THE STATE DEPARTMENT
announced Wednesday evening the abrupt cancellation of a program that gave youth fleeing violence in Central America the chance to apply for asylum and join their families in the United States. While the Trump administration had already narrowed the scope of the Obama-era initiative and
indicated it would shut it downentirely, the program is being ended with barely a 24-hour notice. Families already in the process of applying had just until midnight last night to get their paperwork filed.
The Central American Minors program, or CAM, allowed children, who were fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador and had family members legally in the United States, to apply for asylum from within their home country. Applicants who didn’t meet the criteria for asylum were also eligible to receive a temporary humanitarian parole that granted them permission to stay in the United States for two years.
Alba said that the entire process had slowed to a crawl in January, when Central American organizations also noticed a freeze. Then, in August, the administration canceled the parole portion of the program. Some
2,700 children who had been approved for parole and were waiting on travel arrangements were told that their acceptance had been revoked.
For Leach, the main limitation was that CAM addressed only a sliver of the asylum-seeking population, due to “the fact that the parents have to have status in the U.S., the fact that you are drawing attention to yourself, that it takes a long time, that if your life is in danger you need to be in hiding. In-country processing is fraught with certain dangers.”
Despite these critiques, or perhaps because of them, over time CAM greatly improved, said Sandoval in San Salvador. “It could have been better, definitely. But it established best practices, and it proved that it’s possible to find viable alternatives that offer true solutions.” And Leach’s colleague Amber Moulton said, “We had hoped for an expansion of CAM rather than rescinding or stopping it.”
IN UNDER A year, the Trump administration has taken steps to
drastically reshape U.S. refugee policy in ways that would undermine long-standing protections. On top of executive orders capping
refugee admissions, the Department of Homeland Security has said it will “
intensify” vetting of women and children refugees. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly have both sought to delegitimize the claims of asylum-seekers, saying that there is “
rampant abuse,” and that people are “
schooled by traffickers.” This summer, a lawsuit alleged that officers were
intimidating and lying to asylum-seekers at the border.
Salvadorans and Hondurans, two of the countries eligible for CAM,
may also soon face the end of
temporary protected status, or TPS, which gives citizens of certain countries recovering from disasters, armed conflict, or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions” the right to stay and work in the U.S. This week, the DHS announced it would end TPS for Nicaraguans, and hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, Haitians, and Salvadorans
await decisions on their countries. The two programs were interwoven, said Sandoval, as in many cases, it was family members with TPS status who were petitioning to bring their children to the United States through CAM.
