Texas suit to stop Central American miner program could tear family apart

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On a freezing January night in 2000 in a remote town in northern El Salvador, 17-year-old Jesús kissed the head of his sleeping 14-month-old son and turned to his mother. “Please take care of him,” she said before leaving the house to join a small group of migrants on their way to the United States.

As a single mother, she said she couldn’t afford to raise him, so she decided to migrate to Austin, where her father lived and worked in construction. As a rape victim, she said she wanted to leave her hometown because the man who raped her – which led to her becoming pregnant with her son – also lived there. She said she never reported him to the police because she had no faith in the country’s criminal justice system.

She said she left her son behind because she didn’t want to risk taking a toddler on the dangerous journey through the desert and across the border. It’s a decision she says has filled her with guilt over the past two decades as she worked as a cook at a fast food restaurant and her son grew up in El Salvador, raised by his grandmother. .

“I understood that we were both victims, my son and I,” Jesús said in tears. “He didn’t deserve to be in a situation without his mother, and I didn’t deserve to be away from him all these years.”

Jesús asked to be identified by her middle name because she fears that if she is identified publicly, her son could be targeted by gang members in El Salvador – where the country’s government recently suspended civil liberties after a spike in gang-related killings. His son, Javier, is identified only by his first name.

In 2015, she heard about the Central American Minors Program – an Obama-era policy created to provide a legal pathway for children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to reunite with their parents in the United States instead. than using smugglers to enter the country illegally. Parents must have legal status in the United States

Jesús, 40, has Temporary Protected Status, which allows migrants from certain countries where violent conflict or major natural disasters have occurred to legally live and work in the United States Currently, 400,000 people in the United States of 14 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Ukraine, have temporary protected status.

She applied for the Central American Minors Program, and as part of the process, she and her son had to provide DNA test results to prove that Javier was her biological son. In May 2016, Jesús received notice in the mail that Javier, then 16, was approved and could legally migrate.

But before he could travel to the United States, he had to undergo a physical examination and submit the results to immigration authorities. He was waiting for officials to review those results when the Trump administration suspended the program in early 2017 and then canceled it in August 2017.

Last year, the Biden administration restarted an expanded version of the program. Javier’s case was reopened in 2019 as part of a settlement stemming from a lawsuit filed by immigrant rights organizations in federal court.

He is waiting in El Salvador for final approval to travel to Austin. The pandemic has delayed the process, Jesús said.

But the program could be in danger again: Earlier this year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in federal court in Dallas — one of nearly a dozen lawsuits related to the immigration that Paxton has filed against the Biden administration – asking a judge to stop the program because it rewards migrants “who break the law”.

“[President Joe] Biden’s latest slew of flagrant violations of law includes his program for Central American minors, which contributed significantly to many states being forced to take in even more foreigners,” Paxton said. in a statement after filing the complaint earlier this year with the seven-year-old attorneys general. other states.

Lawyer Linda Evarts represents Jesús and three other migrant parents who have reunited or are reuniting their children through the program. The four parents from Central America asked the judge to let them be accused in the trial so they could share their stories and defend the program in court.

“Texas and the other states are trying to close one of the only remaining pathways for migrant children to reunite with their families,” said Evarts, senior attorney overseeing the International Refugee Assistance Project, a refugee resettlement organization. based in New York. .

Last month, the judge let two of the four parents join the case as parties, but excluded Jesús, ruling that his interests will be represented by the other two parents who are still awaiting a decision on their applications for the program. .

“I’ve waited so long for my son to come to the United States, and I’m losing hope,” Jesús said in a written statement to the judge. “My biggest fear is that the US government will cancel the CAM program again like last time, and at the very last minute my son will be prevented from joining me here in the US.”

Since its inception in 2014 – amid a sharp increase in apprehensions of unaccompanied children at the southern border – the Central American Minors Program has received 12,100 applications. Of the 6,300 cases immigration officials made decisions on, 99% were approved before the Trump administration ended the program in March 2017, according to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank who studies immigration patterns.

