U.S. agreements with the Northern Triangle may have had a deterrent effect before entering into force

In the first month following the extension of the Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACA) to the three Northern Triangle countries, apprehensions at the US border have fallen below recent years. The actual reduction in migrant inflows evidenced by this has to do with Mexico's increased control over its border with Guatemala, but may also be due to the deterrent effect of the advertisement the agreements, whose implementation has not yet fully begun and therefore has yet to demonstrate whether they will be directly effective.

▲ Honduran migrants held by Guatemalan border guards, October 2018 [Wikimedia Commons].

article / María del Pilar Cazali

Attempts to entrance the United States through its border with Mexico have not only returned to the levels of earlier in the year, before the number of migrants soared and each month set a new record high, reaching 144,116 apprehensions and inadmissions in May( U.S.Border Guard figures that provide an indirect assessment of the evolution of migration), but have continued to decline to below several previous years.

The month of October (the first month of the 2020 US fiscal year), there were 45,250 apprehensions and inadmissions at the US southern border, below the figure for the months of October 2018, 2015 and 2016 (though not 2017). This allows us to predict that the total number of apprehensions and inadmissions in the new fiscal year will fall clearly below the record of 977,509 recorded in 2019. This boom had to do with the migrant caravans that began at the end of 2018 in the Central American Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala), following a migratory flow that, with different intensities, began in the 1980s due to political and economic instabilities in those countries.

This migration crisis led President Trump's U.S. administration to implement harsher deportation policies, including changing conditions for expedited deportations. In addition, the White House pressured Mexico with the threat of tariffs on its products if it did not help reduce the flow of migrants crossing Mexican soil, prompting President López Obrador to deploy the newly created National Guard to the border with Guatemala. Trump combined these measures with the negotiation with the Northern Triangle countries of Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACAs), which were initially improperly referred to as "safe third countries", adding to the controversy they generated.

agreement with Guatemala

Due to US threats to impose tariffs on Guatemala if it failed to reduce the issue of migrants from or passing through Guatemala on their way to the US, the Guatemalan government accepted the terms of an attention announced by Trump on July 26, 2019. The agreement provides that those seeking asylum in the US but who have previously passed through Guatemala will be brought back to the US so that they can remain there as asylees if they qualify. The United States sees this as a safe third country agreement .

A safe third countryagreement is an international mechanism that makes it possible to receive in one country those seeking asylum in another. The agreement signed in July prevents asylum seekers from receiving U.S. protection if they passed through Guatemala and did not first apply for asylum there. The U.S. goal is to prevent migrants from Honduras and El Salvador from seeking asylum in the United States. The responsibility for processing protection requests will fall on Washington in only three cases: unaccompanied minors, persons with a U.S.-issued visa or admission document, or persons who are not required to obtain a visa. Those who do not meet the requirements will be sent to Guatemala to await resolution of their case, which could take years. On the other hand, the agreement does not prevent Guatemalan and Mexican applicants from seeking asylum in the United States.

The president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, had previously announced that a similar agreement could become part of the immigration negotiations being carried out with the US. In Guatemala, after the advertisement the agreement, multiple criticisms arose, because the security conditions of both countries are incomparable. To this were added rumors about the true content of the agreement that Morales had signed, since it was not immediately revealed to the public. Faced with this uncertainty, the Minister of the Interior, Enrique Degenhart, declared that the agreement was only for Hondurans and Salvadorans, not for nationals of other Latin American countries, and that the text did not explicitly mention the term "safe third country".

The week following the advertisement, three appeals for legal protection against the agreement were filed before the Constitutional Court of Guatemala, arguing that the country is not in a position to provide the protection it supposedly offers and that the expense it would entail would weaken the economic status of the population itself. However, Degenhart defended the agreement saying that the economic repercussions would have been worse if the pact with Washington had not been reached, because the U.S. tariffs would endanger half of Guatemala's exports and the jobs that accompany these sectors.

