The Department of Homeland Security (NHS) released Thursday the migratory cooperation agreement between United States and Honduras that it would allow some asylum seekers to be sent to the Central American country.
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Agreement, initialed last September 25 in New York and that takes effect this Friday, is part of the government’s actions to reduce the flow of migrants on the southern border, making it difficult for them to enter the United States with an asylum application.
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The text of the agreement was released Thursday, a day before it was published in the official newspaper of the United States government ( Federal Register).
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The document joins two similar cooperation treaties on asylum reached with Guatemala, on July 26, 2019, and El Salvador, on September 20 of last year, respectively.
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At the moment, the new agreement would seem unnecessary because the United States is quickly expelling most of the people it meets on its border with Mexico, in accordance with the public health emergency decree enacted last month by Trump in response to the pandemic of coronavirus. That decree was renewed for 30 days and expires next month.
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The pact obliges Honduras to receive migrants who are referred by the United States and will not be able to return or remove them until their asylum cases are resolved by the US federal authorities.
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The agreement has not been welcomed by immigrant advocacy organizations. The detractors assure that the new agreement and the previous one with Guatemala, contested in the courts, represent a reversal of the United States with respect to its obligations under international law to provide protection to people who want to take refuge from persecution.
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Neither Honduras nor Guatemala have the capacity to receive and relocate refugees, so after all, people will probably return to face the danger from which they had fled in their countries, said the American Yael Schacher, an activist for the organization Refugees International.
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“The United States is indirectly returning people to face persecution,” Schacher said, quoted by the AP.
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A similar opinion was expressed by Eleanor Hace, director of the Refugee Protection program at the organization Humans Rights First. “There is simply no plausible reason to believe that Honduras will protect refugees who want asylum and come from other countries.”
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Schacher claims that the troubled Central American country is ill-prepared to receive people fleeing persecution in other parts of the world.
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