By José de Córdoba
MEXICO CITY—Guatemala’s constitutional court granted an injunction late Sunday stopping President Jimmy Morales from signing a controversial immigration proposal that would require migrants from El Salvador and Honduras to seek asylum there rather than the U.S.
Earlier in the day Mr. Morales scrapped a planned trip to Washington to discuss the proposed “safe-third-country agreement” with President Trump. The government had said Mr. Morales was postponing the trip to give the court a chance to rule on injunction requests, and that the meeting would be rescheduled.
In the statement announcing the cancellation, the government said it had “at no moment contemplated signing an agreement converting Guatemala into a safe third country,” although U.S. and Guatemalan officials have acknowledged the two countries have been discussing such an agreement for about a month.
A meeting with Mr. Morales and President Trump had been set for Monday, but would now be rescheduled, the government said.
The White House and State Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
“The outcry and the pressure on the constitutional court might have focused enough attention in Guatemala that it became politically difficult to do,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “But it’s difficult to know whether it scuttles it or just delays it.”
Last week, U.S. and Guatemalan officials said the purpose of Mr. Morales’s visit was to consider such an agreement, but said Mr. Morales didn’t plan to sign such a treaty during the visit.
The proposed agreement is broadly unpopular in Guatemala. The Catholic Church as well as the two candidates in August’s runoff presidential election have publicly opposed it. After the news of the planned visit became known last week, two actions seeking an injunction were filed with the country’s constitutional court by prominent Guatemalans, including the former head of Transparency International, an anticorruption organization, and a group of former foreign ministers.
Critics say Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, has neither the funds nor the institutional capacity to offer refuge to migrants seeking asylum from other countries when it can’t offer the same conditions to its own citizens. More migrants from Guatemala seeking jobs and security try to enter the U.S. than migrants from the neighboring countries of El Salvador and Honduras.
“Guatemala utterly lacks the institutions able to offer migrants the minimal conditions with respect to human rights,” said Gabriel Orellana, a former foreign minister who is acting as the lawyer for one of the requested injunctions.
Mr. Orellana also said Mr. Morales had exceeded his powers in seeking such an agreement and had kept the country’s congress in the dark about the negotiations with the U.S.
Mr. Selee said a Guatemalan safe-third-country agreement could put more pressure on Mexico to reach a similar deal as the U.S. works to restructure the legal framework for migration in the region.
“The U.S. is betting that if Guatemala agrees to accept other Central Americans, then Mexico would accept Guatemalans sent back from the U.S., sealing the whole border,” he said. “Agreement with Guatemala could make Mexico a much lighter lift.”
Such agreements face political opposition as well as legal challenges in the U.S. as well. In a letter in June, three top House Democrats urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan to halt any safe-third-country negotiations with Mexico or Guatemala.
The three Democrats—House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel, Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler, both of New York, and Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi—said such agreements would be unlawful under U.S. law because the judicial systems of neither Guatemala nor Mexico are up to the task of providing the necessary security or processing asylum claims. The three urged the Trump administration to return to a policy of “common-sense bipartisan policy of providing foreign assistance to the Northern Triangle countries to address the root causes of child and family migration.”
Mexico in June agreed to increase its immigration enforcement after Mr. Trump threatened to place tariffs on all Mexican imports. Mexico deployed its newly created National Guard to detain migrants, and agreed to receive thousands of asylum seekers from the U.S. while they await their court dates. But if those measures fail to reduce migrant flows, Mexico agreed to consider signing a safe-third-country agreement itself.
Mexican authorities detained more than 29,000 migrants in June, by far the largest number for any month on record. The country’s efforts were also a big factor in the 28% drop that month in U.S. arrests of people crossing illegally or requesting asylum at ports of entry.
In the first five months of this year, Guatemala received just 172 asylum requests, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and has received about 1,300 since 2002. By comparison, some 259,000 people applied for asylum in the U.S. in 2017, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Nearly 74,000 of them were from Honduras and El Salvador.
The U.S. State Department plans to cut more than $550 million in development and security aid to the three Northern Triangle countries in response to their failure to reduce the surge of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. over the last year. The cuts would affect violence-prevention programs, agricultural assistance and funding for schools and job-training programs.
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