These criticisms came not only from Guatemalan citizens, but also from public figures such as Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman, Jordán Rodas, citing a lack of transparency on the part of the government. Rodas insisted that Guatemala is not fit to be a safe third country because of its low production, Education, public health and security indicators. Similar ideas have also been expressed by organizations such as Amnesty International, for which Guatemala is not safe and cannot be considered as a safe haven.

In its pronouncement, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala affirmed that the Guatemalan government needs to submit the agreement to the approval of congress in order for it to be effective. This has been rejected by the government, which considers that international policy is the direct skill of the country's president and therefore will begin to implement the decision made with Washington without further delay.

Apprehensions and inadmissions made by U.S. border guards, distributed by month during the last fiscal years (FY) [Taken from CBP].

Also with El Salvador and Honduras

Despite all this controversy generated since July as a result of the pact with Guatemala, the US developed similar efforts with El Salvador and Honduras. On September 20, 2019, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, signed an agreement assimilable to the figure of the safe third country, although it was not explicitly called as such either. It commits El Salvador to receive asylum seekers who cannot yet enter the U.S., similar to the agreement with Guatemala. El Salvador's agreement has the same three assumptions in which the U.S. will have to make a position migrant protection.

The Salvadoran government has received similar criticism, including a lack of transparency in the negotiation and denial of the reality that the country is unsafe. Bukele justified the signature by saying it would mean the extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for the more than 190,000 Salvadorans living in the US. In October 2019, the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry said that this agreement is not a safe third country because El Salvador is not in the serious migratory situations in which Guatemala and Honduras are in terms of the flow of people, so it is only an agreement of non-violation of rights to minimize the number of migrants.

On September 21, 2019 the Honduran government also made public the advertisement of an agreement very similar to the one accepted by its two neighbors. It states that the U.S. will be able to deport to Honduras asylum seekers who have passed through Honduras. Like the other two countries, the Honduran government received criticism that it is not a safe destination for migrants as it is one of the countries with the highest homicide fees in the world.

Despite the criticism generated over the three agreements, in late October 2019 the Donald Trump administration announced that it was in final preparations to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala. However, by the end of November, the sending of non-Guatemalan asylum seekers had yet to occur. The inauguration in early January of President-elect Alejandro Giammattei, who announced his desire to rescind certain terms of the agreement, may introduce some variation, although perhaps his purpose is to extract some more concessions from Trump, in addition to the agricultural visas that Morales negotiated for Guatemalan seasonal workers.

The flood of unaccompanied alien minors suffered by the Obama Administration in 2014 has been surpassed in a 2019 with a new migration peak

In the summer of 2014, the United States suffered a migration crisis due to an unexpected increase in the issue of unaccompanied foreign minors, mostly Central American, arriving at its border with Mexico. What has happened since then? Although oscillating, the Issue of this immigration subject went down, but in 2019 a new record has been registered, hand in hand with the ˝caravan crisis˝, which has led to a rise again in total apprehensions at the border.

▲ U.S. border agents search unaccompanied minors at the Texas-Mexico border in 2014 [Hector Silva, USCBP-Wikimedia Commons].

article / Marcelina Kropiwnicka [English version].

The United States hosts more immigrants than any other country in the world, with more than one million people arriving each year, either as legal permanent residents, asylum seekers and refugees, or in other immigration categories. While there is no exact figure for how many people cross the border illegally, US Customs and Border Control authorities measure changes in illegal immigration based on the number of apprehensions made at the border; these apprehensions serve as an indicator of the total issue of attempts to enter the country illegally. In terms of data, it can be concluded that there have been notable changes in the demographics of illegal migration at the border with Mexico (southwest border, in official U.S. terms) in recent years.

The peak of apprehensions at the border with Mexico was during 2000, when 1.64 million people were apprehended attempting to enter the United States illegally. The numbers have generally declined since then. In recent years there have been more apprehensions of non-Mexicans than Mexicans at the U.S.-Mexico border, reflecting a decrease in the issue of unauthorized Mexican immigrants arriving in the United States over the past decade. The increase, in fact, was largely due to those fleeing violence, gang activity and poverty in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, a region known as the Central American Northern Triangle.

