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 The announcement was made in a memorandum to U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry that also said the admission of up to 70,000
refugees to the United States in fiscal year 2015 is justified by
humanitarian concerns.
Over the summer, President Barack Obama struggled to contain a
border crisis where tens of thousands of children from Guatemala, El
Salvador and Honduras showed up illegally, often without parents or
relatives, at the Texas border.
Some U.S. lawmakers had recommended the step that the White House
took on Tuesday, saying that establishing refugee application
programs in the three Central American countries was key to defusing
the border crisis.
The 70,000 would be allocated among refugees who are judged to have
specific humanitarian concern. Of these, 4,000 would be from Latin
America and the Caribbean, the White House said.
Of the total, 2,000 refugee slots were not allocated to a particular
region. The memo authorized the State Department to accept up to a
total of 2,000 people from Cuba, Eastern Europe and the Baltics,
Iraq, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
A White House spokesman said the memo signals the Obama
administration's intention to launch "in-country" refugee processing
in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
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The program would allow certain lawfully present, eligible relatives
in the United States to request U.S. refugee resettlement for
children still resident in one of those three countries.
"We are establishing in-country refugee processing to provide a
safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that
children are currently undertaking to join relatives in the United
States. These programs will not be a pathway for children to join
undocumented relatives in the United States," the White House
official said.
(Reporting By Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton)
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