It's hard to argue otherwise.
Obama Had A Plan For Central America. Then Came Trump.
Last updated on June 29, 2018, at 10:15 a.m. ET
Posted on June 29, 2018, at 9:01 a.m. ET
The plan involved aid to Central America and a program to screen vulnerable children there. Trump not only reduced the aid, he killed part of the screening program.
The Trump administration, beset by thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their homeland, last year eliminated a program that was intended to screen would-be asylum-seekers in their home countries — a plan that was meant to avoid the chaos that has been unfolding for the past three months on the US's southern border.
An extension of the program, which the Obama administration established in conjunction with the UN refugee agency, still exists in Costa Rica, where people judged to be at immediate risk are housed while awaiting asylum in the United States and elsewhere. The Trump administration provided funding for that part of the program as recently as April.
But funding for the larger program — the one that was meant to feed into the Costa Rica portion — was cut in August, after being frozen in February 2017 as part of Trump’s efforts to more closely control immigration.
“You went from an administration that was very intent on being forward-leaning on these issues to an administration that could not be more hostile,” said Ronald Newman, who was director of human rights and refugee protection on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. (It's uncertain how the Trump administration fulfills that role now; when asked, an NSC spokesperson replied, "The current National Security Council coordinates policy development on human rights and refugee protections through the work of two directorates staffed by subject matter experts with decades of experience across multiple disciplines.")
The program, when it existed, was the humanitarian arm of a multi-pronged approach that emerged when the Obama administration was faced with a Central American refugee crisis of its own. Its elimination underscores the differences between the way Obama approached an intractable immigration problem and the way the Trump administration has decided to deal with it. Vice President Mike Pence, in his visit with the leaders of the Northern Triangle countries on Thursday, merely told them to stem migration flows.
In 2014, the number of unaccompanied children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras suddenly surged on the southern border. Obama immigration officials responded by expanding detention centers and trying to overturn a court settlement that dictated how long they could hold children — steps similar to how the Trump administration has responded.
But the Obama administration also determined that it needed to confront the problem at the source — that is, in the three countries from which most of the unaccompanied children were coming: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The program it settled on included providing funding to Mexico to better police its own southern border, asking for an emergency economic aid package from Congress for the three countries, and undertaking a media campaign encouraging people from those countries not to make the dangerous journey across Mexico to the United States.
It also set up a program to screen people seeking asylum before they set off on their journey. That became known as the Central American Minors program. Parents, lawfully present in the United States, filled out an “affidavit of relationship,” Form DS-7699, through one of the agencies that resettle refugees with funding from the State Department.
The State Department then forwarded the application to a UN-affiliated office in the country of the child. That office then pre-screened the child and arranged a DNA test to confirm the biological relationship between the child and the petitioning parent. US Citizenship and Immigration Services then interviewed the child. Then came security and medical checks and then, finally, resettlement.
In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, “We started up that program and processed thousands of kids and parolees,” Newman said. In July 2016, 9,500 people had applied to the program; when the program was halted, 1,800 refugees and parolees (a status with a lower level of protection) had been admitted to the United States.
The Obama administration later created an extension of that program, realizing that for many children the risk was too urgent for them to wait for all those procedures to be completed. That part of the program was set up in Costa Rica in partnership with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration, an international organization that advises governments on migration issues. Under this program, especially vulnerable children could, after pre-screening, be moved to a camp in Costa Rica for the rest of the process.
The Costa Rica program was not free from criticism. The program, piloted with Salvadoran applicants, was designed to house 200 people for six months at a time. By November 2017, it had apparently relocated only one Salvadoran family, amid reportsthat its bureaucracy undercut the program’s very purpose. UNHCR and IOM both referred requests for comment to each other, with UNHCR eventually declining to respond on the record or on background.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues to fund the Costa Rica program, which, by January of this year, resettled approximately 180 people not just in the United States but also Australia, Uruguay, and Canada, according to a report from the UNHCR.
