Plan will let some kids be refugees

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is initiating a program to give refugee status to some young people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in response to the influx of unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Under the program, people from those countries who lawfully immigrated to the U.S. will be able to request that child relatives still in those three countries be resettled in the U.S. as refugees. The program would establish processing in those countries to screen the young people to determine whether they qualify to join relatives in the U.S.

In a memorandum to the State Department on Tuesday, President Barack Obama allocated 4,000 slots for refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean for next year. The number is a fraction of the amount of children who have already crossed the border into the U.S. and are awaiting deportation proceedings.

The program would not provide a path for minors to join relatives who are illegally in the U.S. and would not apply to minors who have entered the country illegally.

Instead, it aims to set up an orderly alternative for dealing with young people who otherwise might embark on a dangerous journey to join their families in the U.S.

Last month, Border Patrol agents at the border with Mexico apprehended 3,129 young people, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Since the start of the budget year last October, more than 66,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended crossing the border illegally, nearly double the number from the 2013 budget year.

That number has been declining but remains a worry for the administration as Obama considers ways to remove the threat of deportation and grant work permits potentially to several million foreigners already illegally in the U.S.

Under the plan, the U.S. would process refugee requests for minors in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Similar screening programs were set up in East Asia after the Vietnam War and in Haiti in the 1990s.

The plan was included in a White House memo to the State Department setting a total 2015 allocation of 70,000 refugees from Africa, East Asia, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Near East and South Asia. In addition to specifying El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the memorandum also singled out Cuba, Iraq, Eurasia and the Baltics as locations where the U.S. could screen individuals for potential refugee status.

A Section on 10/01/2014

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