Central Americans are Being Shorthanded by U.S. Refugee Politics
Suny Rodriguez’s parents were killed in her homeland Honduras in 2004, in circumstances that looked suspiciously like police retaliation for her mother’s outspoken criticism of local law enforcement. After local police claimed that Rodriguez’s stepfather had killed himself and his wife, Rodriguez left the U.S. — where she had been living under a special temporary protection visa program for eight years — and returned home to conduct her own investigation. She suspected that police had blamed her stepfather for their deaths to cover up their possible complicity.
After several years in Honduras, though, Rodriguez feared she might suffer the same fate as her parents. In a written account of her experience, Rodriguez recounts that police tried to extort money from her and even physically attacked her in front of her house. In 2014 she fled back to the U.S. with her partner and 9-year-old son. On their second attempt, they successfully crossed the Rio Grande River, from Mexico into Texas, where they were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Rodriguez and her family immediately asked them for an opportunity to apply for political asylum.
Rodriguez is one of tens of thousands of Central Americans who have sought refuge in the U.S. from persecution by corrupt police or criminal gangs in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador since the end of the civil wars in Central America in the early 1990. Since the end of the “catch-and-release” policy in 2006, these asylum applicants now spend weeks in detention centers, waiting for their asylum claim to be assessed. “Catch and release” meant that recent border-crossers who applied for asylum were released until their claim was processed, rather than be detained until their case was heard in immigration court. During her time at a detention center in Dilley, Texas, Rodriguez alleges in a formal complaint against the U.S. government, that she was held in harsh conditions, while her and her son were separated from her partner, with only limited access to lawyers.
The UNHCR statute includes the protection of basic human rights of refugees, such as the right not to be subjected to torture or mistreatment. In her complaint, Suny Rodriguez claims that after crossing the river, she and her son, both soaking wet, were placed in what Spanish-speaking detainees call ‘la hielera,’ the ice box. This practice has been reported by a large number of people who went through the detention process after crossing the border.
In June of 2015, during a class-action lawsuit filed in Arizona, photos from a local detention center in the Arizona desert surfaced, showing detainees laying on the bare concrete floors of overcrowded cells, covered in thermal blankets. The lawsuit was dismissed.
Such treatment is in sharp contrast with the reception given to refugees who resettle in the U.S. from other countries — even though the persecution claims of Central Americans can be just as valid as those of people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan or other conflict zones. This is partially due to the fact that refugees who are being resettled in the U.S. have already undergone a thorough vetting process.
The United States’ definition of refugees differs from that of the United Nations. Those seeking asylum are not automatically labeled refugees. Those applying for asylum from within the country, like many of those who cross the Southern border, are considered asylum seekers. Only those applying from outside of the country, whose claims are successfully confirmed and acknowledged by immigration authorities receive the refugee title. Or, as Jason Parkin, head of the Immigrant Law Clinic at Columbia University, puts it: “To say you’re a refugee in the United States means you have actually proven it to the government, and the government has agreed with you.”
But advocates have argued that the treatment of those fleeing the Northern Triangle has always differed from the treatment of other asylum seekers and refugees, beginning with their access to asylum during the region’s civil wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Advocates say this reluctance to grant asylum was a result of Cold War politics. President Reagan, arguing that communist-led revolutionary movements threatened stability in Latin America, supported both the Guatemalan and the Salvadoran governments at the time. Nicaraguans, who claimed to be fleeing persecution from a communist government, were more likely to receive asylum. So were Cubans fleeing the Castro regime.
“That is something that to me has always been fundamentally unfair,” said Damas. “You have a Honduran and a Cuban, both setting foot on U.S. soil, the Cuban will be admitted and the Honduran will be sent back.”
Equally unfair, argues Salvadoran-American blogger Victor Interiano, is the U.S. failure to see Central Americans fleeing violence as similar to the situations that drove out refugees being resettled here from Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere.
“To understand what’s happening in Central America as a refugee crisis would change the dialogue,” said Interiano, who runs the Facebook page “Dichos de un Bicho”, which loosely translates to “Musing of a Kid.” Interiano argues that the U.S. should acknowledge that U.S. interventions in Central America played a role in destabilizing the region. “Today, the folks that are coming over, they are still very much refugees, because that intervention never ceased,” he said.
Honduras, for example, where Rodriguez was threatened, has the highest per capita murder rate in the world, while neighboring El Salvador comes in second. In Honduras and Guatemala, activists like Rodriguez and her parents are especially at risk, according to ACI-PARTICIPA, Honduran nonprofit group that says over 90 percent of all killings and abuses against human rights defenders in the country remained unpunished. From inside a detention center, it can be extremely hard to make these claims, as detainees are asked to provide proof for their claims of government extortion and harassment while having little access to the outside world. “The burden is on the applicant to provide that proof, and that can be very difficult and sometimes dangerous,” says Jason Parkin.
Another challenge is that those who are fleeing gang violence rather than government or police persecution are unlikely to receive asylum at all. The U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 guarantees protection to those seeking asylum or refugee status because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Policy makers are wary of extending asylum for the Central Americans’ claims for fear it will encourage even more migration from the region, said Elise Damas, a lawyer for the Pathway to Citizenship program at the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN), the oldest support organization for Central Americans in the U.S.
“If you granted asylum to everyone fleeing gang violence in Central America, all of the Northern Triangle would be here knocking on our door and have a rightful claim to asylum,” said Damas. CARECEN now focuses on providing legal services that assist mixed status families and family reunification.
Up to a million Salvadorans are estimated to have fled for the U.S. by the end of the civil war, and even if their asylum applications were denied, many remained in the country without documentation, many eventually received protection through the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1996, or were sponsored by family members. Today, many young Central Americans are fleeing gang violence, often in hopes to be reunited with parents or other family members in the United States.
Treating Central Americans who cross the border into the U.S. as refugees would also force a reconsideration of their treatment once they make an asylum claim, say advocates. That would include assistance or legal counsel in making their asylum claims. Currently, Central Americans detained after crossing the border only get access to lawyers if it is made available by groups of lawyers who decide to take on this task for little or no pay, such as the CARA Pro Bono Project who initially assisted Suny Rodriguez.
In June 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement made it explicit that the practice of detention was an important tactic to deter further potential migration, especially from Central America. Considering that only those who hope to claim asylum are even allowed to stay in the country at all, and many of them successfully complete the first steps of their application, Jason Parkin wonders why they are still subjected to these conditions. “Over 90% of the women there are passing their interviews. Then why are we holding them there at all?” he asks.
