The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHY FAMILIES RISK IT ALL AT BORDER
Since April, the Trump administration has enforced a “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. Under the policy, officials must prosecute as many border-crossers as possible. Initially, parents caught coming to the United States without authorization were immediately taken into custody, and their children were sent to detention centers. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the family separations while keeping the “zero tolerance” policy in place.
The architects of the new policy argue that the harshness is part of the point — if coming to the United States illegally is painful, they say, people won’t come.
But many of these families are coming from exceedingly violent corners of Central America and aren’t just traveling to the United States for better jobs or more economic opportunities. Some are literally fleeing for their lives.
A Pew study found that the number of immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala jumped by 25 percent between 2015 and 2017. During that same stretch, the total United States immigrant population grew just 10 percent. In 2016, the last year for which statistics are available, the United States accepted more asylum requests from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala than from any other country besides China.
Here’s a reminder of why many immigrants are coming to the U.S. in the first place:
El Salvador
El Salvador is the most violent country in the world that’s not an active war zone. But it might as well be one.
“Exceptionally intense and persistent” violence, as the International Crisis Group puts it, pits rival gangs against one another. The state’s “iron fist” response has only made things worse, with mass detentions and hyper-militarized police who are accused of shooting first and asking questions later.
In 2017, one family of six explained to the United Nations why they fled their hometown. For years, the family ran a small convenience store out of their home in a San Salvador slum. In 2013, gang members showed up and demanded bribes. At first, the family handed over money and inventory in order to protect themselves. (Salvadorans spend $756 million in extortion fees every year, according to the Central Bank of El Salvador, which estimates that violence costs the country 16 percent of GDP.)
One day, they couldn’t afford to pay. Days later, 20 gang members showed up at their door, threatening to kill the whole family unless they turned over $10,000 — about 2.5 times what the average Salvadoran makes in a year.
The family left their home the next day. “Since the family fled, the retaliation has been brutal: one close relative was hacked to pieces and another was shot to death. The family continue to receive threats and they live in constant terror of what could happen next,” said Michelle Centeno of the United Nations.
As the Intercept wrote, children are also vulnerable: “Kids in El Salvador face well-documented threats at the hands of gangs, from extortion to forced recruitment as members or ‘girlfriends’ of members. Being a witness to a gang murder, or just being in the wrong part of town or on the wrong bus line, can get you killed. Increasingly, they also face violence from police. Poor youth are rounded up on suspicion of being gang members, hassled, imprisoned, and, in some cases, killed.”
It’s worth noting that the United States bears some blame for El Salvador’s problems. The violent MS-13 gang was actually founded in Los Angeles. In response, the U.S. deported thousands of El Salvadorans, effectively exporting a ready-made gang to a much smaller country illequipped to handle the fallout.
Honduras
To say Honduras is the second-poorest country in Central America, where 61 percent of the population lives in poverty, doesn’t quite capture the situation. Honduras is one of the most unequal places in the world, with rampant unemployment and widespread economic insecurity.
Last year’s disputed election has left government officials without much authority to govern, and that power vacuum has been filled by powerful gangs. In order to survive, families must pay gangs a “war tax.” Those who won’t, or can’t, are often killed.
“With a very fragile government and a very fragile state, the violent situation with the gangs and the military is going to increase also,” Lester Ramirez of Transparency International told NPR.
“Most of the people that I’ve talked to, they understand the risks,” Ramirez said. “Just crossing Mexico, there’s ... human trafficking, and there’s rapes and all of this. But they’re seeing that they have to immigrate because they don’t see any opportunity.”
Women and girls are particularly vulnerable in Honduras and El Salvador. Those countries have some of the highest rates of female homicide in the world. Sexual violence is also a huge, often unreported issue.
Guatemala
Guatemala faces many of the same challenges as El Salvador and Honduras, including gang violence and poverty. Things are so bad that many of the migrants captured at the U.S. border and flown back to Guatemala City in handcuffs say they plan to try crossing into the United States again.
NBC News interviewed several of the would-be immigrants. One, Hicer Hernando, 23, told reporters that he fled Guatemala after his father was killed in a machete attack. His family is Catholic; the people who killed his father are Evangelicals. “They were going to kill me too,” Hernando said. Another returnee, Juan Sebastian Tuil Mejia, said that he’d been deported 18 months ago and was still without a job.
Thousands of refugees have fled the country and traveled 2,000 miles to the United States border in the hopes of earning asylum.
The story of the Berduo family is illustrative. The Berduos’ son Wayner has been a victim of several gang-related violent crimes in Guatemala. The 23-year-old was shot in the eye and the arm. His father told NPR that drug lords sent assassins to kill his sons in December. Their crime? Taking tourists to visit a waterfall in the northern part of the country. The drug lord allegedly didn’t like having travelers so close to his property.
“If we go back home,” Berduo told NPR, “they will kill us.”
They’ve been turned away three times.