A federal program now allows parents in the country to legally request refugee status for their children left behind in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
Refugees International, a non-profit organization, reported Wednesday that few Guatemalan children had been welcomed in the United States to reunite with their parents settled in the country. This has been made possible by an expanded program of the government called Central American Minors (CAM).
CAM allows parents in the country to apply for refugee status for their kids through Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
The Obama administration initially launched the program in 2014, but it was ended in 2018 during the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden reestablished it last March 2021, with the program's second phase opening its doors to the children of Guatemala.
There was only two percent of Guatemalan applicants during the Obama administration because TPS was only granted to the people from El Salvador and Honduras following natural disasters in these countries.
Extended to Guatemalan families
The non-profit advocacy group was surprised to find a report that few Guatemalan children had already arrived in the country under the program's expansion.
"We wanted to focus on Guatemalans just because this is really the first time they are eligible. The U.S. government is kind of building up a bit more of the infrastructure to process CAM cases in Guatemala, as well as outreach to Guatemalan families in the U.S," Senior advocate for Latin America at Refugees International Rachel Schmidtke expressed.
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' Office of the Refugee Resettlement, almost 50 percent of all unaccompanied children who crossed the Mexican border in the country last 2022 were from Guatemala. This includes those trying to be reunited with their parents in America.
Since the beginning of the second phase, about 1,000 applications have been received. Two-hundred-fifty of these is from Guatemalan parents, with the majority from Hondurans and Salvadorans, to which the director of the Americas and Europe Refugees International, Yael Schacher, described as "very little."
Challenges and recommendations
The low number of applications from Guatemalan parents is due to a lack of outreach, but for those who can apply, getting the children to CAM interviews has been challenging. Moreover, those who can go through the interviews and are granted parole face difficulties getting passports to leave the country.
One of the most difficult challenges for applicants is getting the consent of both parents for the passport since, under Guatemalan law, the two parents need to give consent. Most of the time, the father usually is absent in the picture or the actual aggressor, especially for kids and women below 18 years old who have fled due to domestic violence, NBC News reported.
Thus, according to Schmidtke, the passport requirement needs to be improved for a better process and to make it available for more families.
Other recommendations include additional resources to invest in by the federal agencies in the program, such as more collaboration with Guatemala and Mexico officials, outreach efforts to Guatemalan families, and more aggressive and readily available information dissemination about the program. Further, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services should have an online "check case status" feature so that families can quickly check the progress of their cases.
