Trump Must Face Lawsuit for Terminating Child Refugee Program

(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge refused Monday to let the Trump administration off the hook for abruptly ending a program offering safe passage for child refugees from Central America to reunite with their parents already in the U.S.

A magistrate judge in San Francisco dismissed some claims from a lawsuit challenging the administration's 2017 termination of the Central Americans Minors program, which was established in 2014 in response to children fleeing danger in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. But the lawsuit will proceed over an allegation that the U.S. violated administrative protocols.

Under the program, if immigrant children with parents living legally in the U.S. were denied refugee status, they were automatically given temporary permission to enter the country on “parole” for humanitarian or public interest reasons.

The shut-down of the program in August 2017 canceled conditional approvals for almost 3,000 children and related family members, including those who'd already paid for air travel, according to the lawsuit.

The case is S.A. v. Trump, 18-cv-03539, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

To contact the reporter on this story: Joel Rosenblatt in San Francisco at jrosenblatt@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.