DHS/IMMIGRATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Trump administration is cutting off an Obama-era pathway to the United States for young migrants fleeing violence in Central America, further narrowing the options for thousands of people hoping to seek refuge here as the White House moves to tighten immigration rules.
As of Wednesday [8-16-17], the Department of Homeland Security is ending a program begun in 2014 that gave some children and young adults who had failed to qualify for refugee status permission to enter the United States to live and work on a temporary basis, known as parole.
The agency said it was doing so in response to President Trump’s January executive order on immigration, which directed officials to exercise much more selectively their authority to admit immigrants outside normal legal channels. The Trump administration has also tried to hold back the high tide of young Central American migrants by intensifying immigration enforcement within the country and even seeking out their parents who are in the United States illegally, and arresting them…
Under the Obama administration, the program was established as a way to deal with a relentless surge of children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala arriving at the southern border without adults. While the administration had tried to discourage migrants from making the dangerous journey at all, the initiative was an acknowledgment that that strategy was not thinning the flow.”
-Vivian Yee and Kirk Semple, “Policy Under Trump Bars Obama-Era Path to U.S. for Central American Youths,” The New York Times online, Aug. 15, 2017