Trump administration officials reportedly claimed in late October that children and families would for now not be subject to an inhumane rule forcing people seeking asylum in the United States to go to Guatemala, but two Honduran families were informed this week that they will be sent there, the Los Angeles Times reports: “One family of three from Honduras, as well as a separate Honduran parent and child, were served with notices on Tuesday that they’d soon be deported to Guatemala.”
To be clear, no one—not single adults, not families—should be subject to this plan, because even the Trump administration itself has admitted that this rule is deadly. Materials distributed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers in late November warned, “Violence and extortion by powerful criminal organizations remain serious problems in Guatemala. Gang-related violence is an important factor prompting people, including unaccompanied youth, to leave the country.” One leading refugee expert has furthermore condemned the rule as “internationally illegal policy, dumping refugees into a place that is not able to protect them.”
But flash forward a couple of weeks, and that’s where the administration is now sending youth and their families. The LA Times reported that “Guatemala has virtually no asylum system of its own, but the Trump administration and Guatemalan government”—mostly likely strong-armed into this agreement by the U.S.—“both said the returns would roll out slowly and selectively.” Erwin José Ardón Montoya, a 23-year-old farm worker from Honduras, became the first person to be sent there under the policy. Once in Guatemala, he opted to just return to his drought-stricken village.
But the humanitarian disaster isn’t just happening thousands of miles away. Desperate asylum-seekers who have been forced to wait out their cases in Mexico for months have sent their kids back across the border to the U.S. alone. “These tents are not good for children because the cold goes right through them,” said one dad who’s still living in a squalid camp. He watched as his two young kids held hands and crossed by themselves. “Sometimes you do things not because you're a bad father, but because you want what's good for them, and you don't want to see them suffer.”
“Delivering asylum seekers to danger in Mexico and Guatemala does not keep people seeking U.S. refugee protection safe,” tweeted Eleanor Acer of the organization Human Rights First, saying that Department of Homeland Security “officials are violating US refugee law and treaties [by] returning men, women and children to places where they face life-threatening dangers.”