Fearing Trump, migrants stay put

Strict policies scare prospective crossers into canceling plans

CHOLOMA, Honduras — His bags were packed, and the smuggler was ready. If all went well, Eswin Josué Fuentes figured he and his 10-yearold daughter would slip into the United States within days.

Then, the night before he planned to leave, he had a phone conversation with a Honduran friend living illegally in New York. Under President Donald Trump, the friend warned, the United States was no longer a place for unauthorized migrants.

Shaken, Fuentes abruptly ditched his plans in May and decided to stay in Honduras, despite its unrelenting violence and poverty. He even passed up the $12,000 in smuggler fees that his sister in the United States had lined up for the journey.

“I got scared of what’s happening there,” Fuentes said.

While some of Trump’s most ambitious plans to tighten the border are still a long way off, particularly his campaign pledge

to build a massive wall, his hard-line approach to immigration already seems to have led to sharp declines in the flow of migrants from Central America bound for the United States.

From February through May, the number of unauthorized immigrants stopped or caught along the southwest U.S. border fell 60 percent from the same period last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection — evidence that far fewer migrants are heading north, officials on both sides of the border say.

Inside the United States, the Trump administration has cast a broader enforcement net, including reversing Obama-era rules that put a priority on the arrest of serious criminals and mostly left other unauthorized immigrants alone. Arrests of immigrants living illegally in the United States have soared, with the biggest increase coming among those migrants with no criminal records.

Wariness palpable

The shift has sown a new sense of fear among unauthorized immigrants in the United States. In turn, they have sent a warning back to relatives and friends in their homelands: Don’t come.

The message is loud and clear in Honduras. Manuel de Jesús Ríos Reyes, 55, stood in the unforgiving sun outside a reception center for deportees flown in from the United States. His wife, who had tried to cross the U.S. border illegally in March, was on an incoming flight.

Mindful of the warnings from the United States, Ríos had urged her not to go. “She didn’t pay attention,” he recalled. “Now she’s here. Thank God, she’s alive.”

If his wife talks about trying to cross again, he said, he will redouble his pleas. “Ah, my love,” he planned to tell her. “Stay here.”

Many in the Central American countries known as the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — appear to be doing just that. Those nations have accounted for many of the unauthorized immigrants who have tried to cross the U.S. border in recent years. Now the wariness about Trump’s immigration policies is palpable, the impact visible.

Migrant smugglers in Honduras say their business has dried up since Trump took office. Fewer buses have been leaving the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula bound for the border with Guatemala, the usual route for Honduran migrants heading overland to the United States. In hotels and shelters along the migrant trail, once-occupied beds go empty night after night.

Marcos, a migrant smuggler based near San Pedro Sula, said that last year he had taken one or two groups each month from Honduras to the U.S. border. Since Trump’s inauguration, however, he has had only one client. He blames Trump.

“People think he’s going to kick everyone out of the country,” Marcos said, asking that his full name not be published because of the illegal nature of his work. “Almost nobody’s going.”

Instead, many potential migrants in the Northern Triangle are choosing to sit tight and endure the poverty and violence that have driven hundreds of thousands to seek work and sanctuary in the United States in recent years.

Experts in the region warn that the decline in migration could put additional pressure on Central American countries, increasing competition for work, which is in short supply, and potentially driving more people into the criminal gangs that have terrorized the region.

Trump is also proposing to cut U.S. assistance for the sorts of economic and social development programs that seek to alleviate the poverty and violence that have compelled so many people to flee their homes.

The president’s proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year would slash economic assistance to Central America by 42 percent from 2016 levels, according to an analysis by the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group.

“The effect on judicial reform, job creation and violence prevention efforts would be severe,” the organization said.

Since abandoning his plan to migrate with his daughter to the United States, Fuentes, a widower, has not found any work in the violent northern city of Choloma or in nearby San Pedro Sula.

Every morning he awakes with his daughter, Andrea Belen, at dawn in their one-room cinder block house. He walks Andrea to a friend’s house, where she waits until it is time to go to school, and then he heads out into the city and spends the day knocking on doors and asking for a job.

Stark drops noted along the way

As tough as their life is, though, he does not regret canceling the journey to the United States.

“I have to think about my daughter,” he said. “You don’t want to make a mistake.”

Because much of the migration to the United States from the Northern Triangle is illegal and unauthorized, its precise volume is hard to pin down.

But the decline in migrants heading north has been registered at many points along the way. Mexican authorities recorded a 56 percent drop in the number of unauthorized immigrants detained in their country — many of them presumably on their way to the United States — in the first four months of the Trump administration, compared with the same period last year.

The drop was stark among Hondurans. Nearly 9,000 were detained in Mexico from February to May, compared with more than 18,600 during the same period last year.

“Fewer Hondurans are being detained because fewer are leaving,” María Andrea Matamoros, vice minister for foreign relations in Honduras, told reporters last month.

Still, many in Honduras do not think the decrease in migration will endure for too long. The hardships of life in Honduras are too many, the government’s solutions are too few — and the allure of the United States is too great.

“The smoke of fear will drop, the migration will return,” said Sister Valdete Wilemann, who runs a center at the San Pedro Sula airport where Honduran migrants are processed after being deported from the United States.

The dream of going to the United States is “the culture,” she said. “You’re not going to rid Hondurans of that.”