Title: Trump’s New Ban Leaves Few Spots for Refugees, Even the Hunted - The New York Times
Headings: Trump’s New Ban Leaves Few Spots for Refugees, Even the Hunted
Trump’s New Ban Leaves Few Spots for Refugees, Even the Hunted
Content: “I have a client who has not left his house since July,” said Berta Guevara, a lawyer at the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador, which helps people with their refugee applications. Ms. Guevara said that many people in danger now believe that the United States no longer wants them. “A one-month delay to a person who, on any day if they are seen, they will be killed — to that person, every day is a terrible day,” Ms. Guevara said. Even before Mr. Trump’s executive order on Monday, officials at the Department of Homeland Security said they had not been taking on any new cases since the president first sought to suspend refugee admissions in late January, effectively freezing new applications to the program. The new executive order will prolong that freeze for at least another 120 days, leaving children under threat in the region with some daunting choices, including staying where they are or making the long, dangerous trek to the southwest border of the United States to apply for asylum or some other form of humanitarian relief. “There’s still this ambivalence in regarding the Central American situation as a refugee crisis,” said Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a Washington organization that offers legal assistance to unaccompanied immigrant children. “There’s a perception in today’s world that refugees are people who are fleeing war, and that gang and drug violence is not war,” she said. Longer term, the Obama program in Central America could also be under threat because of its frequent reliance on a special provision called humanitarian parole, which allows certain immigrants to enter the United States temporarily even if they do not qualify as refugees. Some Republicans who want to limit immigration call humanitarian parole an overused back door to entering the United States. And Mr. Trump, in an executive order last month that sought to tighten border security, took aim at “the abuse of parole and asylum provisions.”