Bigotry led Trump to halt refugee program, suit says

The Trump administration was motivated by bigotry and violated the rights of parents in the United States when it quietly revoked a program last year that had allowed thousands of children threatened with violence in Central America to join their parents here, advocates argue in a suit filed in San Francisco.

The termination of the Central American Minors program in January 2017 — seven months before the action was publicly announced — lacked any legal rationale, deprived parents of “the companionship and society of their family members,” and reflected “President Trump’s long history of racial slurs and epithets toward Latinos,” the suit said.

It cited, among other things, Trump’s labeling of undocumented immigrants as “animals” — a term he later insisted was meant to refer only to gang members — his revocation of deportation protections for more than 200,000 Central Americans, and a recent policy of separating undocumented parents from their children at the border.

Cancellation of the program left nearly 3,000 youngsters stranded in Central America although their entry to the U.S. had already been approved by officials here after security screenings, the suit said. It said their parents, under the program’s requirements, had paid for their medical exams, DNA tests verifying their family relationship, and in some cases their plane tickets. Some, but not all, have gotten refunds.

One plaintiff, a legal U.S. resident from El Salvador who works for a small business in Concord, applied in 2015 for admission of her 20-yearold daughter and the daughter’s year-old son, the suit said. They passed the screenings and were conditionally approved for admission before the program was rescinded. The daughter, still with her son in El Salvador, is threatened regularly by gang members and was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, the suit said.

Termination of the program “pulled the rug out from under ... thousands of families who had spent years and thousands of dollars in reliance on the availability of this safe pathway to family reunification,” said the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court. It seeks restoration of the program.

President Barack Obama’s administration established Central American Minors in December 2014 for legal U.S. residents with children in El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, three nations whose homicide rates are among the highest in the world. It allowed the parents to seek admission of children who were still in their home countries, rather than requiring them to make the dangerous journey to the U.S. border.

Youngsters were interviewed by international and U.S. agencies in the capital cities of their homelands, underwent security checks, medical exams and DNA screening, and then were approved for admission if officials found that they were “at risk of harm” in their home countries. That is a more lenient standard than the “risk of persecution” test for refugee admission, but the suit said the U.S. has had similar programs for other imperiled populations, such as religious dissidents from the Soviet Union, and “boat people” fleeing Vietnam.

More than 3,000 children were reunited with their families in the two years before Trump took office in January 2017, the suit said. Within days, it said, his administration terminated the program — barring admission of those who had already been approved — while continuing to accept applications and payments, and declaring on a government website that “there is no planned end date.”

The administration finally announced the shutdown in August, with a notice in the Federal Register, but never provided a public explanation, the suit said. It said officials told some applicants they could appeal their revocations, but those appeals have mostly gone unanswered.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko