Juan Palacios spent more than $14,000 over the course of two years to bring his children from El Salvador to Houston, Texas, “the right way,” undergoing interviews with officials, DNA testing, and background checks. Now, three years after coming to the U.S. legally, after excelling in school and beginning new lives, Juan’s sons are being ordered to leave.
A government letter informed Juan’s sons that their request to renew their two-year status under an Obama-era program was denied, and told them to prepare for deportation by Sept. 15. Under the program,” the Houston Chronicle reported, “a few thousand children and teens from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala who fulfilled stringent requirements—including having a parent with legal status in the United States—could apply for protection here from their home countries.”
Obama administration officials had called the Central American Minors initiative one of the most important programs for helping protect children from violence in their home countries, but Donald Trump’s administration stopped processing applications following his inauguration, “and in August 2017 officially terminated half of the program. By November that year, no new cases were accepted,” leaving Ariel, Juan Jose, Olman, and others in limbo.
Of course, Trump, his officials, and anti-immigrant defenders love to claim that they have no issue with immigrants or immigration, they just want people to do it legally. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” Trump claimed earlier this year. But that’s exactly what Juan and his family had done, paying thousands of dollars and going through every hoop and test and interview needed to fulfill their end of the process, only now to be told to get out.
Juan’s sons have excelled in the time they’ve been here, the family has said. “Ariel and Juan Jose spend much of their time studying,” the Houston Chronicle reports. “They both passed their STAAR tests and soon will take their SATs. They did not know a word of English two and a half years ago, but now their English as a second language teachers classified them as advanced.” Advocates see right through the administration’s immigration double-talk.
“From one side of their mouth, they say they want you to come by applying for protection before you get here, and from the other side of their mouth, they are literally dismantling the entire structure and capacity of the refugee resettlement program that would allow you to do that,” said Jen Smyers of Church World Service. “They don’t want anyone coming here, regardless of what they’re fleeing and regardless of how they’re applying for protection.”