WASHINGTON — As the State Department begins combing through 18,822 documents relating to the North Korean regime’s Yongbyon reactor, Congress is quickly preparing to reauthorize legislation that would pressure America to accept more refugees fleeing the Hermit Kingdom.

The House yesterday was poised to pass the North Korea Human Rights Reauthorization Act, and it is also considering an effort to condition North Korea’s removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on its disclosure of its role in building what the Bush administration has said is a nuclear reactor taken out last September by Israeli jets deep in Syrian territory.

The sponsor of the amendment, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said in a statement: “We must ensure that any concession granted to the regime is consistent with U.S. law and our vital national interests.”

Her amendment is attached to an arms export bill that, along with the North Korea Human Rights Reauthorization Act, is expected to pass by voice vote today in the House. A legislative aide on Capitol Hill said the bill is not yet scheduled for a vote in the Senate.

At a press briefing yesterday, the State Department’s director of the Office of Korean affairs, Sung Kim, said his recent meetings with North Koreans did not address their support for the Syrian nuclear reactor. In an intelligence briefing last month to Congress and the press, the Bush administration claimed to have photographs of North Korean scientists inside the Syrian reactor. The North Korea Human Rights Reauthorization Act would put more pressure on the State Department to accept North Korean refugees fleeing the country. A recent report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom documents how North Koreans are often repatriated to detention camps by the Chinese authorities. Those North Koreans seeking shelter in Christian churches are singled out for interrogation and torture, says the report, which is based on the testimony of refugees and former North Korean security agents.

A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has organized the political coalition that pressed for the original 2004 North Korea Human Rights Act, Michael Horowitz, said passage of the bill is insufficient.”Unless the Korean-American community is organized and passionate and follows the model of the campaign for Soviet Jewry, the anti-apartheid movement, and the Cuban-American movement against Castro, the politicians will be able to ignore this problem,” he said.