aNewDomain — People who arrive in the U.S. without a visa but who fear being attacked or murdered if they return to their home countries are supposed to be offered asylum.
It’s the law — American and international.
A Guardian article that ought to spark protest marches and congressional investigations but is instead being ignored by U.S. state-controlled media reveals that border control officers patrolling the border with Mexico routinely deport many Hondurans who ought to be admitted.
As a result of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of Homeland Security’s heartless and illegal send-’em-back policy, a shocking number of Hondurans are murdered — some within days of arriving back home.
“No one keeps an official record of how many returnees have been murdered in Honduras,” reports the Guardian. “But a review of news reports of killings in the country compiled by researcher Elizabeth Kennedy at the San Diego State University shows that at least 35 people who were deported between January 2014 and July 2015 were murdered within months — or even days — of their arrival in Honduras.
They’re the victims of gangs. Experts say these numbers are only a small representative sample. Says the Guardian:
“For young people in Honduras, joining local gangs — either by choice or by force — is one of few life options they have.” The paper notes that “many of the minors who leave for the United States are trying to escape being forcibly recruited into the gangs, or if they’ve already started working with the maras, leaving the country may be the only way out …
Anxious to preserve their reputations as people not to be crossed, gang leaders retaliate against those who arrive back in Honduras after fleeing to the U.S. in order to get away from them.”
No matter where you stand on immigration, this is not supposed to be the American way.
Behind the sordid scene of teenagers and young adults getting gunned down in Honduran streets is a detention policy that grinds refugees down to the point that they request deportation rather than waiting indefinitely, at least months, in violent ICE prisons.
Detentions have gotten longer and facilities have become more crowded since the election of President Obama, who is eager to appear unsympathetic to refugees who come to the U.S.
It’s very different when they show up in Europe.
Adding to the appalling morals of routinely deporting back people to a country where they subsequently get killed is the U.S. government’s total failure to take responsibility for its actions.
Honduras, ravaged by decades of a U.S.-backed dictatorship during the Cold War, has spiraled into near-“failed state” status following the Obama-backed overthrow of its democratically-elected president.
After a mass shooting at a school or movie theater, you can count on President Obama for the usual “thoughts and prayers go out” pabulum.
Not so much when the victims are killed by his drones and his mass deportation-based immigration policy.
Gredis Alexander Hernández witnessed the murder of his sister’s boyfriend and fled to the U.S. He and his sister were “both deported days after leaving and initially placed in a home for returned minors,” according to the Guardian.
After a brief stay, he was sent back to live with his family. “Two days later he was shot twice in the head as he lay in his bed.”
He was 14.
Given the carnage on his watch here, I don’t see why or how Obama has the moral standing to lecture Europe that it ought to take in more Syrians.
For aNewDomain, I’m Ted Rall.
Cover image and image three: Latino.foxnews.com, All Rights Reserved. Image one: PBS.org, All Rights Reserved; image two: AustinChronicle.com, All Rights Reserved.
