Guatemala agrees to new asylum rules
WASHINGTON >> The Trump administration has signed an agreement with Guatemala to require migrants who travel through that country to seek asylum there instead of in the United States, President Donald Trump announced Friday.
U.S. officials had been pushing for the agreement as a way to slow the flow of migrants from Central America who have streamed across the Mexican border and into the United States in recent months. This week, Trump had threatened to impose tariffs on Guatemala, or to ban travel from the country, if the agreement was not signed. In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said the agreement would “put coyotes and the smugglers out of business.”
“These are bad people,” Trump said in a signing ceremony with Enrique Degenhart, Guatemala’s minister of interior and foreign affairs.
The accord, known as “safe third,” would affect migrants who flee countries like El Salvador and Honduras seeking refuge from danger.
Under the agreement, asylum-seekers from those countries who arrive at the U.S. border will be turned away if they traveled through Guatemala on their way north. Instead of being returned home, however, they would be sent back to Guatemala, which under the agreement would be designated as a safe country for those migrants to live.
Critics of such policies say Guatemala is itself one of the most dangerous countries in the world and is hardly a place of refuge for those fleeing gangs and government violence.
Negotiations between diplomats for the United States and Guatemala broke down in the past two weeks after Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled that President Jimmy Morales could not sign the agreement until legal challenges were resolved. The ruling led Morales to cancel a planned trip in mid-July to sign the agreement, leaving Trump fuming.
Friday’s action appears to suggest that the threats — which provoked concern among Guatemala’s business community about the effect of tariffs — worked.
It was unclear how Morales intended to carry out the agreement, given the court ruling. Officials said the Guatemalan legislature must approve the agreement before it can go into effect.