The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday ended a program begun in 2014 that gave some Central American children and young adults who had 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 Donald Trump's January executive order on immigration, which directed officials to exercise much more selectively their authority to admit foreigners outside normal legal channels. The Trump administration has also tried to hold back the high tide of young Central Americans into the U.S. 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 was published Wednesday in the Federal Register. "Any alien may request parole to travel to the United States, but an alien does not have a right to parole."
Under former President Barack Obama's administration, the program was established as a way to deal with a surge of children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala arriving at the southern border without adults. While the administration had tried to discourage people from making the dangerous journey at all, the initiative was an acknowledgment that the strategy was not thinning the flow.
The Obama administration expanded the program beyond children last year to include more categories of would-be refugees.
By this summer, of the approximately 10,000 people who had applied for entry, 2,193 had been approved as refugees, said R. Carter Langston, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
An additional 1,465 did not meet the legal criteria to become refugees but were allowed to come to the United States and work legally as parolees, a kind of halfway status that does not offer a pathway to citizenship as refugees have but protects them from deportation for two years.
Those who have already received parole will not see any immediate changes. But, as before, they will have to reapply for parole when the two-year period is up, Langston said.
Once they do, they will be petitioning an agency that Trump has ordered to be less lenient than it was under Obama. The parole program was one of several moves Obama made to protect young aliens from deportation and that conservatives protested as stretching the limits of presidential power.
Though the parole program is ending, children and their families can still apply for refugee status as before.
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 children, said the decision to shut down the parole option would drum up more business for the smuggling networks that 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 suspended it while officials reviewed what Trump's executive order would mean for it, Langston said.
Frydman's organization has seen 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," Frydman said.
A Section on 08/17/2017