In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a temporary travel ban on refugees entering the United States and a hold on travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries. (CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS)

The United States surpassed the Trump administration’s 50,000-person cap on refu­gee admissions Wednesday, as a group of about 160 people landed in airports across the country to begin new lives.

All refugees scheduled to fly July 12 were admitted “to ensure an orderly, effective implementation of the 50,000 cap,” according to a State Department statement. The United States had admitted 50,086 refugees since October as of Wednesday afternoon.

The 50,000-person limit set by President Trump is less than half the number of refugees that had been authorized by President Barack Obama and Congress for this fiscal year, ending September 30.

Trump ordered the cap as part of a January executive order that also sought to suspend the entire refu­gee resettlement program for 120 days. The order, which also called for a temporary ban on the entry of citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries, was blocked in multiple iterations by federal courts. The Supreme Court ruled last month that a partial version of Trump’s order could take effect, allowing for the 50,000-person limit on refugees.

The cap isn’t a hard line, however. The Supreme Court ruled that people with a “bona fide” relationship to a person or entity in the United States could still enter, a standard that the administration has since defined to mean those with immediate family in the United States.

“Beginning July 13, only those individuals who have a credible claim to a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States will be eligible for admission through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” the State Department said in a statement.

The president has broad authority to set the number of refugees resettled in the United States, and it’s unclear at what number the administration will set the cap in fiscal year 2018.

The White House did not immediately return requests for comment.

As of Wednesday, more than 50,000 refugees remained outside the United States at some stage in the U.S. refu­gee resettlement process, said Michael Knowles, the president of AFGE Local 1924, the union that represents United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security. It is unclear how many of them would meet the administration’s bona fide relationship requirement.

Among Wednesday’s arrivals were a Syrian family of three who landed in New England and a Congolese couple who landed in the Midwest, none of whom would have made it into the country had they been scheduled to arrive one day later, said Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, the resettlement agency that handled their cases. The families would have been denied entry because neither has immediate relatives in the United States.

Hetfield said some refugees scheduled to arrive in coming days have had their flights canceled despite having completed the government’s vetting process because they don’t meet the new restrictions. That includes a man from Ukraine who had been approved to be resettled as a refu­gee in the United States, joining his grandmother, Hetfield said. Grandmothers don’t count as providing a “bona fide” relationship under the administration’s guidelines.

Homeland Security officials and refu­gee resettlement advocates have said the U.S. government’s refugee admissions program — a process of applications and background checks by multiple agencies that can take months or years — already had largely ground to a halt since January.

“They’re doing death by procedure,” Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which has sued the federal government over the restrictions, said of the administration. “They’ve realized they can just use bureaucracy to delay so long that no one ever gets in, de facto.”

HIAS and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, two of the biggest resettlement groups, said they had travel bookings scheduled for the next few weeks, but none beyond that. The State Department has also notified resettlement agencies that there will be a temporary pause before the government starts booking additional refugees for travel.

“You’re going to have a significant slowdown. You’re going to have far fewer people arriving in the next four months, and we’re basically waiting to see how fast the guidance around bona fide relationships can get put into travel packages and then accepted at the airports,” said Kay Bellor, the vice president for programs at one of the resettlement groups, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, which handled 18 of Wednesday’s arrivals.

“Right now we have booking dates through August 15. So we’re assessing whether we’re going to need cancellations,” she added.