BuzzFeed News is reporting that Trump administration officials held “a secret meeting” with El Salvador’s president in Miami to move forward with expanding policies on the deportation of people who are seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border to Central America. Under the expansion, the report said, the U.S. would deport asylum-seekers, including Mexican nationals, to El Salvador.
U.S. officials are already deporting asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, as part of a so-called safe third country agreement that legislators have said “violates the law and endangers their lives.” BuzzFeed News reports that following the meeting, U.S. officials are set to deport as many as 2,000 people to El Salvador by the end of this month, even though just months ago, the nation’s president, Nayib Bukele, “told CBS’s 60 Minutes that El Salvador was not ready for asylum-seekers from other countries.”
Advocates immediately condemned the report of the expansion. “We're sending asylum seekers to a country in which people are fleeing daily to seek asylum in the U.S.,” tweeted Mario Carrillo, campaigns manager for the immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice. “The Trump administration has created a deadly game of musical chairs for asylum seekers,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote. “The so-called ‘safe third countries’ aren't safe for asylum seekers. We've sued to stop this scheme.”
That lawsuit, launched jointly this past January with advocacy groups National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and Human Rights First, alleges that the administration’s policy agreement with Guatemala “block[s] asylum seekers from ever receiving a chance at asylum in the U.S. They are instead being sent to Guatemala … these countries are plagued by epidemic violence, instability, and ill-equipped asylum systems.” Officials have gone forward with this policy knowing that they’re deporting vulnerable people, including kids, back to danger.
Plans to expand these deportations have gone back and forth, but according to the BuzzFeed News report, U.S. officials are again trying to move forward in case another anti-asylum policy gets blocked by the courts this week: “The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals will block the Remain in Mexico policy—formally called the Migration Protection Protocols—on Thursday, unless the Supreme Court steps in. DHS officials requested last week the high court stay the 9th Circuit’s order to block the policy in California and Arizona.”
That policy deserves to end, too. As many as 62,000 asylum-seekers have been forced to Mexico to wait for their U.S. immigration court dates. Among them was Hanz Morales, who was separated from his family for nearly seven months, until they were reunited in the U.S. in February following an ACLU of Massachusetts lawsuit. “After returning involuntarily to Mexico, the father and son spent several days in extremely perilous conditions, surviving an attempted kidnapping, and going hungry when it was too dangerous to go out to buy food,” the group said.
BuzzFeed News reports that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied that a “secret meeting” took place, but an administration that lies about anything and everything, from inauguration crowd sizes, to who was going to pay for the racist and useless wall with Mexico, to coronavirus testing availability, and to even a hurricane’s trajectory, loses the benefit of the doubt.