U.S. Flies 38 to Honduras as Part of Expedited Deportations

Wall Street Journal

By Dudley Althaus and Laura Meckler

July 14, 2014

U.S. Flies 38 to Honduras as Part of Expedited Deportations

Thirty eight women and children recently detained at the U.S. border were flown home to Honduras on Monday, in what U.S. officials say is the first of an expected increase in expedited deportations.

"This is just the initial wave," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. "We expect additional adults with children will be returned to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador soon, based on the results of removal proceedings or expedited removal."

More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors, and thousands more young children chaperoned by parents or other adults, have flooded across the U.S.-Mexico border since October, overwhelming U.S. immigration officials and creating what President Barack Obama has called an "urgent humanitarian situation."

U.S. officials say the perceptions that children who make it to the U.S. can stay are encouraging more to make the dangerous journey north. They say they hope to persuade would-be migrants that this is false.

The deportees, including 21 children aged 18 months to 15 years, were flown from El Paso, Texas, to the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, near the country's Caribbean coast. San Pedro and nearby cities are the top Central American source of unaccompanied minors traveling to the U.S., said an internal Department of Homeland Security study. The U.S. has deported some 82,000 Central Americans, mostly adults, since October, the agency said.

House Republicans are expected to discuss the child-migration influx Tuesday at their weekly meeting in Washington.

On Monday, two Texas lawmakers—Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat—said they would offer legislation to hasten deportation proceedings for Central American children who arrived in the U.S. alone. Some Republicans are pressing to tie such a change in law to approval of Mr. Obama's request for $3.7 billion in emergency funds.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said he had no comment on Monday's deportations.

U.S. law has long allowed for expedited removal proceedings for families crossing the border without authorization, just as it does for adults traveling without children. But because the government had almost no beds in facilities suitable for families as immigration surged, nearly everyone was released and ordered to report to immigration court.

In response, the Department of Homeland Security late last month opened a temporary family detention facility that can hold 700 people in Artesia, N.M. Soon after, the U.S. began sending apprehended adults traveling with children to the center.

The Monday deportations also are a result of the administration's move to increase the number of immigration judges and asylum officers to process the cases faster, the Homeland Security statement said.

Immigrant advocates argue there is no reason to fast-track these deportations and they oppose detaining families during the process. They say alternatives to detention, such as ankle bracelets, are more humane and work to assure people show up for court hearings. U.S. officials say these methods increasingly are being used as well.

Like others in recent weeks, Monday's deportees were greeted in San Pedro by Honduran first lady Ana García de Hernández, who is leading a task force aimed at dissuading people from leaving Honduras. In addition to the U.S. deportees, Mrs. García de Hernández met with several hundred more young migrants deported from Mexico.

Mexico also has stepped up immigration enforcement recently on and near its porous southern border.

So far this year, Mexico has deported 48,500 Central Americans, according to the Mexican government.

Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio has warned that foreigners without proper visas faced deportation. He said Mexican officials would target the freight trains by which many migrants, including large numbers of teenagers, make their way to the U.S. border.

The Obama administration hopes to fund Mexico's effort by redirecting $86 million that had been earmarked for Mexican law enforcement and justice reform under the 2007 Merida Initiative, Thomas Shannon, a senior State Department official, told Mexican reporters on Sunday. Mr. Shannon was touring the Mexico-Guatemala border on Monday.

In an interview published Monday in a Mexico City newspaper, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández blamed U.S. antinarcotics policy for the violence said to be driving many from his country. As Colombia and then Mexico attacked the narcotics trade, traffickers increasingly moved to Honduras, fueling violence, the president said.

Much of the violence in Honduras—as in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala—is caused by local street gangs with a marginal connection to the international drug trade. The rival MS-13 and 18th Street gangs—both founded by Central American migrants decades ago in Los Angeles—are involved in extortion, kidnapping and other crimes in their poor neighborhoods, analysts have said.

Efforts to lessen the gangs' violence, through enhanced enforcement or through government-brokered truces, have had only limited impact, they said.

Social workers and migrant advocates in Honduras say endemic poverty, a lack of job opportunities and the desire to reunite with parents who migrated earlier prove greater motivations for young people to leave the country than does violence.

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