Migrants find themselves stranded abroad by new U.S. policy

Karla Leiva sat on the patio of a migrant shelter near the Guatemala-Mexico border Thursday with her 5-year-old daughter Zoe. They had been in three countries in the past 24 hours, none of them their own.

Leiva, 32, from Yoro in north-central Honduras, had arrived at the shelter in El Ceibo on Wednesday. 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.

The rumor running among the migrants was that they were being sent to California. 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.