By Amelia Luo ’23
Staff Writer & Photographer
Guatemalan police and military forces attempted to block 4,000 Honduran migrants from heading north toward Mexico and the U.S. border on Jan. 17. The group confronted a caravan of migrants on a highway in southeastern Guatemala. The police tried to force back the migrants with batons and tear gas but were unsuccessful, as the Honduran migrants broke through them.
The situation developed overnight as the Guatemalan security forces broke up the caravan of Honduran migrants near the village of Vado Hondo in an attempt to force the caravan back in the direction of the Honduran border, about 31 miles away.
According to NPR, since Jan. 17, between 7,000 and 8,000 Hondurans have illegally crossed the Guatemalan border. Many of the migrants are victims of hurricanes Eta and Iota, both of which struck Honduras in November 2020. Eta first arrived in Nicaragua on Nov. 3 as a Category 4 hurricane and moved north through Honduras and Guatemala. In less than two weeks, Iota, another Category 4 hurricane, arrived in the region. Both natural disasters caused serious landslides, flooding and destruction.
According to Amnesty International, the two hurricanes led to the deaths of 94 people displaced or impacted about 4 million others in Honduras alone. Amnesty International also suggested that the hurricanes raised the poverty level in Honduras by 10 percent, forcing a country that already suffers from incredibly high rates of violent crime, state repression, environmental destruction and economic problems to face further hardship.
In 2019, all three countries of the Northern Triangle — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — signed the Asylum Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. government. Under this contract, any individuals who arrive at the U.S. border seeking asylum could transfer to any country that has signed “safe third country” agreements.
These agreements limit the ability of asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle area from gaining protection in the U.S. The U.S. government could send asylum seekers from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala back to the Northern Triangle as long as they are not nationals from that country. However, according to the Justice For Immigrants organization, none of these three countries meet the mandated standard that would qualify them as “safe third countries.” Typically, a Northern Triangle individual seeks asylum in the U.S. for the same reason in each country.
Emma Chen ’22, a double major in philosophy and politics, commented on the asylum system, saying, “The Asylum Cooperative Agreement is, in essence, [the] Trump administration’s deal [to pass] the buck … to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, [all of] which are dangerous areas due to local gangs and do not have any developed asylum system.
“Refugees are torn apart at the borders. What we need … to do is not … pass around the problem or … block the problem but to solve it from the root,” Chen continued. “The refugees left their home for reasons, the most fundamental [the] need for security and livelihood. It is important to find current asylum seekers a safe place to stay in the U.S., where [an] asylum system is in place, and to look into the possibilities of foreign aid to improve the safety of the countries where [the] refugees fled from. When the home is safe and hopeful, who would want to leave?” Chen explained.
Honduras’ economy was also damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving many individuals both jobless and homeless. Some people whose houses were flooded were living under bridges and kept all their belongings in carts. For them, emigrating to the U.S. could be the only option.
Lumeng Yang ’24, an international relations major, shared her view on this topic. “To many people around the world, the U.S. is the ‘green light’ because this is where [they] feel they belong,” she said. “Personally, I think it is acceptable to have [a] strict immigration policy — after all, in order to ensure American citizens’ pursuit of happiness, policies must be enforced as they are; however, [the] U.S. should still show hospitality, as any nation of merit should,” Yang continued. “The immigrants from Guatemala came all the way to [the] U.S., after overcoming all [the] possible challenges, just trying to survive.
“I do think that, whether these immigrants can stay in the U.S., they should be taken care of during their stay here,” she added. “It is simply humane.”
Many Honduran caravans hope that the U.S. immigration policy will change as Joe Biden takes office. However, Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told NPR that he thinks it is unlikely that the caravan would make it to the U.S.-Mexico border because there would be a heavier presence of Mexican National Guard members trying to detain the migrants along the way.
Migrating during the pandemic is even more difficult than usual. Before COVID-19, people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua were able to freely pass through each other’s borders, but with the spread of the virus, the new policy requires them to show a negative COVID-19 test result, making it harder for migrants to seek asylum abroad.
Mexico praised the Guatemalan government for its forceful action on the Honduran migrants. It strengthened the southern border with Guatemala in anticipation of the incoming migrants. Mexico also sent six buses to Guatemala to transport Honduran migrants back to their home countries.
On Jan. 18, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president, urged the U.S. to make major reforms to its immigration policy. He said that he hoped the changes would dissuade migrants from crossing into Mexico, though he added that the rights of all migrants must be respected.