Thursday, November 09, 2017

Trump's refugee crackdown begins

Trump's administration informed Congress in September that it intended to scrap the Central American Minors (CAM) program within the new fiscal year. In a statement Wednesday, the State Department announced that no further applications for refugee status under the program would be accepted after 11:59 p.m. EST (0459 UTC) on Thursday.

The United States will no longer accept applications for its special child refugee program, which had allowed minors fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to apply for asylum in the US before leaving their home countries. From Friday, minors applying for refugee status in the US will be required to go through the normal screening process.

The CAM program was introduced in December 2014 amid and meant that children could apply and be screened in their home country before traveling out the US. Parents living in the US could also apply for refugee status for the children or relatives who were still living in their country of origin. As of August 2017, 1,500 children and eligible relatives had settled in the US as refugees as part of the CAM program. In total, more than 13,000 had applied over the course of the program's short history.

The CAM deadline comes the same week that the government announced that it was also ending "temporary protected status," which had allowed a number of Nicaraguans to live in the US.

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