Australia’s agreement to take in Central American refugees came after Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull attended Obama’s summit on refugees in September 2016 — an irony, given that the US agreement to take in refugees from Australian detention centers was the subject of an acrimonious exchange between Trump and Turnbull just days after Trump took office.
“Virtually every high-level conversation [Obama had] involved some pitch to his counterpart to be more generous in welcoming refugees,” said Benjamin Gedan, who was South America director on the National Security Council in the Obama White House.
In April of this year, the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migrants provided $1.75 million to support the Costa Rica program, even though what Newman called the “principle feeder” to that program has been stopped.
While Trump rails against Mexico for letting migrants through and Pence is expected to demand that the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras stop migration from their countries, there appears to be little thought to duplicate the Obama effort to confront the problem in Central America.
“The Trump administration fundamentally doesn’t believe in foreign assistance. It wasn’t a great fit for them to get behind a program of carrots and sticks,” said Dan Erikson, who served as special adviser on Western Hemisphere affairs to Vice President Joe Biden. “They prefer the all-stick approach.”
Indeed, Trump has threatened to cut funding completely to the three Central American countries, which collectively are known as the Northern Triangle. For the current budget year, the Trump administration requested only $460 million in aid for the three countries, far less than the $700 million the Obama administration had provided in its final federal budget and an amount so low that Congress increased it to $615 million.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...happened-to-the-obama-administrations-plan-to
Obama Approves Plan to Let Children in Central America Apply for Refugee Status
The program is aimed at helping to discourage many children from making a long, dangerous trek across Mexico in an attempt to cross into the United States and join their parents. The idea was first presented to Mr. Obama at the height of the summer’s border crisis, when tens of thousands of young children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were pouring across the border from Mexico and presenting themselves to American border patrol agents as refugees fleeing from rape and gang violence.
The spike in migrations raised concerns that the journey across Mexico was often more dangerous than the rough conditions the children were fleeing in their home countries, while the images of border control centers overflowing with unaccompanied children prompted a political backlash against illegal immigration across the country.
Officials have said that the number of children crossing the border has decreased over the last two months, but White House officials said the new program should help to stem that flow even further by providing children a way to determine if they qualify as refugees without leaving their country. In June, more than 10,000 children crossed the border into the United States, according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, but in August, that number had dropped to slightly more than 3,000 children.
Children at the Border
The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone has doubled since last year. Answers to key questions on the crisis.
In particular, some critics object to the ease with which the children will be able to visit processing centers in their own countries to determine their eligibility for refugee status. In July, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration, predicted that “orders of magnitude more people will apply for refugee status if they can just do it from their home countries.”
Officials countered that the program did not increase the number of refugee visas that the United States would approve. In a memorandum to the State Department released Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that 4,000 of the 70,000 refugee visas should be allocated to people from Latin America and the Caribbean.
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 to the children, experts have said, is the “social group” classification — in short, that the children could be considered a vulnerable group endangered by crime and violence in their countries.
Processing centers in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras will be established, officials said. But they said that “several program parameters” were still being worked out. That could help determine what age the children must be and what dire circumstances they must face to qualify.
The idea of setting up a refugee processing center in other countries is not a novel one, though it has never been done in countries that are reachable by land to the United States. Similar plans were put into effect in Haiti, in the 1990s, and in Vietnam, after the war there prompted many Vietnamese to seek to become refugees in the United States. In both cases, American officials had sought to provide alternatives to dangerous voyages by boat.
Human rights advocates have largely praised the idea, saying the plan would help protect children who are facing rape and even death at the hands of drug trafficking gangs that have become more prevalent in some parts of Central America.
In the memorandum to the State Department, Mr. Obama also said people from Cuba, Eurasia and the Baltics, and Iraq might qualify to become refugees in the United States. But the government will not set up processing in those areas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/...ly-for-refugee-status-in-central-america.html
So, to summarize, Trump shat the bed, and now he blames Obama for all of the people showing up at our southern border. If he had just continued Obama's plan and continued the screening in their own countries, we wouldn't even have a crisis like we are seeing now. It's really that simple. Obama played chess while Trump turned to tiddlywinks.
