US to expand refugee admissions for Central Americans fleeing violence

The US is to expand its refugee programme to help thousands of people fleeing violence in Central America avoid a perilous journey often exploited by human smugglers, secretary of state John Kerry has announced.

The office of the UN high commissioner for refugees will now conduct initial screenings to test whether people from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala may qualify as refugees eligible to move to the US legally.

The move came after a backlash from Democrats in Congress who urged Barack Obama to halt the deportations of families who have fled drug-fuelled violence, corruption and institutional breakdown in the three countries and entered the US without documentation.

Speaking on foreign policy at the National Defense University in Washington on Wednesday, Kerry said: “I am pleased to announce that we have plans to expand the US refugee admissions programme in order to help vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and offer them a safe and legal alternative to the dangerous journey that many are tempted to begin, making them at that instant easy prey for human smugglers who have no interest but their own profit.”

The state department said it would work with the UN and non-government organisations to identify people in need of refugee protection, including human rights activists.

A department spokesman added that, unlike the existing in-country programme for Central American minors, this will not be a direct application program. Instead, it will be based upon referrals from organisations that work with vulnerable populations in the three countries. Also unlike the existing Central American minors programme, individuals and families without relatives in the US will be eligible.

The UNHCR will assist with determining who should be referred for resettlement, but the final decision will rest with the US government. The eligibility criteria will be identical to those applied throughout the world under its existing refugee admissions programme.

The latest effort is aimed at expanding that programme by moving applicants, both families and single individuals, into safe zones to await processing. It reflects a wider attempt to curb the unprecedented surge of families and children travelling alone caught at the Mexican border in recent years.

Border agents detained 21,469 people travelling in family groups in the last three months of 2015 – almost triple the number held during the same period in 2014, according to new figures released by Customs and Border Protection. The vast majority were from the northern triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

The number of unaccompanied children more than doubled to 17,370, compared with just under 7,987 in the last three months of 2014. The apprehension of 6,782 children in December made it the fifth-highest month for child detentions on record. Undocumented crossings are usually low in December because of the holidays and cold weather.

The figures reveal the sharpest rise in vulnerable women and children seeking refuge at the US border since the summer of 2014. Then, images of women and children locked up in inadequate detention centres triggered a public outcry and led Barack Obama to declare the flow of undocumented Central American migrants into the US a humanitarian crisis.

A subsequent wave of patchwork measures – including beefed-up border security, advertising campaigns in Central America warning people against travelling to the US, and the multimillion-dollar Southern Border Program (Plan Frontera Sur) to apprehend migrants in Mexico – were implemented in lieu of comprehensive immigration reforms that Republican lawmakers opposed.

The numbers reaching the US overland halved almost immediately as Mexican authorities doubled the number of migrants they detained and deported.

But the number of families and children arriving at the southern border has been rising steadily since August 2015.

“The steady monthly increase, despite Mexico’s continued efforts, makes me think this pattern is probably permanent, and that the sophisticated smuggling networks operating with the help of corrupt officials have adjusted to the Southern Border Plan,” said Adam Isacson, a security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).

“Going into spring, we’re going to see lots of children and families coming into American communities which anti-immigration candidates will try to take advantage of as we head into the primaries. Migration is already a polarising election issue … these numbers are going to reverberate in the campaigns.”

Immigration is always a key issue in American elections, but the popularity of Republican maverick Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric has propelled it to centre stage. Trump and his closest rival, Ted Cruz, support building a wall along the US-Mexico border to keep undocumented migrants out.

The latest detention figures, while still lower than they were during the height of the 2014 crisis, show Obama’s package of measures did little to tackle the root causes driving the exodus, according to Mike Allison, associate professor of political sciences at Scranton University and author of the Central American Politics blog.

Many are fleeing violence. The murder rate in El Salvador increased 70% last year to make it the most dangerous peacetime country in the world. The tiny nation of 6.5 million recorded a murder rate of 104 per 100,000 habitants amid soaring gang bloodshed and extrajudicial killings.

The need for a more immediate deterrent may have triggered recent immigration raids across the US in which 121 people were detained, and at least 80 summarily deported. Democratic frontrunners Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both criticised the crackdown. On Tuesday, more than 140 Democrats published a joint letter accusing the administration of wrongfully deporting women and children.

According to Isacson, the raids were an obvious attempt to look tough and head off anti-immigration critics. “We need to ensure people have access to due legal process because if they’re fleeing violence, they’re not doing anything illegal.”

Kerry, who held a meeting with refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Burma, Eritrea and Congo on Wednesday afternoon, said: “Let me be very, very clear. We can both maintain the highest security standards and live up to our best traditions as Americans by welcoming those in need of help to our great country. That is who we are. That is what we do. That is how we wrote our history. That’s how we became who we are. And we dare not turn our backs on future people, generations seeking the same set of opportunities. We have the ability to protect ourselves even as we remain a country that welcomes migration.”