U.S. Considering Refugee Status for Hondurans
By FRANCES ROBLES and MICHAEL D. SHEARJULY 24, 2014

Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico, according to a draft of the proposal.
If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House said, putting the violence in Honduras on the level of humanitarian emergencies in Haiti and Vietnam, where such programs have been conducted in the past amid war and major crises.

The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone has doubled since last year. Answers to key questions on the crisis. By moving decisions on refugee claims to Honduras, the plan aims to slow the rush of minors crossing into the United States illegally from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, which has overwhelmed the border this year. More than 45,000 unaccompanied minors from those three nations have arrived since Oct. 1, straining federal resources to the point that some agencies will exhaust their budgets by next month, the secretary of Homeland Security has said.

Many of the children, particularly in Honduras, are believed to be fleeing dangerous street gangs, which forcibly recruit members and extort home and business owners. The United Nations estimates that 70,000 gang members operate in the three nations. Administration officials stressed that no decision had been made to move forward, saying the idea was one of many being discussed by officials at the White House and the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human Services.

Among the factors surrounding the decision are how many people in Honduras would be eligible to apply for the program, and how many would probably be approved.
The proposal, prepared by several federal agencies, says the pilot program under consideration would cost up to $47 million over two years, assuming 5,000 applied and about 1,750 people were accepted. If successful, it would be adopted in Guatemala and El Salvador as well.

It is unclear how the administration determined those estimates, given that since Oct. 1 more than 16,500 unaccompanied children traveled to the United States from Honduras alone.
Children would be interviewed by American immigration employees trained to deal with minors, and a resettlement center would be set up in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, with assistance from international organizations like the International Organization for Migration. The plan would be similar to a recent bill introduced by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who proposed increasing the number of refugee visas to the three Central American countries by 5,000 each. According to the draft, the administration is considering opening the program to people under 21. It also suggested offering entry on emergency humanitarian grounds — known as humanitarian parole — to some of the applicants who did not qualify for refugee status.

That would most likely cause an outcry among critics who believe President Obama has been too soft on immigration. But officials called it “highly unlikely” that people who were denied refugee status would be considered for parole, which is generally offered in isolated emergencies. Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration, said that the proposal would increase, not stem, the flood of migrants from Central America trying to get into the United States.
“It’s clearly a bad idea,” Mr. Krikorian said. “Orders of magnitude more people will apply for refugee status if they can just do it from their home countries.”
He added that the proposal would allow people to claim to be refugees from their countries with “nothing more than a bus ride to the consulate. We’re talking about, down the road, an enormous additional flow of people from those countries.”

The preliminary plan could create a thorny challenge for the administration because the definition of a refugee is legally specific, and children fleeing street gangs could have a hard time qualifying. Under American law, refugees are people fleeing their country of origin based on fears of persecution by reason of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. The only category that would seem to apply is “social group,” experts said, but there is disagreement on what that means. Some contend that children could count as a group, but others say the refugee requirements are stricter, and would not apply to people fleeing general crime and violence. “What is a social group?” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of migration policies for the Migration Policy Institute’s New York office. “This is going to create a huge deal of debate. You will see a lot of law developing on it.”

With that in mind, the draft proposal suggested that 35 percent to 50 percent of the applicants in Honduras could be considered for relief, a figure the White House said was inflated. The early draft, the White House said, was the most generous and least likely of the options the administration is considering. How many people are accepted is critical, because refugees qualify for public assistance upon arrival in the United States.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story One of the issues under debate is whether the program should be limited to children who have at least one relative in the United States, so that the government would not be saddled with custodial issues. Whether that relative would have to have legal residency is another issue that was addressed but not resolved.
Under Senator McCain’s proposal, refugee applicants would be processed at home, and child migrants arriving in the United States illegally could be deported quickly.
Kevin Appleby, director of Migration and Refugee Services at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the plan would be welcome, as long as it did not substitute for protections Central American children currently receive under American law.
“This program would certainly be a formal acknowledgment by the administration that these children are refugees,” Mr. Appleby said. “That’s huge, because they have yet to utter that word.”
When a similar plan was adopted in Haiti, as a way to keep people from taking to the high seas, he said, it was ultimately criticized because Haitians already in the United States did not receive help. “It ended up being counterproductive to the goal,” Mr. Appleby said.

