Waiting for U.S. to open its doors
Lives of two Salvadoran girls hang in limbo as Trump administration puts refugee admissions on hold
Veronica picked up some modeling clay, molded it into little human figures with her hands — and then dug holes into the sculpture’s face. “Look,” said Veronica, 9, showing off the creation to her aunt. “That’s how Mamá ended up.”
For more than a year, Veronica and her sister have been in hiding here in El Salvador, hoping to receive refugee status in the United States. The two girls were doing homework at their dining room table when masked men burst in and gunned down their grandparents — the community’s only two health workers — on rumors that the couple had been tipping off the police about gangs in the neighborhood.
Like many thousands of others, Veronica and her sister applied for sanctuary in the United States under a special Obama administration effort to grapple with the violence that has gutted Central America and sent waves of its people on a desperate march toward the U.S. border.
But Monday, the Trump administration announced a four-month suspension on all refugee admissions to the United States so security procedures can be improved and, perhaps most significantly, cut the number of total refugees allowed into the country by more than half.
“We can’t remain in the same place,” said the girls’ aunt, Reina, who is seeking refugee status for her nieces, witnesses to the double homicide. “We got a call last weekend telling us that they’d find us under whatever rock we were hiding.”
When President Donald Trump first tried to freeze the nation’s refugee program in January, the courts jumped in and thwarted his executive order.
But one vital limit that the courts did allow — and which Trump’s new order continues — is a drastic reduction in the number of refugees admitted to the United States this fiscal year, from 110,000 under President Barack Obama to Trump’s revised cap: 50,000. And those seats are mostly taken already. More than 37,000 refugees from around the world have been admitted to the United States since the fiscal year began in October. By Monday morning, with seven months to go in the fiscal year, fewer than 12,700 slots remained under Trump’s limit.
Veronica and her sister — whose last names are being withheld to protect their identities — have been waiting to find out whether they will be among the chosen. They and their father have been interviewed a total of four times, but months have passed.
Members of El Salvador’s most notorious gang, MS-13, have made menacing phone calls suggesting that more killings are coming, the family says. So the girls, their father, aunts and uncles abandoned their houses and ran. But in a country the size of Massachusetts, there are only so many places to hide. They have already moved twice. Officials and immigrant advocates in Central America fear that as the Trump administration cites the danger of admitting potential terrorists cloaked as refugees from nations like Syria, it is disregarding the tens of thousands of people here who are being terrorized by street gangs that actually originated in the United States.
In 2014, the Obama administration began setting up a program to offer refugee status or special entry for some Central American children, hoping to stanch the tide of minors making the dangerous journey to the U.S. on their own.
More than 11,000 people have applied through the program, and just over 2,400 had been admitted to the United States by Feb. 22, according to the State Department. In Trump’s first month in office, 316 people were admitted, the department said.
Even before Trump’s executive order Monday, officials at the Department of Homeland Security said they had not been taking on any new cases since the president first sought to suspend refugee admissions in late January, effectively freezing new applications to the program.
The new executive order will prolong that freeze for at least another 120 days, leaving children under threat in the region with some daunting choices, including staying where they are or making the long, dangerous trek to the southwest border of the U.S. to apply for asylum or some other form of humanitarian relief.
Longer term, the Obama program in Central America could also be under threat because of its frequent reliance on a special provision called humanitarian parole, which allows certain immigrants to enter the U.S. temporarily even if they do not qualify as refugees.
Some Republicans who want to limit immigration call humanitarian parole an overused back door to entering the United States. And Trump, in an executive order last month that sought to tighten border security, took aim at “the abuse of parole and asylum provisions.”