Honduras is collapsing. The thousands of migrants who flee every day are direct testimony to a political, economic and social crisis that the world ignores and the U. S. government seems bent on perpetuating.
For the past year, Ciudad Juarez has been a flashpoint of the migrant and refugee humanitarian crisis gripping the U.S.-Mexico border. Now hundreds of other people-mainly women and children-are camped out at the international bridge, but this latest group of refugees is Mexican.
There’s nothing “uncontrollable” about people applying for asylum. All the U.S. has to do is meet its obligations under international law.
Trump’s tariffs-for-crackdown tradeoff punishes Americans and Mexicans and doesn’t fix the border. It’s hard to imagine a more misdirected plan.
In this Special Report, the Americas Program analyzed existing Safe Third Country Agreements to determine what such an agreement would mean for Mexico, for the United States and for the migrants from Central America who pass through Mexico to seek safety in the United States.
I have trouble responding to the Trump Wall Hoax. First because it’s almost incomprehensible that we’re even talking about a “border crisis” that has no relationship to reality (there is no “surge” or “invasion”, no increase in crime, no correlation between violence and migrants, no terrorists over the southern border, no threat to national security). Fact-checking these speeches has become a macabre shadow dance, actions that respond to illusions until the real and the projected become indistinguishable to viewers.
2018 in our America was a year of contradictions that make any single reading or even search for trends impossible. But the issue of borders was a recurring theme.
The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration has the support of the upcoming Mexican administration headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to drive a plan entitled “Remain in Mexico”. This plan would consist of the applicants for exile who arrive to the Southern Border being returned to Mexico to wait for a resolution in their case in the United States’ courts.
This year the Caravan of Central American Mothers arrived in Mexico City to participate in the first World Summit of Mothers of the Disappeared with mothers, other relatives of the missing and allies from Mexico, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Morocco, Mauritania, Spain, Italy and the United States to compare notes and gain a deeper understanding of the problem, across borders.
Claudia is not the first migrant murdered by the Border Patrol, nor will she be the last. The Border Patrol kills people with impunity in the name of “border security”.