Obama Had A Plan For Central America. Then Came Trump.
Last updated on June 29, 2018, at 10:15 a.m. ET
Posted on June 29, 2018, at 9:01 a.m. ET
The plan involved aid to Central America and a program to screen vulnerable children there. Trump not only reduced the aid, he killed part of the screening program.
The Trump administration, beset by thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their homeland, last year eliminated a program that was intended to screen would-be asylum-seekers in their home countries — a plan that was meant to avoid the chaos that has been unfolding for the past three months on the US's southern border.
An extension of the program, which the Obama administration established in conjunction with the UN refugee agency, still exists in Costa Rica, where people judged to be at immediate risk are housed while awaiting asylum in the United States and elsewhere. The Trump administration provided funding for that part of the program as recently as April.
But funding for the larger program — the one that was meant to feed into the Costa Rica portion — was cut in August, after being frozen in February 2017 as part of Trump’s efforts to more closely control immigration.
“You went from an administration that was very intent on being forward-leaning on these issues to an administration that could not be more hostile,” said Ronald Newman, who was director of human rights and refugee protection on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. (It's uncertain how the Trump administration fulfills that role now; when asked, an NSC spokesperson replied, "The current National Security Council coordinates policy development on human rights and refugee protections through the work of two directorates staffed by subject matter experts with decades of experience across multiple disciplines.")
The program, when it existed, was the humanitarian arm of a multi-pronged approach that emerged when the Obama administration was faced with a Central American refugee crisis of its own. Its elimination underscores the differences between the way Obama approached an intractable immigration problem and the way the Trump administration has decided to deal with it. Vice President Mike Pence, in his visit with the leaders of the Northern Triangle countries on Thursday, merely told them to stem migration flows.
In 2014, the number of unaccompanied children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras suddenly surged on the southern border. Obama immigration officials responded by expanding detention centers and trying to overturn a court settlement that dictated how long they could hold children — steps similar to how the Trump administration has responded.
But the Obama administration also determined that it needed to confront the problem at the source — that is, in the three countries from which most of the unaccompanied children were coming: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The program it settled on included providing funding to Mexico to better police its own southern border, asking for an emergency economic aid package from Congress for the three countries, and undertaking a media campaign encouraging people from those countries not to make the dangerous journey across Mexico to the United States.
It also set up a program to screen people seeking asylum before they set off on their journey. That became known as the Central American Minors program. Parents, lawfully present in the United States, filled out an “affidavit of relationship,” Form DS-7699, through one of the agencies that resettle refugees with funding from the State Department.
The State Department then forwarded the application to a UN-affiliated office in the country of the child. That office then pre-screened the child and arranged a DNA test to confirm the biological relationship between the child and the petitioning parent. US Citizenship and Immigration Services then interviewed the child. Then came security and medical checks and then, finally, resettlement.
In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, “We started up that program and processed thousands of kids and parolees,” Newman said. In July 2016, 9,500 people had applied to the program; when the program was halted, 1,800 refugees and parolees (a status with a lower level of protection) had been admitted to the United States.
The Obama administration later created an extension of that program, realizing that for many children the risk was too urgent for them to wait for all those procedures to be completed. That part of the program was set up in Costa Rica in partnership with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration, an international organization that advises governments on migration issues. Under this program, especially vulnerable children could, after pre-screening, be moved to a camp in Costa Rica for the rest of the process.
The Costa Rica program was not free from criticism. The program, piloted with Salvadoran applicants, was designed to house 200 people for six months at a time. By November 2017, it had apparently relocated only one Salvadoran family, amid reportsthat its bureaucracy undercut the program’s very purpose. UNHCR and IOM both referred requests for comment to each other, with UNHCR eventually declining to respond on the record or on background.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues to fund the Costa Rica program, which, by January of this year, resettled approximately 180 people not just in the United States but also Australia, Uruguay, and Canada, according to a report from the UNHCR.
Australia’s agreement to take in Central American refugees came after Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull attended Obama’s summit on refugees in September 2016 — an irony, given that the US agreement to take in refugees from Australian detention centers was the subject of an acrimonious exchange between Trump and Turnbull just days after Trump took office.