Of those approved, 4,600 children of legal migrants have traveled to the United States, where they are classified as either refugees, which gives them a path to citizenship, or as parolees, which allows them to receive work permits. but no path to citizenship. Both require a background check and authorization from the federal government.

“A beautiful moment”

Jesús said she crossed the border through the Sonoran Desert into Arizona in February 2000 as an undocumented immigrant. The following year, the US Department of Homeland Security began approving some migrants from El Salvador for Temporary Protected Status after the country suffered two earthquakes that killed 1,100 people and displaced about 17% of 6.2 million inhabitants of the country.

The status has since been renewed as other natural disasters and violence have delayed the country’s recovery. Currently, the status of Salvadorans is valid until December.

After moving to Austin, Jesús met another migrant from El Salvador in 2005, and after dating for a while, they moved in together.

When Jesús finally received a passport, she flew to El Salvador in 2014 to visit her 14-year-old son for the first time since leaving. She said she picked him up at the airport, and as soon as she saw the boy’s light brown eyes and smile, she thought, “He’s my son.”

“I remember seeing a young, handsome man, very charming, and I noticed that he looked like me,” she said. “I hugged him, we cried together. It was just a beautiful moment.

This trip was the last time she saw him.

Meeting canceled

In 2015, her husband was listening to a radio report in Spanish on the program of Central American miners. Shortly after he told Jesús about it, she called Refugee Services Texas, who helped her apply for the program.

After receiving her son’s first conditional approval notice, she sent $1,551 for a one-way plane ticket to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency that coordinated Javier’s trip to the states. -United.

“Every day we talked and celebrated the news that he was going to be able to be here, that he was going to be able to continue studying, that he was going to be able to meet his little sister, that he was going to be able to have a family that ‘he never had,” she said.

For years, his partner wanted to have a child, but Jesús told her that she did not want to have any more children until she found her son. When Javier was allowed to come to the United States, Jesús and his partner decided to have their first child together. Their daughter was born in 2016.

“I felt a lot of guilt, I felt it was selfish of me to have another child here, who had all the comforts of a home and parents who left my son there with practically nothing,” she said.

But then President Donald Trump canceled the program. Javier said the news devastated him.

“I was very excited to be able to go to the United States. I felt it was a dream come true,” Javier said in a WhatsApp voicemail message to the Texas Tribune. “We had talked about it a lot with my mother, we had imagined that we were going to meet again, that I was finally going to meet my little sister, that we were going to have a good time with the family.

Resentment builds up over the years

During the two decades they were separated, Jesús sent $500 a month to his mother and son. She talks to her son on the phone several times a week, using WhatsApp for video chat.

When he was younger, conversations were dominated by Javier’s obsession with Lionel Messi, the Argentine footballer. But as he reached his teens, the conversations were filled with resentment.

“My son told me that he was hurt that I couldn’t bring him to the United States, and he thinks that I didn’t try hard enough to bring him here and that I don’t only care about my daughter,” Jesús said. “It’s devastating for me to hear as a mother.”

Javier is now 22, still lives with his grandmother and works in a hardware store. Although he was no longer a child, he could still move to the United States through the program because he was approved when he was still 18 or younger.

Javier and his mother feel more urgency to get him out of El Salvador.

The country’s Legislative Assembly declared a state of emergency in March, suspending civil liberties. Since then, Javier hasn’t left his remote town for fear of being targeted by gangs or the government targeting anyone he suspects of being a gang member. Around 20,000 people have been arrested, including children as young as 12, over suspected gang ties, according to the president of the country.

Javier said he still hopes to be able to join his mother soon. If he comes, he says, he wants to work in construction. He can’t wait to meet his sister, now 5, for the first time.

“I want to move towards a better future. The United States offers many opportunities for young people,” he said. “In El Salvador it’s not easy, there aren’t many opportunities, there’s a lot of insecurity, it’s dangerous.”

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