US government says it will deport a Honduran mother and her two sick children, both of whom are currently hospitalized, to Guatemala as soon as it can get them medically cleared to travel, according to court documents and the family’s advocates.
A lawsuit filed by the family says they were taken first to the U.S. Border Patrol’s processing center in McAllen, Texas, a former warehouse where migrants are held in large fenced-in pens, then to a complex of tents built at the port city of Donna, where they were held for several days longer than the Border Patrol’s own 72-hour limit to detain people.
President Donald Trump’s administration struck a deal last year with the Guatemalan government to take in asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador, and has since said it will send Mexicans to Guatemala as well. The U.S. has also announced similar deals with Honduras and El Salvador. As of earlier this month, about 100 Hondurans and Salvadorans had been sent to Guatemala.
Tens of thousands of people annually flee El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — collectively forming Central America’s “Northern Triangle — due to endemic violence, poverty, and political and religious persecution. Experts on the Northern Triangle say those countries can’t be expected to take in asylum seekers when many of their own citizens are fleeing. The American Civil Liberties Union and other legal groups sued Wednesday to try to prevent the agreements from being enforced.
Their lawsuit alleges that after the mother said she feared returning to Honduras — where she says gangs demanded monthly payments or they would kill her and her children — she “was instructed that she could either return to Honduras or be sent to Guatemala and had to decide immediately."
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