Expansions to Reunification Program

Back in 2014, the Central American Minors (CAM) program was created. It was designed to allow certain children from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras to come to the United States to be reunited with a parent or relative with legal status here. The hope was that these children would come through CAM instead of making the extremely dangerous journey to the United States with a smuggler or other dangerous group. When a child entered the United States with CAM, they were either granted refugee status or were paroled in so they seek protection through another mechanism.

The program was stopped under the Trump administration, but in March 2021, the Biden administration announced that they would re-start the program.  Originally, the sponsoring parent had to be on in one of these types of status:

• Lawful Permanent Resident
• Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
• Parole
• Deferred Action
• Deferred Enforced Departure
• Withholding of Removal

This was a great start, but it left behind many parents in the United States who had no status or who had a pending case, but nothing finalized. As processing times ballooned and people waited for their status to be finalized for one of types above,  families became desperate and some children were still making the dangerous journey north to be reunited. On April 11, 2023, USCIS announced an expansion of the CAM program to the following parents/guardians:

• With a pending asylum application filed on or before April 11, 2023;
• With a pending U visa petition filed on or before April 11, 2023; or
• With a pending T visa application filed on or before April 11, 2023.

These changes are huge and will allow many families to be reunited. With asylum cases taking six years or more to be interviewed, with U petitions taking around five years to get a deferred action grant, and with T petitions increasing in processing times, the change was much needed. We have U cases still pending from as far back as June 2018.

I’m thinking about clients who have pending cases and who haven’t seen their children in a decade. This expansion will allow children to safely leave their home country and be with a parent. In some cases, if one parent is in the US and the other parent is in the home country, the parent in the home country can also be included in the application. It’s hard to think of anything better than having families reunited like this!

Since this is a program run through the refugee program, private attorneys (me included, sadly) cannot assist with the application. If you have an unmarried child who is under 21 and lives in El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, and you’re in a qualifying status or have an qualifying application pending, you’ll complete a DS-7699 (there is no fee) and the Department of State will walk you through everything. For questions about the program the best thing to do is to contact a Refugee Resettlement Agency.

Even though we can’t help our clients with this program, we are so excited to think about them being reunited with their children!

-Tracie