https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/trump-central-american-refugees.html?action=click&contentCollection=us&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article&version=newsevent&rref=collection%2Fnews-event%2Fdonald-trump-white-house
The NYT reports:
“The Trump administration is cutting off an Obama-era pathway to the United States for young migrants fleeing violence in Central America, further narrowing the options for thousands of people hoping to seek refuge here as the White House moves to tighten immigration rules.
As of Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security is ending a program begun in 2014 that gave some children and young adults who failed to qualify for refugee status permission to enter the United States to live and work on a temporary basis, known as parole.
The agency said it was doing so in response to President Trump’s January executive order on immigration, which directed officials to exercise much more selectively their authority to admit immigrants outside normal legal channels. The Trump administration has also tried to hold back the high tide of young Central American migrants by intensifying immigration enforcement within the country and even seeking out their parents who are in the United States illegally, and arresting them.
“Parole will only be issued on a case-by-case basis and only where the applicant demonstrates an urgent humanitarian or a significant public benefit reason for parole and that applicant merits a favorable exercise of discretion,” the department said in its announcement, which is to be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday. “Any alien may request parole to travel to the United States, but an alien does not have a right to parole.”
Under the Obama administration, the program was established as a way to deal with a relentless surge of children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala arriving at the southern border without adults. While the administration had tried to discourage migrants from making the dangerous journey at all, the initiative was an acknowledgment that that strategy was not thinning the flow.
. . . .
Lisa Frydman, the vice president for regional policy and initiatives for Kids in Need of Defense, a group in Washington that provides legal assistance to unaccompanied immigrant children, said the decision to shut down the parole option would drum up more business for the smuggling networks that Mr. Trump has vowed to dismantle.
“It is not a surprise, but it is a disgrace,” she said. “This is the Trump administration completely turning its back on Central American children, slamming the door on them.”
For the 2,714 people in the process of applying to the program, gaining what is known as conditional parole status, the future is hazier. Their conditional approvals will be revoked. Some, after being interviewed by refugee officers, may qualify as full-blown refugees. The rest may ask for parole individually, according to the announcement, but the agency will no longer automatically consider them for parole.
No one has entered the United States through the program since February, when the Department of Homeland Security put it on hold while officials reviewed what Mr. Trump’s executive order would mean for it, Mr. Langston said.
Ms. Frydman’s organization has three cases in which the child began the application process but has not been able to travel to the United States. In one case, two siblings applied; one was granted refugee status and the other conditional parole. The refugee is free to come; the parolee is not.
In another case, the mother had already bought the plane ticket for her child, who had received conditional parole.
“It’s so cruel,” Ms. Frydman said.”
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Read the entire article at the link.
Mindless cruelty is one of the specialties of the Trump Administration.
PWS
08-15-17
] PDF: courtlistener.com/docket/6736730 #CL67367309
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