Safe 3rd Country: A Trumpian Blow on the Day of the Refugee

June 20 is the International Day of the Refugee, a humanitarian social reality that is increasing in the world.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2018 there were 70.8 million displaced people in the world, 41.3 million forcibly displaced within countries, 25.9 million refugees (more than half younger than 18) and 3.5 million people who petitioned for asylum. Some 85% percent of the displaced are located in developing nations.

The countries of northern Central America have multiplied their numbers of displaced sevenfold. Those numbers, according to the U.N., are comparable to those of the 1980s, when we suffered from civil wars: from 20,900 to 311,900 between 2012 and the middle of 2018. In 2018, the countries with the highest number of migrants who requested asylum in the United States were El Salvador (33,400), Guatemala (33,100), Honduras (24,400) and México (20,000). These countries account for 56% of the total number of asylum applications. Those numbers are more than just statistics, signifying a true humanitarian crisis concentrated on the borders between Guatemala and Mexico and Mexico and the United States, especially after the creation of the so-called caravans of Central American migrants that brought together around 16,000 people at the end of 2018 (four caravans) and 15,000 at the beginning of 2019. At least 3,331 applications for asylum were filed in Mexico in 2018. Recently, in an Instagram post, United States Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border. That is exactly what they are … The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the ‘Home of the Free’ is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it. … I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” referring to the detention centers run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

President Donald Trump, in response to a situation that is growing more serious, and at the beginning of his campaign for reelection in 2020, continues to make the frenetic struggle against undocumented immigrants within and outside his country his focal point. He has increased the number of deportations and, even more dangerously, used economic blackmail to force the government of Mexico to stop migration at its southern border and become, practically speaking, a safe third country, which is to say, one where asylum applications are handled. Mexico, which depends on the United States for 98% of its exports, did not want to put its economy at risk with tariff increases on its products, which Trump threatened to impose if his demands were not met. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gave in, sending 6,000 members of the National Guard to the southern border, imposing movement restrictions on the Mexicans in his country (who now each have to show an identity document to board transportation), investigating migrant shelters and defense organizations and handling refugee paperwork in Mexico.

Meanwhile, similar agreements are being imposed on the governments in northern Central America: these involve security on the borders and becoming safe third countries, which is to say, managing asylum here in Guatemala for Hondurans, Salvadorans and people of other countries, which involves providing temporary shelters, food and integration if Guatemala becomes their destination country. According to the U.N., the Guatemalan government reported 172 asylum applications, and between 2002 and June 2019, 1,302 applications were submitted, coming from more than 40 different countries.

The Guatemalan government has said on several occasions that it is an ally of the United States and is ready to collaborate to stem this flow, to the degree that it believes it is necessary to assess the provisions of the Central America-4 Free Mobility Agreement.

International human rights organizations and various nongovernmental organizations have stated their rejection of these measures, because they endanger the life and physical integrity of migrants and do not comply with the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in 1951, and the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees of 1984.

Facing this scenario of hardening anti-immigrant and anti-asylum measures and the destabilization of the institutional and legal framework − internationally and nationally, regarding human rights, migration and refuge − the migrant population and its defenders are being placed in a completely vulnerable situation. Their rights are just a bill of exchange and their lives, a safe-conduct for governments that have agreed to become complicit.