Guatemalan minors struggling to access US migrant reunification program: report

Guatemalan at-risk minors face an array of obstacles to access a Biden administration program to reunify with their parents in the United States, according to a new report released Wednesday by Refugees International.

The report on the administration’s revival of the Central American Minors (CAM) program and implementation of phase two found that “few, if any, Guatemalan children have arrived in the United States as either refugees or parolees through Phase 2 of the CAM program.”

The CAM program, originally started in the Obama administration and nixed by the Trump administration, is designed to reunite Central American minors, primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, with parents who have migrated to the United States.

While minors from all three countries see roadblocks to taking advantage of the program, the Refugees International researchers found that Guatemalans face a steeper uphill battle.

“There are things the Biden administration isn’t doing in the U.S. to help the program reach more Guatemalans, and then there are things in Guatemala itself,” said Yael Schacher, one of the authors of the report.

The Biden administration expanded the program in September 2021, giving access to Guatemalans — under Obama it had only been available for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients, and Guatemala is not listed in that program.

But the report found a lack of outreach on the U.S. side that kept stakeholders in the dark: Eligible Guatemalans and authorities in both Guatemala and Mexico are largely unaware of the program, according to the researchers.

“What we’ve seen happen is that the Biden administration hadn’t done enough to get the word out, especially to non-Spanish-speaking Guatemalans. But also I would say that the lack of counsel for Guatemalans in the United States kind of spiraled into them just not knowing about this program,” said Schacher.

“Since restarting the Central American Minors (CAM) Program in March 2021, the United States has strived to provide a safe, legal alternative to irregular migration for minors from the region,” a State Department official told The Hill. “We continue to evaluate the program to make improvements that will better serve the intended beneficiaries, such as the fall 2022 award to new NGO partners dedicated to streamlining application intake and expanding outreach efforts.”

The researchers found that most of the Guatemalans who had availed themselves of the CAM program were families who had counsel in the United States.

Guatemalan migrants have consistently been a substantial number of unaccompanied minors (UACs) encountered at the border in recent years.

From October to January, border authorities have encountered 46,825 UACs at the border, 17,791 of whom are Guatemalan. In fiscal 2022, 60,780 out of 152,057 UACs were Guatemalan, and 58,778 of 146,925 UACs encountered in fiscal 2021 were Guatemalan, according to Customs and Border Protection figures.

The expansion of the CAM program beyond TPS recipients was intended to reduce those numbers, while still providing asylum protections to at-risk minors in Guatemala.

Under TPS, citizens of countries undergoing man-made or natural disasters are allowed to remain in the United States and work under certain conditions. El Salvador and Honduras are both designated for TPS, meaning parents from those countries who benefit from TPS were able to avail themselves of CAM’s previous iterations.

“Essentially before this administration, Guatemalans made up 2 percent of the applicants for this program, and Hondurans and Salvadorans made up the rest. And Salvadorans made up 85 percent during the Obama administration, so this has been mostly a program for Salvadorans, for Salvadoran children,” said Schacher.

But Guatemalan minors eligible for CAM, many of whom have U.S.-based parents in the asylum program, also face particular issues in their home country.

“There’s a lot of untapped potential in Guatemala for kids who really are high risk, who may have parents who have a lawful status or are applying for asylum in the United States that just aren’t being reached, because they don’t know about the program,” said Rachel Schmidtke, the other lead researcher on the report.

Schmidtke added that many eligible minors come from places far away from Guatemala City, and in many cases from communities that don’t speak Spanish.

That often means that to avail themselves of CAM, minors will have to travel hours to fill out paperwork and answer interviews in an unfamiliar city, overcoming language barriers and potential discrimination.

And often the insurmountable obstacle CAM-eligible minors face is obtaining a Guatemalan passport.

“Something that we saw very frequently was that children who were under 18, who had a parent and usually a father, who was sort of absent from the picture or was the aggressor in the family, in many cases, the reason why the mother had left to go claim asylum,” Schmidtke said.

Children need consent from both parents in most cases to receive a passport, said Schmidtke, and families often have neither the resources nor the know-how to navigate custody proceedings in the Guatemalan legal system.

Legal obstacles for children to obtain Guatemalan passports are in large part rooted in abuses of adoption proceedings in the country.

“This requirement for a passport to leave the country is heavily enforced in Guatemala, maybe in ways that’s even more than other countries. And sometimes for good reason, because of a history of concern about children leaving and adoption,” Schacher said.

But for children who are eligible for the CAM program, that legal protection can turn into a burden.

“It’s a long process, and they finally make it through and they’re saying, ‘OK, you’re gonna be able to go to your parents. But now you need this document and you can’t leave.’ So even after the U.S. is saying, ‘It’s OK for you to leave,’ but the Guatemalan government now won’t let you out without this passport. So it’s a real challenge,” said Schacher.

One pressing issue, the researchers said, is that Mexican authorities often don’t know about the program, so are likely to deport Guatemalan minors they encounter, even if those minors are being processed for CAM in the relative safety of Mexico.

Still, the CAM expansion to Guatemala has the potential to help both ease the flow of migrants through Mexico and to the U.S.-Mexico border, and to minimize the dangers of migrant traffic through Mexico.

“There are a significant number of Guatemalan unaccompanied children coming to the border every year and digging into country conditions, specifically in Guatemala, there’s issues that affect children, especially indigenous children disproportionately,” Schmidtke said.

“All the families that we interviewed that were indigenous had very real concerns that their daughters were going to be subjected to sexual violence.”

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