WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House announced its intention yesterday to establish refugee processing in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to try to deter unaccompanied children from resorting to crossing the US-Mexico border on their own.
The announcement was made in a memorandum to US 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 US lawmakers had recommended the step that the White House took yesterday, saying that establishing refugee application programmes 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.
