On Monday, the Biden Administration announced the expansion of a pre-existing program that will see immigration officials importing even more immigrants from Central America into the United States, as reported by The Hill.
The program involved is the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which allows for aliens already residing in the U.S. to request that the government import any minors in their home countries who are dependent on them. The administration defended the move as an effort to reduce stress on the countries that deal with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens marching through on a regular basis on their way to the United States.
“Strengthening collaborative migration management, which includes creating legal pathways, including CAM, is one of the pillars of the president’s blueprint for a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system,” said an administration official during a conference call with the press.
The CAM program had originally been shut down by the Trump Administration in March of 2017, and was reimplemented by Biden in March, with an expansion of eligibility for the program enacted in June. CAM is already actively looking into numerous case requests from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, among others. The program’s first phase will feature reopening cases that were shut down in the Trump era, while the second phase will allow for entirely new applications.
Other justifications were given for the return of the amnesty program, including claims that providing legal pathways for more migrants would reduce their dependence on coyotes and human traffickers, and that it would also reduce the ongoing flow of illegals across the southern border, a situation which has proven politically detrimental to the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party.