A group of Democratic House committee chairs say the cruel and inhumane Trump administration policy of deporting some Central American asylum-seekers back to dangerous places “violates the law and endangers their lives,” and are demanding that the State Department brief legislators on the policy, as well as hand over key documents, as part of an inquiry into this so-called safe third country agreement.
“Core elements of America’s modern asylum and refugee laws were enacted as a deliberate response to the Holocaust,” chairs Joaquin Castro, Eliot Engel, and Albio Sires tell Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a letter published on Castro’s official website, which calls the agreements under which the deportations take place “unlawful.” “They are more than just a set of legal obligations, but a principled declaration that never again shall this country or any other be free to turn its back on the world’s most vulnerable people or to send them onward to situations that are as dangerous as or worse than those that they originally fled.” But that’s exactly what the U.S. under the Trump administration is doing.
A coalition of national civil, immigration, and human rights organizations have already sued the administration over the policy of deporting asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, with the claim that vulnerable families can just apply for protection there. This, of course, is a lie: Guatemala itself produces thousands of asylum-seekers a year. This policy, the legislators say, is instead producing disastrous results, as intended.
“[S]ince late 2019, the administration has already deported 698 asylum seekers to Guatemala under the [agreement], 324 of whom had fled here with their families. This was done on the theory that these people could simply apply for asylum in Guatemala instead. But of these 698, only 24—less than 4%—have even been able to seek protection through Guatemala’s nascent, overburdened asylum system. DHS officials admitted that they have no knowledge of, and no ability to find out, what became of the remaining 96%,” the letter reads.
Named in the groups’ lawsuit against the administration are mom M.H. and her child. “Her common-law husband and her sister-in-law worked in the transportation business in Honduras and were forced to pay local gangs in order to work. They were both murdered,” the groups said. Terrified for their lives, M.H. and her child fled to the U.S., only to be deported to Guatemala. “Feeling that she had no means to remain safe or support herself in Guatemala,” the lawsuit said, “M.H. and her daughter returned temporarily to Honduras. M.H. remains uncertain how or where she and her daughter can find safety.”
Trump officials have already acknowledged in documents distributed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers that deporting asylum-seekers to a country they’re not even from is a deadly plan; despite this, the Democratic House chairs say, the administration seeks to expand these agreements and put even more lives at stake. “Rather than learning from the tragic consequences of the Guatemala [agreement], the Trump administration is now doubling down by signing [agreements] with El Salvador and Honduras, countries which State Department reporting indicates also have utterly insufficient asylum procedures in place,” they said.
The State Department certainly hasn’t hesitated to take harmful actions against vulnerable folks in the past. Senate and House Democrats previously called on the department’s watchdog to open an investigation into the administration’s move to spark another family separation crisis by ending Temporary Protected Status for thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras. “We are deeply concerned,” they wrote to the department’s inspector general, “about evidence that domestic political interests well beyond the scope of the TPS statute appear to have overridden the recommendations of senior State Department officials related to U.S. national security priorities and humanitarian interests.”
While the policies under which some Central American asylum-seekers are being deported haven’t drawn as much as attention as the Remain in Mexico policy, combined they all represent a near-obliteration of the U.S. asylum system, and they need to be stopped. “The Guatemala [agreement] violates the law, betrays these values, and puts the lives of asylum seekers at risk, all with the full knowledge of the Trump Administration,” Castro, Engel, and Sires wrote. “The proposed agreements with Honduras and El Salvador threaten to do the same.”