New York Times
By Frances Robles and Michael D. Shear
July 24, 2014
Hoping
to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama
administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and
young adults from
Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek
through Mexico, according to a draft of the proposal.
If
approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of
children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United
States as refugees or on emergency
humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a
nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House said,
putting the violence in Honduras on the level of humanitarian
emergencies in Haiti and Vietnam, where such programs
have been conducted in the past amid war and major crises.
Critics
of the plan were quick to pounce, saying it appeared to redefine the
legal definition of a refugee and would only increase the flow of
migration to the United
States. Administration officials said they believed the plan could be
enacted through executive action, without congressional approval, as
long as it did not increase the total number of refugees coming into the
country.
By
moving decisions on refugee claims to Honduras, the plan aims to slow
the rush of minors crossing into the United States illegally from El
Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,
which has overwhelmed the border this year. More than 45,000
unaccompanied minors from those three nations have arrived since Oct. 1,
straining federal resources to the point that some agencies will
exhaust their budgets by next month, the secretary of Homeland
Security has said.
Many
of the children, particularly in Honduras, are believed to be fleeing
dangerous street gangs, which forcibly recruit members and extort home
and business owners.
The United Nations estimates that 70,000 gang members operate in the
three nations.
Administration
officials stressed that no decision had been made to move forward,
saying the idea was one of many being discussed by officials at the
White House and the
Departments of State, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human
Services.
Among
the factors surrounding the decision are how many people in Honduras
would be eligible to apply for the program, and how many would probably
be approved.
The
proposal, prepared by several federal agencies, says the pilot program
under consideration would cost up to $47 million over two years,
assuming 5,000 applied and
about 1,750 people were accepted. If successful, it would be adopted in
Guatemala and El Salvador as well.
It
is unclear how the administration determined those estimates, given
that since Oct. 1 more than 16,500 unaccompanied children traveled to
the United States from Honduras
alone.
Children
would be interviewed by American immigration employees trained to deal
with minors, and a resettlement center would be set up in the Honduran
capital, Tegucigalpa,
with assistance from international organizations like the International
Organization for Migration.
The
plan would be similar to a recent bill introduced by Senators John
McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who proposed increasing the number of
refugee visas to the three
Central American countries by 5,000 each.
According
to the draft, the administration is considering opening the program to
people under 21. It also suggested offering entry on emergency
humanitarian grounds —
known as humanitarian parole — to some of the applicants who did not
qualify for refugee status.
That
would most likely cause an outcry among critics who believe President
Obama has been too soft on immigration. But officials called it “highly
unlikely” that people
who were denied refugee status would be considered for parole, which is
generally offered in isolated emergencies.
Mark
Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration, said that the
proposal would increase, not
stem, the flood of migrants from Central America trying to get into the
United States.
“It’s
clearly a bad idea,” Mr. Krikorian said. “Orders of magnitude more
people will apply for refugee status if they can just do it from their
home countries.”
He
added that the proposal would allow people to claim to be refugees from
their countries with “nothing more than a bus ride to the consulate.
We’re talking about, down
the road, an enormous additional flow of people from those countries.”
The
preliminary plan could create a thorny challenge for the administration
because the definition of a refugee is legally specific, and children
fleeing street gangs
could have a hard time qualifying.
Under
American law, refugees are people fleeing their country of origin based
on fears of persecution by reason of race, religion, nationality,
political opinion or membership
in a particular social group.
The
only category that would seem to apply is “social group,” experts said,
but there is disagreement on what that means. Some contend that
children could count as a group,
but others say the refugee requirements are stricter, and would not
apply to people fleeing general crime and violence.
“What
is a social group?” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of migration
policies for the Migration Policy Institute’s New York office. “This is
going to create a huge deal
of debate. You will see a lot of law developing on it.”
Still,
the draft of the plan noted that 64.7 percent of the unaccompanied
minors who applied for asylum this year got it, which suggests that
immigration officials have
found their claims of imminent danger credible.
With
that in mind, the draft proposal suggested that 35 percent to 50
percent of the applicants in Honduras could be considered for relief, a
figure the White House said
was inflated. The early draft, the White House said, was the most
generous and least likely of the options the administration is
considering. How many people are accepted is critical, because refugees
qualify for public assistance upon arrival in the United
States.
One
of the issues under debate is whether the program should be limited to
children who have at least one relative in the United States, so that
the government would not
be saddled with custodial issues. Whether that relative would have to
have legal residency is another issue that was addressed but not
resolved.
Under
Senator McCain’s proposal, refugee applicants would be processed at
home, and child migrants arriving in the United States illegally could
be deported quickly.
Kevin
Appleby, director of Migration and Refugee Services at the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the plan would be welcome,
as long as it did not substitute
for protections Central American children currently receive under
American law.
“This
program would certainly be a formal acknowledgment by the
administration that these children are refugees,” Mr. Appleby said.
“That’s huge, because they have yet
to utter that word.”
When
a similar plan was adopted in Haiti, as a way to keep people from
taking to the high seas, he said, it was ultimately criticized because
Haitians already in the United
States did not receive help. “It ended up being counterproductive to
the goal,” Mr. Appleby said.
Stacie
Blake, the director of government relations for the U.S. Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants, an advocacy group, said the processing of
potential refugees in
Central America could be handled by the United States or by the United
Nations, which makes refugee determinations in many other countries. She
said some of the people designated as refugees in Honduras could end up
in countries other than the United States.
“It’s a way to help folks avoid life-threatening escapes and journeys,” Ms. Blake said. “It’s a good idea. It’s a tested idea.”
The
Honduran Foreign Ministry referred requests for comment to its embassy
in Washington, which said that, due to the president’s visit to
Washington, its ambassador was
not immediately available for comment.
On
Friday, Mr. Obama is scheduled to meet with the presidents of Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvador at the White House in an effort to urge the
Central American leaders
to do more to help stem the flow of children fleeing their countries
for the United States.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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