WASHINGTON/TEGUCIGALPA, (Reuters) – The White House said yesterday that Central Americans trying to cross the U.S. border should know “they will not be welcome to this country,” a day after the United States deported a planeload of women and children to Honduras.
A charter flight on Monday from New Mexico to San Pedro Sula, the city with the highest murder rate in the world, transported 17 Honduran women, as well as 12 girls and nine boys between the ages of 18 months and 15 years.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the return of the Hondurans should be a clear signal to those thinking about crossing the border illegally that “they’re entitled to due process but they will not be welcome to this country with open arms.”
The return of the Hondurans was the most high-profile example of President Barack Obama’s struggle to gain control of an influx of child migrants from Central America that is overwhelming immigration resources and leading to scattered protests from people angry at the government for housing some border-crossers in communities around the country.
Organizations working with illegal migrants and Honduran youths said the U.S. flight was largely symbolic and would have little impact on Honduran children trying to escape a country racked by gang violence and the world’s highest murder rate.
“This is a problem about the country, about the conditions in the country,” said Gerardo Rivera, a researcher for Casa Alianza, a youth organization in Honduras. “What they’re looking for is to flee from dangerous situations, flee from poverty, flee from a lack of opportunities.”
Ana Garcia de Hernandez, the first lady of Honduras, called on the United States to provide “comprehensive support, not just small steps” to help the struggling nation tackle drug cartels she said were fuelling the exodus north.
“The children, the young and their mothers are leaving areas where’s more violence due to drug traffickers using our country as a transit point toward the United States,” she said.
The number deported on Monday was a drop in the ocean next to the wave of migrants flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America have been caught since October, twice as many as a year earlier.
U.S. immigration officials said more people would be sent back to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in the coming days but declined to give any details about the pace of deportations.
Obama is attempting to balance competing interests: reassure Americans that the migrants, many of them unaccompanied children who have streamed into Texas across Mexico’s border by the thousands, will be sent home, while making clear to immigration advocates that the children will be given due process of law.
ARIZONA PROTEST
The White House’s Earnest said Obama did not personally approve the return of the Hondurans on Monday. It was a decision made by the Homeland Security Department, implementing a policy the president had set out, he said.
The flood of unaccompanied migrants have added a toxic mix to a raging debate over whether to approve comprehensive immigration reform to cover some 11 million undocumented people in the United States. Reform is one of Obama’s priorities, but it has no chance until after November congressional elections.
Waving U.S. flags and playing patriotic music, dozens of protesters demonstrated in southern Arizona yesterday against the arrival of undocumented immigrants for processing at a center near the border before being returned to their homelands.
In a scene reminiscent of protests in California, about 65 demonstrators gathered at a fork in the road near the small town of Oracle to complain that Washington’s response to the Central America migrant surge was putting their communities at risk.