 Frazzled wrote:
Its like the entire country has lost its mind.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Its like the entire country has lost its mind.

Which one?

 Frazzled wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/world/americas/administration-weighs-plan-to-move-processing-of-youths-seeking-entry-to-honduras-.html?_r=0

Its like the entire country has lost its mind.

 d-usa wrote:
If we can put that whole program and stick it inside Honduras itself, then it will be a win-win for everybody involved.

The US does not have to house all these kids that don't qualify but who come into the country anyway thinking that they might. The US does not have to spend the resources caring for them, does not have to hire a ton of judges to hear their cases and make decisions, and does not have to spend the resources and money to send them back. The US will also be at less risk from public health issues by not having a ton of kids coming into the country without any medical screening of any kind.

The kids will know if they qualify or not, the coyotes won't make any money, and less dead bodies lying in the desert between here and Honduras.

If we have a choice between putting a refugee court in Honduras and dealing with X number of actual refugees that would be here legally instead of dealing with a gak-ton of kids that are here illegally, then it should really be an obvious choice.

 Ouze wrote:
I don't get it. You're unhappy about illegal immigration, rightfully, but what is wrong with allowing in lawful refugees, as this country has since... literally day one?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 d-usa wrote:
If we can put that whole program and stick it inside Honduras itself, then it will be a win-win for everybody involved.

The US does not have to house all these kids that don't qualify but who come into the country anyway thinking that they might. The US does not have to spend the resources caring for them, does not have to hire a ton of judges to hear their cases and make decisions, and does not have to spend the resources and money to send them back. The US will also be at less risk from public health issues by not having a ton of kids coming into the country without any medical screening of any kind.

The kids will know if they qualify or not, the coyotes won't make any money, and less dead bodies lying in the desert between here and Honduras.

If we have a choice between putting a refugee court in Honduras and dealing with X number of actual refugees that would be here legally instead of dealing with a gak-ton of kids that are here illegally, then it should really be an obvious choice.

So much this.

 whembly wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Its like the entire country has lost its mind.

Which one?

These guys:

 d-usa wrote:
If we have a choice between putting a refugee court in Honduras and dealing with X number of actual refugees that would be here legally instead of dealing with a gak-ton of kids that are here illegally, then it should really be an obvious choice.

 Seaward wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
If we have a choice between putting a refugee court in Honduras and dealing with X number of actual refugees that would be here legally instead of dealing with a gak-ton of kids that are here illegally, then it should really be an obvious choice.

That's true, provided those who don't make the cut simply don't go, "LOL, they're not sending us back once we get there, so let's make that trans-Mexican trip they're trying to avoid having us make by setting up this court that rejected us. #yolo".

Never will you see a more wretched den of scum and villainy

 curran12 wrote:
Gotta agree with d-usa on this one. I know it is all fun to rail on immigration (because hey, we sure don't have immigrant ancestry amirite) but this is a matter of making legal refugee work safer for the refugees.

 Frazzled wrote:

Never will you see a more wretched den of scum and villainy

Yes, New Mexico can be terrifying.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 curran12 wrote:
Gotta agree with d-usa on this one. I know it is all fun to rail on immigration (because hey, we sure don't have immigrant ancestry amirite) but this is a matter of making legal refugee work safer for the refugees.

1. They are not refugees.
2. This will not stop them from coming here. Once they get there they are home free.

yellowfever wrote:
I would use that 47 million to improve our wall.

 Frazzled wrote:
They do not meet the defnition of refugee under the law.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
They do not meet the defnition of refugee under the law.

Ah, that makes sense.