Newly elected Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales asked Vice President Joe Biden Thursday to stop deporting migrants from his country that are fleeing violence by traveling to the United States, and said the U.S. should give them temporary asylum.
Biden arrived in Guatemala Thursday to greet the newly-elected president and attend his inauguration.
Minutes after arriving, Biden met with Morales at a hotel in Guatemala City, the country’s capital. Morales asked him to consider giving Guatemalan migrants temporary protected status, a short-term legal asylum for immigrants who are temporarily unable to return to their home countries because of violence or another type of extraordinary circumstance, such as an environmental disaster.
Biden told Morales he would make an effort to analyze the proposal.
Biden later met with Juan Orlando Hernandez and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, the presidents of Honduras and El Salvador, respectively.
The vice president arrived amid a growing controversy in both countries over the Obama administration’s recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids of 121 illegal immigrants from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Over the past week, House Democrats have expressed outrage over those raids, and asked that the immigrants from that region be considered refugees who are fleeing violence and poverty.
On Wednesday, the Obama administration announced it would broaden its refugee program to allow “vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” to apply for refugee status and seek asylum in the United States, just as people fleeing conflicts in other countries can do. The move is aimed at reducing the number of illegal immigrants from these countries, in the wake of a new surge of immigrants trying to cross the southwestern U.S. border.
The policy shift would apply only to potential immigrants before they come to the United States, not immigrants who are already here and subject to the ICE raids. It also would do nothing for immigrants from Central America that have already been deported.
House Democrats reacted with tepid praise for the policy shift but pushed the Obama administration to immediately suspend deportation raids targeting mothers and children from Central America.
