Migrants face old dangers upon return
CORTÉS DEPARTMENT, Honduras — Yovani has a strategy for staying alive: He will not let anyone know he is back in Honduras, he will move homes every couple of weeks and he will stay indoors.
This is how much he fears the gang member who killed his brother, who forced two other close relatives into exile and who, he says, is trying to murder him next.
Yovani, 23, had hoped to apply for asylum in the United States. But when he and his family arrived at the border late last month, U.S. officials diverted them to Guatemala instead.
The action is permitted under a new accord between the Trump administration and the Guatemalan authorities, but it has left Yovani with no good options. Fearing for his safety in Guatemala, he and his family returned to Honduras. And then they looked for a place to hide.
“We can’t stay in one place,” Yovani said from northern Honduras, where he, his wife and two daughters have lived since earlier this month.
Getting killed in Honduras, he explained, “is supereasy.”
Trump administration officials last year created the policy, which allows them to send asylumseekers to Guatemala to apply for sanctuary there. Their hope is that it would reduce the number of migrants reaching the United States.
But critics say the deal may be a death sentence for migrants.
Since the transfers began in November, more than 900 Central Americans have been sent to Guatemala. But only 20 — about 2% — have formally applied for sanctuary there.
The rest have opted instead to face the risks of either returning to their home countries or heading north once again, hoping to find sanctuary in Mexico or try their luck, one more time, at the U.S. border.
Supporters of the GuatemalaU.S. deal point to the large number of transferees who have left Guatemala as evidence that their asylum cases likely had little merit. Migrants and their advocates, however, say it instead reflects the dangers vulnerable people face because of Guatemala’s weak rule of law.
“To be here is almost the same as being in Honduras,” said Carlos Eduardo Woltke Martínez, a migrants’ advocate in the human rights section of Guatemala’s public prosecutor’s office. “You’re in the same neighborhood of the criminal groups. The conditions here are not a guarantee of your safety.”