Ariel Palacios and his younger brother strode down the halls of Aldine High on the first day of school last month, uncertain if they would be on campus come September.

The senior had signed up for advanced placement government and economics classes even though he struggled with the pronunciation of some English words. His sibling Juan Jose, a quiet, sports-obsessed junior, hoped to have another shot at playing for the Mustangs soccer team, a dream impeded last year by an ankle injury.

Now all of that was up in the air, as was everything about their lives.

The siblings shared a small bedroom, the walls painted pale blue by their father for their arrival in Houston nearly three years ago. Their older brother, 25-year-old Olman, worked 14-hour days as an electrician in Tomball before collapsing in exhaustion at night on a hammock strung across the room. It reminded him of his grandmother’s house in El Salvador, where he and his brothers grew up.

On weekends, the boys helped their dad on side construction gigs, recently ripping out floors from the old Houston Press building downtown. Ariel is saving for a car and tuition money so that he can obtain his electrician’s license through community college.

“In this country, if you like to work, you will live well,” their father, Juan, often said. “You can do anything.”

Juan is passionate about the opportunities of America and its rule of law. He believes these qualities made this country great, compared to his native El Salvador, where the gangs and corruption that infiltrate nearly every corner of society have drawn hundreds of thousands like him to the United States. That is why he said he waited almost two decades before sending for his children to come to Houston — legally.

Then a government letter arrived unexpectedly this summer, threatening to derail everything the family had spent so long to build, at such cost. In confusing legal jargon, the document denied the three brothers’ request to renew their two-year status —known as humanitarian parole — and ordered them to present for deportation to El Salvador by Sept. 15.

President Donald Trump’s administration had terminated the program through which they entered the United States, known as the Central American Minors initiative, or CAM, shortly after he took office in 2017. The government was no longer issuing renewals of the status. Under the program, instituted by President Barack Obama in 2014, a few thousand children and teens from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala who fulfilled stringent requirements —including having a parent with legal status in the United States — could apply for protection here from their home countries.

‘Took all the right steps’

The idea, coming after a record nearly 68,600 Central American minors arrived alone at the southern U.S. border in 2014, was to prevent more from making that dangerous journey north.

About half of 404 such children surveyed by the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees in 2013 said they had experienced or been threatened with harm by organized criminal groups in their home countries. A quarter had suffered at the hands of gangs. Nearly half the children reported that at least one of their parents lived in the United States.

In December 2016, Obama’s ombudsman to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversaw the CAM initiative, called it “one of the most important programs” the agency had developed in four years, saying it was a “targeted option for minors to escape violence and join close family.”

“Such a program has a place in the regional efforts to provide safe passage and long-term refuge to these displaced children,” the ombudsman, Maria Odom, wrote.

One month later, the Trump administration essentially stopped processing such applications and in August 2017 officially terminated half of the program. By November that year, no new cases were accepted.

A USCIS spokesman declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. On its website, the agency explained the program was “part of an integrated strategy to address factors contributing to increases in migration from Central America.” However, according to the president’s executive orders curbing humanitarian parole and halting refugee admissions, it was now “pursuing a new strategy to secure the U.S. southern border.”

The White House has insisted it supports legitimate asylum seekers seeking protection here and is simply trying to end what it claims is widespread abuse of the system.

Over the last two and a half years, the administration has dramatically overhauled the American asylum and refugee process in unprecedented ways — curtailing how one can qualify for asylum, trying to ban migrants from requesting asylum at the southern border, and making applicants wait in dangerous Mexican border towns for the duration of their immigration cases. It has slashed the number of refugees allowed into the country to the lowest level in history, permitting in only 24,700 between October 2018 and July, according to the U.S. State Department.

Meanwhile the administration is pursuing agreements with Central American countries such as Guatemala and Panama that would force asylum seekers to first seek protection there. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has said the goal is for those fleeing persecution to find refuge in the closest possible place to their homes, rather than hiring smugglers for the perilous trip to the United States.

Advocates say the CAM program, which brought the Palacios boys to Houston, fit squarely into what the administration claimed it wanted asylum seekers to do. A version of the initiative was included in a compromise the White House offered to end a government shutdown in January this year.

“With respect to having people seek authorization for entry before appearing at the border, that’s exactly what these kids did,” said Lisa Frydman, vice president for regional policy and initiatives at Kids In Need of Defense, a national advocacy group for migrant children. “They took all the right steps and now they are going to be sent back to danger and likely have no choice but to come back.”

Opponents such as Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for reduced immigration and whose platform the Trump administration has often adopted, said the CAM program wrongly skirted congressional limits on how many foreigners are allowed into the United States. In a 2016 statement, Stein called CAM a “mass resettlement program …designed to perpetuate the Obama administration’s policy of mass immigration by any means necessary.”

