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 advertisement of 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 to enter the United States through its border with Mexico have not only returned to the levels of the beginning of 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 allow an indirect assessment of the evolution of migration), but have continued to fall 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 agreed to the terms of a attention announced by Trump on July 26, 2019. The agreement provides for those seeking asylum in the US but who have previously passed through Guatemala to be brought back to the US so that they can remain there as asylees if they qualify. The U.S. sees this as a safe third country agreement .

A safe third countryagreement is an international mechanism that makes it possible to host 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. Responsibility for processing protection claims will fall to 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 comply with 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 US.

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 advertisement of 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 were filed against the agreement 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 with the U.S. tariffs, half of Guatemala's exports and the jobs that accompany these sectors would be at risk.

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 in conditions to be a safe third country due to its low indicators of production, Education, public health and security. 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 skill directly from the president of the country and therefore will begin to implement the decision 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 a 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 US, similar to the agreement with Guatemala. El Salvador's agreement has the same three assumptions in which the U.S. will have to make position of 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 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 flow of people, so it is only a 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 a agreement very similar to the one accepted by its two neighbors. This says that the US will be able to deport to Honduras asylum seekers who have passed through Honduras. Like the other two countries, the Honduran government received criticism as it is not a safe destination for migrants as it is one of the countries with fees highest homicide rates 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 agreement, may introduce some variation, although perhaps his purpose will be to wring some more concessions from Trump, in addition to the agricultural visas Morales negotiated for Guatemalan seasonal workers.