and a human story, and what people tell us all over the world is that for them to leave home — it's really the last desperate act after a series of very harsh hardships," Kelley said.

Here are a few more details from the report:

• The highest number of people fleeing their home country last year came from Syria, at 6.7 million. The majority of Syrian refugees migrated to Turkey.
• More than two-thirds of refugees came from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. 
• The majority of refugees were hosted by neighboring countries. Turkey had the largest refugee population last year, followed by Pakistan, Uganda, Sudan and Germany. 
• The United States received the most applications for asylum in 2018, with the highest number of applicants being from El Salvador. Peru received the second-highest number of asylum applications, because of the economic and political crisis in Venezuela.

But while the number of people fleeing their home countries has increased year after year, the number of refugees that the U.S. is willing to take in and resettle has declined dramatically. According to the International Rescue Committee, refugee admissions is at a historic low, capped at 30,000. Actual admissions don't even reach the cap, because of a reduced capacity for U.S. officials to process admissions, the IRC reports. 

Both the numbers have changed, along with who is being admitted to the U.S., said Nazanin Ash, vice president for policy and advocacy at the IRC. 

"We see a dramatic reordering of who is provided protection in the United States," Ash said, noting the majority of refugees resettled in the U.S. prior to the Trump administration were from majority Muslim countries, like Syria. Now, most refugees resettled are from African countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"I think it's important to note that there's no group that's been spared by the plummeting rate of refugee admissions, but Muslim refugees have certainly borne the brunt of the cuts," she said.

What's more, the increased standards for vetting refugees from certain Muslim countries — the so-called "Muslim ban" — means the U.S. is not hitting the lower numbers of refugees it committed to resettling in the first place. The U.S. set a cap of receiving 9,000 refugees from the Middle East for Fiscal Year 2019, Ash said. So far, eight months into the fiscal year, the U.S. has taken in 1,500.

They are numbers that are being felt in New York and New Jersey. The IRC said it had a 52 percent drop in the number of refugees the organization resettled in New York this fiscal year, compared to 2016. In New Jersey, the IRC saw a drop of 32 percent in refugee arrivals.  

Avigail Ziv, who leads the IRC's New York and New Jersey office, said that just a few years ago the IRC was resettling large numbers of Syrians in New Jersey. The agency reported that it resettled 180 Syrians over the course of a year starting in late 2015. 

In contrast, since mid-2017, the IRC has resettled just one Syrian family in New Jersey.

Reporter Yasmeen Khan is hosting an evening of storytelling, performance and conversation with refugees on World Refugee Day in The Greene Space. Click here for more information.