The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Denied asylum, migrants go back to homes they left
By now, one young couple thought they’d be in the U.S. Somewhere, anywhere, in the U.S. Now what?
SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS >> By now, the young couple thought they’d be in the United States. Somewhere, anywhere, in the United States. They thought they’d have jobs — he’d work construction, maybe she’d be a waitress. They thought they’d be safe. They thought they’d have asylum.
Instead, an American judge swiftly denied their asylum requests. The Trump administration, in making asylum an increasingly remote possibility for everyone, had closed the door on them.
In early August, immigration officials escorted the couple onto a chartered airliner packed with deportees that flew them back to this industrial city in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
They were home, back in a two-room apartment in the dusty San Pedro Sula neighborhood of Rivera Hernandez.
There was nowhere more frightening.
“They own Rivera Hernandez. The gangs own it,” said the wife, a driven, barely educated daughter of farmworkers who had promised herself as a little girl that she would escape the drudgery of itinerant field work. She, like most migrants living underground in Honduras, spoke on condition that her and her husband’s names not be used, fearing retribution by gangs. “They own the whole place. They walk around freely.”
This story is part of an occasional series, “Outsourcing Migrants,” produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
MS-13. Mara 18. Los Vatos Locos — The Crazy Guys. The gangs’ shifting lines of control dodge and weave through Rivera Hernandez, a place where even the police are afraid. Here, nearly every business pays “el impuesto de guerra” — the war tax — extortion payouts that can range from a couple dollars a week for a sidewalk vendor to thousands of dollars a month for a large company.
Everyone knows what happens to people who don’t pay. They know about the men shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, the kidnapped daughters of business owners raped and tortured before being killed. They know about the bloody bags found alongside San Pedro Sula’s roads, spilling out with corpses and body parts.
The gangs want people to know these stories. Fear is profitable.
Before they left for United States, the young couple had opened a tiny grocery store near a Rivera Hernandez intersection. After a few months, they were forced to start paying war tax to Mara 18. The amounts rose and rose until they couldn’t pay anymore. Fearing for their lives, they fled to the U.S, the safest place they could think of.
Then, after being denied asylum, they came back.
“Why did you leave?” a Mara 18 member demanded angrily of them after they returned. “Why did you leave your business? Why aren’t you making any money for us anymore?”
Their pleas of poverty went unheard.
“I thought we would cross over” to the United States, she would recall. “Our plan was to work until we could come back and build a house, and a new business. But not in that neighborhood. In a different place where it might be less controlled by gangs and criminals.”
Then she began to weep. While asylum has always been a long shot for migrants, with most claims denied, it has become even harder in the Trump administration, which has focused on making asylum increasingly difficult — some would say nearly impossible — to get.
U.S. pressure on Mexico has forced tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to survive an immigration limbo in shelters and ever-growing tent camps in Mexican border cities, waiting for their cases to wind through U.S. immigration courts. Pressure on Central American governments, meanwhile, has led to bilateral agreements aimed at sending migrants to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to seek asylum there.
Many have been deported back to the dangerous places where their journeys started. Among them was a soft-spoken factory worker, sitting in a TGI Fridays in San Pedro Sula in late November.
It had been nearly a year since he’d applied for U.S. asylum, claiming he feared being killed by criminals hunting him in Honduras. It had been four months since he’d been deported and flown home.
And it had been three days since he was walking on a crowded downtown street two blocks from San Pedro Sula’s city hall, where the policemen outside carry assault rifles and wear body armor.
Suddenly, a man stepped toward him, fired one shot from a pistol, and fled.
The worker slumped against a wall, disoriented, a sensation of warmth rippling through him before the pain hit. But he’d been lucky. The bullet had grazed him just below his belt line, leaving a bloody welt about 3 inches long. He was discharged from the hospital after a few hours and returned to his tiny rental apartment and to a life in hiding.
He says he and his relatives have been hunted for more than 20 years by a powerful criminal family from his small hometown, ever since an attack left his stepmother and stepbrother dead. The other family, he said, fears the men of his family will seek revenge.
He ticks off the years of carnage: his father shot, three cousins killed as they approached adulthood, including one tortured by having his left eye ripped out. As a child, he had been grabbed off the streets as a warning, his attackers using a switchblade to cut some of his ankle tendons before shoving him out of the car.
“I’ve spent my whole life running,” he said in his soft mumble, looking down at a half-eaten cheeseburger as he talked about life underground. “One day they are going to get me.”
The rules are clear for outsiders who enter the gangcontrolled neighborhoods of San Pedro Sula: Roll your windows down so the spotters can see you’re not a threat; drive slowly; stay on main roads, leave before nightfall.
There are police stations in these neighborhoods, but everyone knows who is in charge. The gangs monitor the streets, the police patrols and rival gangs using a complex network of young boys who work in shifts around the clock and report anything suspicious.
San Pedro Sula’s criminal life is dominated by two street gangs formed decades ago in Latino enclaves of Los Angeles, spreading southward as gang members were deported. Today, MS-13 and Mara 18 are the most powerful and feared gangs in Central America, and have operations that reach from Mexico to the U.S. to Europe.
Their power is immense in Honduras, where they control many poor urban neighborhoods and have at least some influence nearly everywhere, experts say. A welter of other gangs control smaller swathes of territory.
Their earnings come from a range of businesses, from drugs to weapons to human trafficking, though they are best known by most Hondurans for the war tax.
Very little escapes their notice.
Street violence remains commonplace, driving tens of thousands of people to flee the country. Just days ago, a gang of gunmen on motorcycles killed the director of the country’s maximum-security prison.
Orlin Castro, the dean of San Pedro Sula’s crime reporters, chronicles that violence.
He’s a pudgy 32-yearold who works much of the night, sleeps until noon, wields three mobile phones and often holds court at upscale coffee shops. He’s been chasing crime since he was 15 years old.
While the murder rate has dropped in recent years, he says many victims are now simply disappearing.
“Every day I get phone calls about people who are missing,” he said.
After thousands of appearances at murder scenes, and thousands of hours spent with cops and gangsters, Castro can seem like a parody of a hard-bitten reporter, a man who chuckles at grisly murder details and proudly declares that he sometimes gets tipped off in advance to killings.
There’s only one way, he said, for people to stay safe in San Pedro Sula: “There are three rules you have to follow here: You listen and you watch. But you never tell.”
And if you do speak up about what you’ve seen?
He laughed and sliced his finger along his throat.