The Trump administration’s inhumane move deporting Honduran and Salvadoran asylum-seekers to Guatemala as part of a so-called “safe-third-country” agreement is bad enough. That the administration may be deporting these asylum-seekers without even telling them where they’re being sent makes a bad situation worse.
Advocates say that U.S. officials have put asylum-seekers, including children, on planes to Guatemala “without being told where they were headed, and left here without being given basic instruction about what to do next,” The Washington Post reports. “When the migrants land in Guatemala City, they receive little information about what it means to apply for asylum in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries.”
One of these children, a 17-year-old boy, had fled Honduras with his mom after being shot in the face by gang members. This family should be in the U.S. seeking safety, but they say they were instead deported without even knowing where they were going. “In the U.S., the agents told us our cases would be transferred, but they didn’t say where. Then they lined us up to get on the plane,” his mom Marta told The Post. “When we looked out the window, we were here. We thought, ‘Where are we? What are we supposed to do now?’”
But that has been of no concern to the Trump administration, which has implemented these so-called safe-third-country agreements knowing full well of the violent dangers in Guatemala. The Washington Post reported that only five of the more than 140 Honduran and Salvadoran asylum-seekers deported there have chosen to stay to try to apply for the nation’s “skeletal asylum program,” and are given only a short time to make this decision. The others may have returned to their home countries—and the dangers they fled from in the first place.
Earlier this month officials halted, for now, a plan to also deport some Mexican nationals seeking asylum to Guatemala. It’s not yet clear why the plan was halted for Mexicans but not for Honduran and Salvadoran asylum-seekers, who are still getting deported under that “third-country” agreement. What’s clear is that none of these asylum-seekers should be kicked out without the fair chance to seek asylum, period.