Border crisis: Central American leaders meet Obama at White House

President Barack Obama is mulling a pilot program that would grant refugee status to young migrants from Honduras, the White House has announced, hours before Obama met in the Oval Office with the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The leaders discussed the Central American migrant surge that has stretched resources in Texas along the border and cast renewed attention on the partisan fight over comprehensive immigration reform.

More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors, most of them from Central America, have been detained on the U.S. border this year as they flee extreme poverty and drug traffickers — and the violent gangs that support them — who kill, rob and extort with impunity. United Nations figures from 2012 show the violence in Central America had reached such heights that murder rates in the Northern Triangle were higher than in Iraq during the height of war.

Critics contend that a tepid U.S. response to the overthrow by the Honduran military of the government of President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 has helped fuel the migrant surge to the United States. The U.S. made little effort to return Zelaya to power, instead suspending military aid and counternarcotics assistance. Control of the country’s Caribbean coast and its border with Guatemala, fell to drug traffickers. Homicide rates spiked.

“Your country has enormous responsibility for this,” Honduras’ Juan Orlando Hernández told The Washington Post on Thursday. “The problem of narcotrafficking generates violence, reduces opportunities, generates migration because this [the United States] is where there’s the largest consumption of drugs. That’s leaving us with such an enormous loss of life.”

The pilot program being considered by the White House would screen children in Honduras to determine if they qualify for refugee status. Children would be interviewed by U.S. immigrations officials in Honduras, with assistance from international organizations, The New York Times reported Thursday. Since October, more than 16,000 unaccompanied children from Honduras have been detained along the U.S. border. Similar screening programs were established in Vietnam after the Vietnam War and in Haiti during its political upheaval in the 1990s.

The Obama administration has so far resisted calling the migrant surge a refugee crisis, instead referring to it as a humanitarian crisis.

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina said he was unaware of the program when asked about it in Washington on Thursday. He said he and his Honduran and Salvadoran counterparts will ask Obama for a unified approach to the crisis on Friday.

“We expect that the solution to this problem also is equal for the three countries,” Pérez Molina told The Associated Press.

The refugee proposal comes as Congress appears deadlocked on proposing a solution to the migrant crisis –comprehensive immigration reform has also stalled – and a five-week congressional recess looms at the beginning of next week. Obama has threatened executive action to fix the nation’s immigration system if Republicans do not act before recess.

A White House adviser on Friday said Republicans might try to impeach Obama over his immigration strategy. Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama's longest-serving advisers, told reporters that the executive actions Obama will approve at the end of the summer aimed at tackling undocumented immigration will likely generate ire from Republicans who have blocked comprehensive immigration legislation.

A $3.7 billion emergency spending request for the child migrant crisis has stalled in Congress. Roughly $1.8 billion would go toward finding sustainable housing for children under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). An additional $880 million would be used to prosecute and deport migrant parents, and $64 million would be spent to hasten court cases for children and parents.

But in return for any deal, Republicans have insisted on changes to a 2008 anti-trafficking law, signed by George W. Bush, which provides increased protections for children entering the U.S. who are not from Canada or Mexico. Republicans want changes to the law that would streamline the return of Central American children to their countries of origin. Democrats have resisted such changes.

Republicans have countered with a $1.5 billion emergency plan that would be offset by spending cuts. Under the proposal, HHS would take custody of migrant children until their cases reach an immigration court. Those court hearings would be streamlined under the plan. Currently, children are released from HHS to a U.S. sponsor as they await court dates.

“I think it needs to be resolved,” said House Speaker John Boehner. “That’s why we're continuing to talk to our members about how to resolve it. But as I said before, the White House needs to get its act together or it’s not going to get resolved.” 

With wire services