Between 2014 and 2017, about 6,000 minors were admitted through the program. Advocates said the administration used previously allocated refugee visas and has broad discretion on granting humanitarian parole.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which is affiliated with FAIR, wrote in an email that the CAM program was a “transparent gimmick to improperly allow (a) family reunification program.”

She called it a “bogus refugee program.” In practice, she said, CAM largely enabled parents who crossed illegally and obtained a temporary protected status once in the United States -- instead of legally immigrating through other means -- to bring their children, who otherwise would have few formal avenues to come here other than seeking asylum at the border.

Jen Smyers, director of policy at Church World Service, a national refugee resettlement group, said CAM addressed a vital need because there is currently no way to seek refugee protection from a Latin American country of origin. Refugees must apply through the United Nations in a third country, and the administration admitted only 634 refugees from all of South and Central America this fiscal year.

“From one side of their mouth, they say they want you to come by applying for protection before you get here, and from the other side of their mouth, they are literally dismantling the entire structure and capacity of the refugee resettlement program that would allow you to do that,” Smyers said. “They don’t want anyone coming here, regardless of what they’re fleeing and regardless of how they’re applying for protection.”

Minors like the Palacios brothers, who arrived here through the CAM program, received parole and have lived with their families in the United States for several years, will now likely see the administration deny the renewal of their two-year legal status and order them deported to situations where they may face danger.

Juan, the 47-year-old father, sank his head into his hands.

“I just don’t understand,” he said. “We did everything the right way.”

‘Come when the time is right’

Nearly two decades ago, Juan was a young father with three boys and another on the way. He was struggling to support his family growing maize, but there weren’t other jobs in in the small municipality of Pasaquina near El Salvador’s border with Honduras.

Like thousands of Salvadorans, Juan’s older brothers had fled the country in the 1980s during its civil war, settling in the United States. One was able to become a permanent resident and two qualified for a type of legal status for Salvadorans. They told Juan about all the jobs in Houston, so many you could find one on practically every corner.

In April 2001, as Juan’s wife was pregnant with their fourth son, the father decided to go too.

In Houston, Juan lived with one brother and quickly applied for and received a temporary protected status for citizens from certain countries ravaged by natural disasters or war. He worked as a bricklayer, sending $250 to his family every two weeks.

He told his wife not to risk bringing the boys on the perilous journey north. It took him 45 days to cross through Mexico, with soldiers there turning him back three times, and he feared he would die in the Arizona desert.

“You suffer a lot in the journey,” he said. “Nobody recommends it. We never thought of having them come like that.”

The years apart weighed on Juan and his wife, so in 2007 Jessica came here with a brother, leaving her four boys with her mother in Pasaquina. She couldn’t bear to bid them goodbye, slipping out while they slept. In Houston, she cried every day. She wanted to go back and bring her sons.

“It’s too dangerous,” Juan told her. “Look on the news how many kids are dying on the journey ... they will come when the time is right.”

For now, he said, they had to support their children from Houston.

They sent money and tried hard to parent by phone. They wanted to know where the boys were at all times.

In 2010, Juan visited El Salvador for the first time since he had left. Juan Jose, who had not been born when his father went north, did not recognize him at El Salvador’s international airport. He looked much older than in the photos. The father stayed for a month, trying to get to know his sons again. Shortly after returning to Houston, he and Jessica had a daughter, Marielena, the only American citizen in their nuclear family.

The parents worried about their boys, especially as El Salvador’s homicide rate skyrocketed, making the country the most dangerous in the world outside a war zone. Its two murderous gangs, MS-13 and 18th Street, controlled nearly every inch of the nation and forced teenagers to join their killing ranks.

“I feared for them even in my dreams,” Jessica said of her sons.

When Olman was 15, gang members at school threatened to hurt his family if he did not help them. Olman never returned to class, but began tending maize on an uncle’s plot of land. The other boys rarely left their grandmother’s house other than to go to school because they did not want to get in any trouble.

It was an isolated existence, and the urgency to get them to Houston was mounting, but Juan insisted they find a way to do so legally.

In 2015, the father heard about Obama’s new program allowing some Central American children to apply for protection at home and come to the United States with authorization. He researched, sought legal counsel, and flew to El Salvador to investigate whether the program was legitimate.

Over the course of two years, Juan paid more than $14,000 in U.S. government fees and other expenses related to the program. He and the boys underwent DNA testing to prove he was their father and background checks showing they had never committed a crime. Juan paid private shuttles to drive his children on the dangerous five hour-route from Pasaquina to San Salvador, where they went through rounds of interviews with refugee officials and the U.S. Embassy to determine their eligibility.

By the end of 2016, as Trump won the presidential election on a platform promising to cut immigration, the Palacios family received uplifting news. The oldest son was above the age threshold to qualify, but the three youngest had been approved for the program and would arrive in Houston on Jan. 19 — hours before Trump was inaugurated.

