Even as Donald Trump abuses his office by using the federal government to bring in more foreign workers to staff his various resorts and thus line his pockets, he’s now also making it harder for Central American children who are fleeing gang violence in their home countries to come legally to the U.S., even if they already have parents here:
As of Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security is ending a program begun in 2014 that gave some 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 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.
Humanitarian experts who have been helping Central American refugees say that Trump’s effort stands to instead fuel the human smuggling trade—something “Trump has vowed to dismantle”—by making it harder for children and other vulnerable populations to come here legally. And, it will mean more senseless deaths of innocents.
“It is not a surprise, but it is a disgrace,” said Lisa Frydman, a leader with Kids in Need of Defense. “This is the Trump administration completely turning its back on Central American children, slamming the door on them.”
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.
In a violent climate where “approximately one Salvadoran citizen dies every hour,” according to Think Progress, the Obama administration “expanded the program beyond children last year to include more categories” of vulnerable Central American 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 United States 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 when the parole program ends on Wednesday. But, as before, they will have to reapply for parole when the two-year period is up, Mr. Langston said.
“No reason was given for the change to the program,” claimed the San Diego Union Tribune, but Trump’s reasons are obvious. On a petty level, it’s an Obama program, which means it has to go, no matter its humanitarian reasoning or legality. On a morally corrupt level, it’s just another step in Trump’s mission to make America white—and this time, at the expense of children.