“Virtually every high-level conversation [Obama had] involved some pitch to his counterpart to be more generous in welcoming refugees,” said Benjamin Gedan, who was South America director on the National Security Council in the Obama White House.
In April of this year, the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migrants provided $1.75 million to support the Costa Rica program, even though what Newman called the “principle feeder” to that program has been stopped.
While Trump rails against Mexico for letting migrants through and Pence is expected to demand that the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras stop migration from their countries, there appears to be little thought to duplicate the Obama effort to confront the problem in Central America.
“The Trump administration fundamentally doesn’t believe in foreign assistance. It wasn’t a great fit for them to get behind a program of carrots and sticks,” said Dan Erikson, who served as special adviser on Western Hemisphere affairs to Vice President Joe Biden. “They prefer the all-stick approach.”
Indeed, Trump has threatened to cut funding completely to the three Central American countries, which collectively are known as the Northern Triangle. For the current budget year, the Trump administration requested only $460 million in aid for the three countries, far less than the $700 million the Obama administration had provided in its final federal budget and an amount so low that Congress increased it to $615 million.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...happened-to-the-obama-administrations-plan-to
Obama Approves Plan to Let Children in Central America Apply for Refugee Status
- Sept. 30, 2014
The program is aimed at helping to discourage many children from making a long, dangerous trek across Mexico in an attempt to cross into the United States and join their parents. The idea was first presented to Mr. Obama at the height of the summer’s border crisis, when tens of thousands of young children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were pouring across the border from Mexico and presenting themselves to American border patrol agents as refugees fleeing from rape and gang violence.
The spike in migrations raised concerns that the journey across Mexico was often more dangerous than the rough conditions the children were fleeing in their home countries, while the images of border control centers overflowing with unaccompanied children prompted a political backlash against illegal immigration across the country.
Officials have said that the number of children crossing the border has decreased over the last two months, but White House officials said the new program should help to stem that flow even further by providing children a way to determine if they qualify as refugees without leaving their country. In June, more than 10,000 children crossed the border into the United States, according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, but in August, that number had dropped to slightly more than 3,000 children.
Children at the Border
The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone has doubled since last year. Answers to key questions on the crisis.
In particular, some critics object to the ease with which the children will be able to visit processing centers in their own countries to determine their eligibility for refugee status. In July, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration, predicted that “orders of magnitude more people will apply for refugee status if they can just do it from their home countries.”
Officials countered that the program did not increase the number of refugee visas that the United States would approve. In a memorandum to the State Department released Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that 4,000 of the 70,000 refugee visas should be allocated to people from Latin America and the Caribbean.
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 to the children, experts have said, is the “social group” classification — in short, that the children could be considered a vulnerable group endangered by crime and violence in their countries.
Processing centers in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras will be established, officials said. But they said that “several program parameters” were still being worked out. That could help determine what age the children must be and what dire circumstances they must face to qualify.
The idea of setting up a refugee processing center in other countries is not a novel one, though it has never been done in countries that are reachable by land to the United States. Similar plans were put into effect in Haiti, in the 1990s, and in Vietnam, after the war there prompted many Vietnamese to seek to become refugees in the United States. In both cases, American officials had sought to provide alternatives to dangerous voyages by boat.
Human rights advocates have largely praised the idea, saying the plan would help protect children who are facing rape and even death at the hands of drug trafficking gangs that have become more prevalent in some parts of Central America.
In the memorandum to the State Department, Mr. Obama also said people from Cuba, Eurasia and the Baltics, and Iraq might qualify to become refugees in the United States. But the government will not set up processing in those areas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/...ly-for-refugee-status-in-central-america.html
So, to summarize, Trump shat the bed, and now he blames Obama for all of the people showing up at our southern border. If he had just continued Obama's plan and continued the screening in their own countries, we wouldn't even have a crisis like we are seeing now. It's really that simple. Obama played chess while Trump turned to tiddlywinks.
