In Credible Fears, Unaccompanied Minors, and the Causes of the Southwestern Border Surge, Professor Scott Rempell attributes the surge in unaccompanied children and refugees seeking asylum in the United States from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) to both country conditions arising from within the Northern Triangle and to migrants’ perception that changes to U.S. immigration law and policy favorably impact their chances to remain in the United States.
Within the Northern Triangle, the author cites several contributing factors to the surge in migration. First, each of the three countries have extraordinarily high murder rates linked to drug trafficking and gang violence. In major cities throughout the Northern Triangle, gangs control large swathes of neighborhoods. Due to the conflicts in the Northern Triangle during the 1980s, gangs have wide availability to arms which has aggravated existing gang violence problems. Second, the author states that the depressed economies of the Northern Triangle cause migrants to flee Central America to look for better economic opportunities. Finally, Rempell cites weak state governments that lack the power or the will to address the aforementioned issues as another underlying factor in the decision of citizens to migrate from the Northern Triangle.
Rempell cites U.S. changes in “credible fear” processing and the processing of unaccompanied children at the border as creating a perception of an increased opportunity to remain in the United States amongst potential migrants. Credible fear processing is the determination of whether an individual is entitled to refugee status within the United States based upon a credible fear of torture or persecution due to their membership in a protected class in accordance with the 1967 United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which the United States codified in the Refugee Act of 1980. Absent credible fear processing, migrants are subject to expedited removal procedures of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which permits Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspectors to summarily determine that individuals are ineligible for entry to the United States due to a lack of valid travel documents. Credible fear claimants are transferred from DHS control to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who conduct interviews to determine whether claims are credible. Since 2009, ICE has broadly interpreted its authority to grant parole to migrants rather than detaining them throughout the credible fear determination. Migrants granted parole often stay with family members who have already arrived in the United States. The change in parole discretion has also been coupled with a significant increase in the rate of approval of credible fear claims. The percentage of approved claims from 2006 to 2009 was in the sixties. Since 2009, the number of applicants has surged and the percentage of approved claims has climbed into the seventies and eighties.
Changes in determining the status of unaccompanied children, who before 2003 were treated with little distinction from adults, has led potential migrants to expect higher chances of successfully resettling in the United States. The 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires that unaccompanied children who are awaiting determination of their immigration status be placed in the “least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.” As a result, unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle seeking entry into the United States are typically placed with family members or friends who have previously migrated to the United States until their immigration status is determined.
Rempell limits the scope of his article to determining the causes of the recent surge in credible fear claimants and unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle at the U.S. border. He does not delve into a policy analysis of potential responses to the situation. However, in his conclusion, he does cite the increase of adjudicatory capacity within the United States as an uncontroversial means of addressing the backlog of pending cases and urges policy makers to focus on the root causes of migration cited in his article in determining policy responses.
NOTE: This summary is produced by the Rule of Law Collaborative, not by the original author(s).