MOSCOW, November 15 (Sputnik) – Some undocumented minors under the age of 21 hailing from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, but whose parents legally reside in the US, will be able to apply for a refugee status beginning in December, US Vice President Joe Biden said, according to the Guardian.
The program, part of a larger overhaul of the US immigration system, has been launched after over 60,000 children have entered the US illegally fleeing poverty and gang violence, abundant in these three Central American countries.
“The program will provide safe, legal and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children make and some children don’t ever arrive. … They start but never make it to the United States,” Biden said during a lunch with Guatemala’s president Otto Pérez Molina, Honduras’s president Juan Orlando Hernández and El Salvador’s president Salvador Sánchez Cerén at the Inter-American Development Bank. “It provides those seeking asylum a right way to come to our country, as opposed to crossing the border illegally,” he added, stressing that “we all have an obligation to help the most vulnerable and to keep families together.”
The US has cautioned against treating the program as a way for immigrants living in the US without legal permission to bring their children to the country. The initiative “will not be a pathway for undocumented parents to bring their children to the United States, but instead, … will provide certain vulnerable, at-risk children an opportunity to be reunited with parents lawfully resident in the United States,” the US State Department explained in a fact sheet on the Refugee/Parole Program. The program only applies to those minors currently in their home countries.
The mechanism of applying for a refugee status involves a DNA test to confirm that children and parents are biologically related. Thereupon, the children will have to attend an interview at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The DHS will then determine whether a minor is eligible for refugee status and can enter the United States.
“Approved refugees will be eligible for the same support provided to all refugees resettled in the United States, including assignment to a resettlement agency that will assist with reception and placement, and assistance registering children in school,” the US State Department said.
“It’s a small gesture,” Daniel Kowalski, an immigration attorney in Austin, Texas, and a member of the board of the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg. Barack Obama is “making it seem as if he’s a little bit compassionate but if he really wanted to show [the children from Central America] compassion he wouldn’t lock them up the first place,” the attorney added.
The US currently allows 4,000 people from Colombia and Cuba to seek refugee status. The initiative will modify the existing program to include children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The State Department said the quota could be increased but did not provide further details. However, it stressed that a relatively small number of children from Central America are expected to be admitted to the United States as refugees in FY 2015, “given the anticipated December launch and the length of time it takes to be processed for U.S. refugee admission.”
