According to some immigration experts, as many as 80 percent of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America, illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border may be permitted to stay in the U.S.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which aims to "lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide," according to its official website, interviewed over 400 of the migrant children, Fox News Latino reported.

Based on the interviews, many of the children left their countries in an effort to avoid "join or die" gangs and threats to their families. According to UNHCR, this means that almost 60 percent of these minors may qualify for either refugee status or political asylum.

In addition, FNL cited immigration lawyers who said that up to 80 percent of the unaccompanied minors may qualify for Special Immigrant Juveniles status. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official website, this program is meant to "help foreign children in the United States who have been abused, abandoned or neglected." Children who cannot be reunited with a parent can obtain green cards through SIJ status and can live and work "permanently" in the U.S.

"The numbers that are eligible are really high," Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration attorney, said. "Eighty or 90 percent [of the 100 migrant children my office represents] would qualify for some type of relief."

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, argued that SIJ status is being exploited, however.

"It's a subversion of the [original] legislation," he told FNL. "The point of this is not that anyone gets a visa who is not living with both parents."

Since October 2013, 47,000 children have been caught trying to cross the U.S. southwest border. It is expected that 90,000 minors, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, will be caught at the border this year, 10 times more than in 2011, according to government estimates. In 2013, the U.S. deported fewer than 2,000 undocumented immigrant children back to their homelands, FNL reported.

Some are urging Congress to change legislation to stop the trend.

"The flow we're seeing now is the result of earlier people allowed to stay and messaging more broadly that minors in the United States are, in effect, exempt from immigration law," Krikorian said.
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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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