The nations included in the Northern Triangle are among the poorest in Latin America - a high percentage of the population still lives on less than $2 a day (the international poverty line is $1.90) - and there has been little progress in reducing poverty in recent years. Within Latin America and the Caribbean, Honduras has the second highest percentage of population living below the poverty line (17%), after Haiti, according to the latest World Bank data .

Unaccompanied foreign minors

While fewer adults, unaccompanied by family, have attempted to cross the border without authorization in the last decade, there has instead been a surge of unaccompanied alien minors (UACM) attempting to enter the United States from Mexico. The migration of unaccompanied minors is not new; what is new now is the Issue and the need to implement policies in response to this problem. The increase in apprehensions of MENAs in FY 2014 caused alarm and prompted both intense media scrutiny and the implementation of policy responses; attention was sustained even as the phenomenon declined. Numbers dropped again to just under 40,000 apprehensions of minors the following year.

The international community defines an unaccompanied migrant minor as a person, "who is under the age of eighteen" and who is "separated from both parents and is not being cared for by an adult who by law or custom has the responsibility to do so." Many of these unaccompanied minors immediately present themselves to U.S. border security, while others enter the country unnoticed and undocumented. Not only this, but the children have no parents or legal guardians available to provide care or physical custody, which quickly overwhelms local border patrol services.

In 2014 many of the unaccompanied children claimed that they were under the false impression that the Obama Administration was granting "permits" to children who had relatives in the U.S., as long as they arrived by June at the latest. These false convincements and propagated hoaxes were even more potent this past year, especially as President Trump continues to reinforce the idea of restricting migrants' access to the US. The cartels have continued to transport an increasing issue of Central American migrants from their countries to the United States.

Critical moments in 2014 and 2019

In 2014, during Obama's second term, total apprehensions along the border with Mexico reached 569,237 (this figure includes "non-admissible" individuals), a record only surpassed now. While the increase over the previous year was 13%, the increase was much more B apprehensions of MENAs; these went from 38,759 in FY 2013 to 68,541 in FY 2014 (in the US the fiscal year runs from October of one year to September of the next), an increase of almost 80%, more than four times those recorded in FY 2011. In the case of minors from Honduras, the number rose in one year from 6,747 to 18,244; those from Guatemala rose from 8,068 to 17,057, and those from El Salvador from 5,990 to 16,404 (those from Mexico, on the other hand, fell from 17,240 to 15,634). The highest issue of apprehensions occurred in May, a month in which arrests of MENAs accounted for 17% of total apprehensions.

Since 2014, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors, although fluctuating, declined in issue. But 2019 saw a new record high, reaching 76,020, with a peak in the month of May. However, they accounted for only 9% of total apprehensions that month, as this time it was not properly a crisis of MENAs, but rather inserted into a B in total apprehensions. While overall apprehensions dropped significantly during the first six months of Trump's presidency, they then rose, reaching a 2019 total of 851,508 (with "non-admissibles" the figure reached 977,509), more than doubling from 2018. The issue of total apprehensions increased by 72% from 2014 to 2019 (in the case of MENAs the increase was 11%).

Apprehensions of unaccompanied alien minors at the US-Mexico border, between 2012 and 2019 (figure 1), and comparison of 2014 and 2019 by month (figure 2). source: US Customs and Border Patrol.

Reaction

The United States had various domestic policies aimed at addressing the massive increase in immigration. However, with the overwhelming spike in 2014, Obama requested funding for a program to "repatriate and reintegrate migrants to Central American countries and to address the root causes of migration from these countries." Although funding for the program was fairly consistent in recent years, President Trump 's proposed 2018 budget reduced financial aid to these countries by approximately 30%.

The Trump Administration has made progress in implementing its immigration diary , from beginning construction of the wall on the border with Mexico to launching new programs, but the hard line already promised by Trump in his degree program to the White House has proven ineffective in stopping thousands of Central American families from crossing the southwest border into the United States. With extreme gang violence being rampant and technicalities in the US immigration system, the motivation for migrants to leave their countries will remain.