SUMMARY: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen recently declared a "compact” with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, aiming to reduce their migration to the U.S. But since then, the Trump administration said it will cut aid to those countries, including to programs that seek to address the violence and poverty making their residents desperate to flee. John Yang talks to Nick Schifrin for more.
SUMMARY:The deadly stranglehold of gang violence in Honduras drives tens of thousands of desperate residents to flee north to request asylum in the U.S. But few receive it, often due to a lack of documentation of the persecution they faced at home. Special correspondent Marcia Biggs reports from San Pedro Sula with harrowing stories of the fates of migrants who made it to the U.S., only to be deported.
JOHN CARLOS FREY (NewsHour): Miguel Angel Gomez, a 30-year-old taxi driver here in El Salvador spends a lot of time looking in his rear-view mirror, worried that he’ll be the next victim of a notoriously violent street gang that already murdered Miguel’s brother.
A local news report showed the scene of the crime.
MIGUEL ANGEL GOMEZ: First they shot him and then they beheaded him. Here if they don’t like you or for any little thing, they have you killed.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Miguel says his brother was not part of a gang and has no idea why his brother was killed. But Miguel says gang members are now after him because they believe that he’ll seek revenge.
What happens to you and your wife if you both stay here in El Salvador?
MIGUEL ANGEL GOMEZ: They will kill us.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: He and his wife are now planning to illegally cross the border into Texas, where they have relatives. Since last January more than 230,000 undocumented Central Americans, many of them children, have crossed into the United States fleeing violence perpetrated by gangs and drug cartels in countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
With all the reporting about the current crisis, what’s little understood is that the mass exodus to the United States earlier this year was actually thirty years in the making. Fueled by American foreign policy decisions in the 1980’s and an act of congress in the mid 1990’s.
AL VALDEZ, Orange County police: There are experts who say this is all Americans’ fault and there are those who say it’s not our fault because we’re following the rules. And then there’s people like me sort of on the fence.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: It all began in the early 1980’s when El Salvador was in the midst of a brutal civil war. It was the height of the cold war and the Reagan administration, fearful of communist expansion in Central America supported the military-backed government with arms and financing. Seventy-five thousand were killed in the conflict, mostly at the hands of government forces. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their war-torn country seeking refuge in the United States.
AL VALDEZ: The mass exodus of Salvadorians to flee the conflict down there put a large population of Salvadorian immigrants in Los Angeles.
Al Valdez is a 28-year veteran of the police force in Orange County, California, who specialized in undercover field operations and headed the gang investigation unit for the Attorney General’s office there. He explains that many of these Salvadoran families lived in poverty in the rough neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. Some of these new immigrants joined Latino gangs like 18th street gang and Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS 13, for both protection and a livelihood.
AL VALDEZ: Kids join gangs as a mechanism to survive. Now granted your life sucks, but at least you’re alive and you have food and water, and you have protection.
JOHN CARLOS FREY:Many of those Salvadoran gang members ended up in California prisons. And this is where that act of congress comes in. Before 1996, only criminals convicted of violent felonies with sentences of five years or more could be deported. But all that changed in 1996, when in an attempt to get tough on illegal immigration, congress passed a law allowing authorities to deport criminals if they had a prison sentence of just one year.
This led to the deportation of 10s of thousands of gang members to Central America, many to El Salvador. Once they arrived they set up shop here and recruited local Salvadorans into the gangs. Many of the new recruits were teenagers who joined for the money and for the street cred. Others because they’d been threatened that if they refused to join, they’d be killed.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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