On March 10 the U.S. State Department announced
officially that it was restarting the Obama administration’s Central
American Minors (CAM) program, a process for Central American youths to seek
refugee status from within their own countries instead of having to travel
across Mexico to the U.S. border.
CAM will definitely benefit a certain number of Central
Americans, but it will do little for most of the tens of thousands of Central Americans
now seeking asylum from dangers in their countries.
The Obama administration announced the earlier CAM program
in the fall of 2014. The proposal sparked wild
accusations from the right wing about “a dangerous
situation” and “[p]otentially millions” of Central American youths being flown
into the United States “with taxpayer dollars.” In reality, as we warned at the
time, the program could only help a limited number.
The program, we noted, was
only open to immigrant parents from El Salvador, Guatemala
and Honduras who are “lawfully present” in the United States. They may be legal
permanent residents (LPRs), for example, or be covered by temporary protected
status (TPS), or they may have had their deportations deferred.
Applicants also had
to go through a time-consuming vetting process while remaining in their home
country, which ruled out people in immediate danger. And since CAM was
administered through the refugee program, the number of minors accepted was
restricted by the administration’s proposed ceilings for refugees. In 2015 the
ceiling was 4,000 for all of Latin America, and most of the slots were already
allocated to Cubans.
How Did the First CAM
Turn Out?
As we predicted, relatively few Central American minors were
admitted into the United States through the program, which ran for less than
two years before being shut down by the Trump White House.
 |
| No, CAM didn't bring millions of youths to the U.S. |
A total of 2,631 Central American minors ended up being
settled here as refugees, we learned in February from a spokesperson for the
State Department, which managed the program. Some other minors were admitted to
the United States temporarily in a parole program administered by U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services; these parolees would be able to seek
permanent status from within the country through other channels. (Presumably
this would include such avenues as protection under the Convention Against
Torture.) According to information provided by USCIS spokesperson Victoria
Palmer, about 2,400 of these parolees had entered the country by last December;
it’s not clear how many have had their cases resolved.*
So how many Central American minors will actually benefit
from the resurrected CAM program?
The limitations on the original program still apply with the
revived program. The new
refugee ceilings the government announced on May 3 are
somewhat higher than those for 2015, with a total of 5,000 slots allocated for
Latin America and the Caribbean, an increase of 1,000; in addition, Cubans no longer have the
priority they had in 2015. So the number of minors granted refugee status or
paroled into the country each year will probably be higher than under the Obama
administration, but it will remain in the low thousands.
In short, restarting the CAM program will save a number of
youths from danger in Central America. This is laudable, but it certainly won’t
be enough to stop tens of thousands of Central Americans from fleeing north to
escape intolerable conditions at home.
*
USCIS’s Palmer told us that approximately 1,450 applicants were paroled into
the U.S. before the program was terminated in August 2017. She also provided a
copy of a quarterly court status report for S.A. et al v. Trump,
the suit challenging the program’s termination. The report, filed Dec. 30, 2020,
showed that another 950 minors had been paroled into that country by that date.
