Here are the six things you need to know about how asylum works, and how it relates to the current crisis.
1) Refugee status is for people applying in their home countries; asylum is for people applying here
2) Refugee and asylum applicants have to show they've been persecuted
To get either refugee status or asylum, an individual has to prove two things:
He or she has been persecuted
The persecution was because of his/her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
3) The US cares more about persecution by governments than persecution by gangs
4) Children can still qualify if their families have been targeted
But even though being threatened by a gang doesn't qualify someone for asylum on its own, a child can still qualify for asylum if he or she proves that the gang was targeting him or her based on one of the five categories above: race, religion, political beliefs, nationality, or membership in a particular social group.
5) Most children who come to the US aren't actually getting asylum
Even though the government currently makes it easier for children who come to the US unaccompanied to apply for asylum, not many of them do so....
Furthermore, most unaccompanied children don't formally file their asylum applications until several months after they've arrived in the US. So very few of those cases were from children who had actually come to the US during the last several months.
Children often have other options for legal status that are easier to obtain, like Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Many of them apply for those instead: 3,900 immigrants applied for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status from October to June. All in all, the number of unaccompanied children who end up receiving asylum in the US is much smaller than the number who come.
6) The US can make it easier to apply for refugee status from home — but they have to keep offering asylum, too
According to news reports last week, the US is considering a program to make it easier for young people in Honduras to apply for refugee status without having to come to the United States first. That's the program that President Obama downplayed the importance of on Friday. And his implication, that the program would only grant refugee status to a few people, is consistent with how programs like this have worked in the past.
