New US policy flies migrants to spots for another odyssey
EL CEIBO, Guatemala — Karla Leiva sat on the patio of a migrant shelter near the Guatemala-Mexico border Thursday with her 5-yearold daughter, Zoe. They had been in three countries in the past 24 hours, none of them their own.
Leiva, 32, of Yoro in north-central Honduras, had arrived Wednesday at the shelter in El Ceibo. She and her daughter had started that day 1,000 miles to the north in Brownsville, Texas, where they were put on a plane by the U.S. government with dozens of others mothers and children without knowing where it was going.
Eventually, while in the air, they were told the plane would land in Villahermosa, in southern Mexico’s Tabasco state. There, Mexican authorities hustled them onto buses that drove them the three-plus hours to the Guatemalan border.
Leiva and her daughter were swept up in the latest U.S. government effort to deter migrants and asylum-seekers from arriving at its southern border. While still delivering some migrants on flights directly to their Central American nations, the U.S. government has started supplementing with flights to southern Mexican cities like Villahermosa and Tapachula, where Mexican authorities carry them the rest of the way to Guatemala’s border, even if they’re not Guatemalan.
Since last year, the U.S. has not been allowing migrants to solicit asylum at the southern border under a pandemic-related ban.
Leiva said she was not asked by U.S. or Mexican authorities if she feared returning to her country.
At the Mexico-Guatemala border, they were told to walk into Guatemala and look for the shelter. No one
registered their entrance into Guatemala. They were not asked for evidence of a negative COVID-19 test required of all foreigners entering Guatemala.
“No one told me anything. They never heard my case and why I went to the United States,” Leiva said. “I couldn’t tell them that they were extorting me and that they threatened to kidnap my little daughter and take my adolescent sons to join the gang. That’s why I left the country.”
Responding to reporters’ questions Thursday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made his department’s first public acknowledgment that it is expelling Central Americans on the flights to southern Mexico. The Mexican government has been publicly silent.
Mayorkas said the U.S. was coordinating with the Mexican government on flights that include Central Americans and ensuring that they comply with international law to provide humanitarian protection when warranted.
The flights to the interior of Mexico are part of efforts to discourage returns by migrants apprehended along the Southwest border, Mayorkas said during a visit to the Rio Grande Valley.
He said the Biden administration
has made changes to border policy, including allowing unaccompanied children into the country, but said people without a legal claim to residency would be removed under the law.
On Wednesday, five U.N. agencies, including the High Commissioner for Refugees, expressed concern over the U.S. policy and repeated their call for the Biden administration to lift the so-called Title 42 restriction on asylum.
Mayorkas said the people being expelled to the interior of Mexico have been expelled under Title 42.
Leiva had left Yoro on July 27 with her daughter and three older sons. Twelve days later, she and her daughter crossed the Rio Grande on a raft into Texas with a smuggler and were apprehended. She said her sons were supposed to have followed, but didn’t manage to cross.
Leiva was still trying to understand what had happened and what would come next. She said she could not return to Honduras and she fretted over the $3,000 she had paid the smuggler.
Leiva’s only choice, she said, was to try making her way north again. Her other children were waiting in northern Mexico.