Just in time

Within days, Trump issued several expansive executive orders on immigration, including curtailing the use of humanitarian parole, making it harder to receive asylum, and halting refugee admissions. Though the government would only officially end the CAM program in August 2017, it essentially stopped processing applications.

Olman, Ariel and Juan Jose had made it just in time; more than 2,700 Central American children who had completed almost the entire, extensive process — many awaiting only their medical checks, the final step —were in limbo at home. (In December 2018, a San Francisco federal judge ruled that the government had wrongly bypassed a statute governing how to establish new regulations and under a court settlement those children were allowed in, too.)

The program had two tracks. About 1,770 children, most from El Salvador, qualified for refugee status after proving that they had been persecuted for their race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group or their political opinion, and that their government could not help them. After a year of being in the United States, they would qualify for a green card.

Fleeing gang violence, a significant driver for Central American children, does not always fit neatly into those refugee requirements. So the program also approved about 1,500 minors such as the Palacios boys for a status known as humanitarian parole, a measure intended to allow someone with no other legal avenue into the United States to enter because of a “compelling” circumstance. The status held no pathway to American citizenship and must be renewed every two years.

The Palacios family thought they were lucky.

They had waited so long for this day. Juan rented a two-bedroom apartment in their complex and carefully set up the boys’ room, installing sturdy hooks for Olman’s hammock and buying them phones, a television, and a PlayStation. Marielena was thrilled to meet her big brothers.

Ariel and Juan Jose enrolled in school, thrust suddenly into an English-speaking world and trying to get up to speed in their classes. They succeeded in math and computers, but struggled with courses such as U.S. history taught solely in English.

“I didn’t know a lot of the history,” Juan Jose said. “And it was a little complicated because of the language.”

But he came away fascinated with the Civil War and the role of the U.S. in World War II, marveling at how the country had emerged as the world’s dominant power.

The brothers made friends — Ariel began dating another girl at school who was also from Pasaquina — and Olman found a job as an electrician with one of his father’s relatives. They tried to relearn being a family.

“Time has stolen me from them,” the father said. “I am trying to get to know them again and to see what they are like as people.”

‘Worrying because time is running out’

Jessica kneaded dough to make pupusas, a traditional Salvadoran dish of fried and stuffed flatbread.

On the patio, Juan fried chicharrón, or pork rinds, on an outside stove. If the dish is made indoors, the smell hangs inside their small apartment.

After a week of night shifts reconstructing the inside of a Target in Humble, the father was off that day. He always volunteered for what his coworkers considered the unpopular schedule because it paid more. He recently helped finish a Kroger in the Galleria and is also working on renovating a school in Sugar Land.

“I’m always looking for hours,” Juan said. “For me, it’s not very tiring because I’ve done it for so long.”

He worried about how much longer his own legal permission would last.

The Trump administration last year announced it was rescinding the temporary protected status of more than 300,000 people from El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan and Nepal. A San Francisco federal judge blocked the government from revoking that authorization while the issue is under litigation, but it is unclear how the judge will ultimately rule on the program’s legality.

The uncertainty weighed on the family. Marielena recently came home from school saying kids were talking about parents being deported. Would that include her own?

“That’s not going to happen to us. Don’t worry,” Juan said, trying to comfort his daughter. “Everything is going to be fine.”

Privately, he worried. Not only about his own future, but about the effect on the kids.

“These are the things that make children sick,” he said.

Not long ago, federal immigration agents descended on their complex looking for a neighbor. But the man either did not answer the door or was not home, and the agents left.

All the money Juan spent bringing his boys to Houston has added up, and more legal costs loomed. Recently, he hired an attorney, Richard Prinz, who in August filed a federal lawsuit asking U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston to temporarily halt the deportation of Juan’s sons while they litigate whether their status was wrongly terminated.

“You will try for your kids until the impossible,” Juan said. “But it’s worrying because time is running out.”

Ariel walked to get Marielena at the bus stop and she stormed into the apartment, picking her pet turtle Penelope out of her container.

“Her teacher says she can’t get her to stop talking,” Jessica said. “The boys, on the other hand ...”

Life in El Salvador is difficult, she said. It has an impact on children.

Ariel and Juan Jose spend much of their time studying. They both passed their STAAR tests and soon will take their SATs. They did not know a word of English two and a half years ago, but now their English as a second language teachers classified them as advanced.

“They were really awesome students,” said Fernanda Vargas, an ESL teacher who taught them both.

Olman left behind a girlfriend in El Salvador who is studying English at a university there. He hopes she might make her way here one day.

But who knows where they will be then?

If it’s in El Salvador, he feared, they might be dead.

lomi.kriel@chron.com

This story was updated to correct the teacher's name. It is Fernanda Vargas, not Barjas, as originally provided by the school district.