The U.S. Government Is Deporting Central American Migrants to Their Deaths

A Guardian investigation into the consequences of the Obama administration’s crackdown on migrants reveals that U.S. deportees have been murdered shortly after returning to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with a separate academic study showing as many as 83 have been killed since 2014.

The number migrants unlawfully crossing the U.S. border with Mexico declined sharply in 2015.

The Guardian reports:

The Guardian has confirmed three separate cases of Honduran men who have been gunned down shortly after being deported by the US government. Each was murdered in their hometowns, soon after their return – one just a few days after he was expelled from the US. …

José Marvin Martínez was 16 when he fled from the town of San Manuel in the north of Honduras to the US. A few months earlier his brother Rigoberto had been shot and killed by suspected gang members, relatives said. …

On 14 December – four months after he was deported – Martínez, who was known locally as El Chele or “Blondie”, was sitting outside a corner shop back in San Manuel when a gunman opened fire from a drive-by truck, killing him. “If a deportee can’t find a place to feel safe, surely he’ll be killed,” said Jaime Coto, a Honduran detective. …

Elizabeth Kennedy, a social scientist at San Diego state university, has compiled a comprehensive estimate of US deportees who have been murdered on their return to Central America since January 2014 based on local newspaper reports. Her forthcoming research identified 45 such cases in El Salvador, three in Guatemala and 35 in Honduras.

“These figures tell us that the US is returning people to their deaths in violation of national and international law. Most of the individuals reported to have been murdered lived in some of the most violent towns in some of the most violent countries in the world – suggesting strongly that is why they fled,” Kennedy said.

Read more here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.