US turns to UN to screen refugees from Central America

“We will collaborate with UNHCR and its NGO partners to identify persons in need of refugee protection: people targeted by criminal gangs, human rights defenders who have been targeted, and others”, it said in a fact sheet issued after Kerry had spoken.

In December 2014, the USA began offering refugee status to children in those countries who have parents already living legally in the United States.

It’s not the first time the administration has announced a measure for processing Central American refugees in their countries of origin.

The United States plans to admit 85,000 refugees from around the world during the 2016 fiscal year, but had previously planned on welcoming only 3,000 from Latin America and the Caribbean. The administration’s response in many cases has been to jail women and children seeking refuge, prevent them from accessing adequate legal counsel and, now, to target them for deportation raids.

The latest effort is aimed at expanding that program by moving applicants, both families and single individuals, into safe zones to await processing. “This is in line with the United States’ long history of protecting the persecuted and, frankly, a long-overdue development in addressing a refugee displacement situation as dire as what we’ve seen in Central America”.

The expansion of the Refugee Admissions Program is directed primarily at migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where battles between drug cartels are fueling instability and unrest. He said he expected the pace of child refugee arrivals to increase.

Kerry did not say how many more from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras might be accepted under the new policy, but the refugee program has a reserve of 6,000 places not allocated to regions to provide flexibility.

The United States operates nine centres globally, but only one is in the Western hemisphere – in Quito, Ecuador. “That’s who we are”.

But Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who is another leader in drafting the letter to the president, said she had urged the administration to broaden refugee screening and resettlement in the region, a proposal much closer to the administration’s plan.