All → Migration
As trusted individuals in a Guatemalan culture rooted in religion, pastors and priests play a role in the booming business behind immigration.
Families – rather than single adults – from Central America are the big growth sector as poverty, violence and Trump’s immigration policy all play a part
A crowd of Nicaraguans, Haitians and Hondurans gathered Wednesday around two young men who had just shuffled into the dusty courtyard of a small shelter in northeast Tijuana, a Mexican border city.
“Why are you back?” a Haitian woman with a baby on her hip asked.
“The gringos sent us to wait here,” one answered, visibly annoyed. “I don’t know why they picked us.”
As the United States moves to implement a new plan to turn back legal asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border, tens of thousands of Central American migrants could be stranded in Mexico while their cases are decided, which often takes a year or more.
Almost three years ago, Pedro Nehemias told his mother he was traveling from their rural town in Guatemala to the country’s capital to visit friends and buy some clothes. In reality, he was going to meet a Honduran boy he met on Facebook.
It’s 4 a.m. A wave of cellphone alarms go off inside the church and movement begins. The heavy sleepers need an extra nudge. “It’s that time,” one woman murmurs, tapping her teenage son on the shoulder.
Arnovis Guidos Portillo was deported from US but his six-year-old daughter remained in U.S. custody until they were reunified on Salvadoran soil.
Photos by Kimberly dela Cruz/ funding for this reporting from the IWMF.
Eighty percent of the people who joined this year came from Honduras. And as chronic violence and a deep political crisis roil their home country, Trump’s harsh rhetoric and U.S. policy in the region have done little to deter them from seeking safety.
