Denied asylum, migrants return to place they fear most: home

By now, the young couple thought they’d be in the United States. Somewhere, anywhere, in the United States. They thought they’d have jobs – he’d work in construction, maybe she’d be a waitress. They thought they’d be safe. They thought they’d have asylum.

Instead, an American judge swiftly denied their asylum requests. The Trump administration, in making asylum an increasingly remote possibility for everyone, had closed the door on them.

In early August, immigration officials escorted the couple on to a chartered airliner packed with deportees that flew them back to this industrial city in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

They were home, back in a two-room apartment in the dusty San Pedro Sula neighbourhood of Rivera Hernandez.

Gangs own the “whole place”

There was nowhere more frightening.

“They own Rivera Hernandez. The gangs own it,” said the wife, a driven, barely educated daughter of farmworkers who had promised herself as a little girl that she would escape the drudgery of itinerant field work. She, like most migrants living underground in Honduras, spoke on condition that her and her husband’s names not be used, fearing retribution by gangs. “They own the whole place. They walk around freely.”

The gangs’ shifting lines of control, dodge and weave through Rivera Hernandez, a place where even the police are afraid. Here, nearly every business pays ‘el impuesto de guerra’ – ‘the war tax’ – extortion payouts that can range from a couple dollars a week for a sidewalk vendor to thousands of dollars a month for a large company.

Everyone knows what happens to people who don’t pay. They know about the men shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, the kidnapped daughters of business owners raped and tortured before being killed. They know about the bloody bags found alongside San Pedro Sula’s roads, spilling out with corpses and body parts.

The gangs want people to know these stories. Fear is profitable.

Before they left for the United States, the young couple had opened a tiny grocery store near at Rivera Hernandez intersection. After a few months, they were forced to start paying war tax to Mara 18. The amounts rose and rose until they couldn’t pay anymore. Fearing for their lives, they fled to the US, the safest place they could think of.

Then, after being denied asylum, they came back.

“Why did you leave?” a Mara 18 member demanded angrily of them after they returned. “Why did you leave your business? Why aren’t you making any money for us anymore?”

Their pleas of poverty went unheard.

“I thought we would cross over” to the United States, she would recall. “Our plan was to work until we could come back and build a house and a new business, but not in that neighbourhood. In a different place where it might be less controlled by gangs and criminals.”

Then she began to weep.

… Asylum a long shot for migrants

While asylum has always been a long shot for migrants, with most claims denied, it has become even harder in the Trump administration, which has focused on making asylum increasingly difficult – some would say nearly impossible – to get.

US pressure on Mexico has forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to survive an immigration limbo in shelters and ever-growing tent camps in Mexican border cities, waiting for their cases to wind through US immigration courts. Pressure on Central American governments, meanwhile, has led to bilateral agreements aimed at sending migrants to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to seek asylum there.

Many have been deported back to the dangerous places where their journeys started. Among them was a soft-spoken factory worker, sitting in a TGI Fridays in San Pedro Sula in late November.

It had been nearly a year since he’d applied for US asylum, claiming he feared being killed by criminals hunting him in Honduras. It had been four months since he’d been deported and flown home.

And it had been three days since he was walking on a crowded downtown street two blocks from San Pedro Sula’s city hall, where the policemen outside carry assault rifles and wear body armour.

Suddenly, a man stepped towards him, fired one shot from a pistol, and fled.

The worker slumped against a wall, disoriented, a sensation of warmth rippling through him before the pain hit. But he’d been lucky. The bullet had grazed him just below his belt line, leaving a bloody welt about three inches long. He was discharged from the hospital after a few hours and returned to his tiny rental apartment and to a life in hiding.

Hunted for more than 20 years

He says he and his relatives have been hunted for more than 20 years by a powerful criminal family from his small hometown, ever since an attack left his stepmother and stepbrother dead. The other family, he said, fears the men of his family will seek revenge.

He ticks off the years of carnage: his father shot, three cousins killed as they approached adulthood, including one tortured by having his left eye ripped out. As a child, he had been grabbed off the streets as a warning, his attackers using a switchblade to cut some of his ankle tendons before shoving him out of the car.

“I’ve spent my whole life running,” he said in his soft mumble, looking down at a half-eaten cheeseburger as he talked about life underground. “One day they are going to get me.”

… Smart, pretty and ambitious

No one was surprised when the young couple fell in love.

She was smart and pretty and ambitious. He was charismatic and handsome – “a catch,” said the women in their small Honduran town, who would swoon over his cinnamon-coloured skin and carefully trimmed beard.

For generations, both their families have marked the time of year by the work they can find: the cantaloupe harvest, the watermelon harvest, the months when the shrimp farms need help. It’s a hard life. Neither went to school past ninth grade.

When they met, in a town outside the little city of Nacaome, they quickly realized that they shared a dream.

Planned their escape together

“I don’t want this,” he told her. “I want something more.”

“I’m not one of those people who will get stuck in the village,” she said. “That has never been how I thought.”

They moved in together and began planning their escape, saving as much money as they could. Two years later, with a couple hundred dollars in seed money, they took a bus north to San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city, where a friend said there were opportunities for people willing to work hard.

They rented a two-room apartment in Rivera Hernandez that opened directly on to the sidewalk. They put a bed in the back, and opened a tiny grocery store in the front, selling a few staples – rice, beans, instant coffee – through an opening in a metal grill.

Business started slow. At first, Mara 18, which controls the neighbourhood, left them alone. The couple spent almost nothing on themselves, putting nearly all their profits into more inventory. They expanded into Pepsi and candy and Bimbo blanco, Honduras’ ubiquitous white bread. Their earnings, the equivalent of barely $20 a day when they started, rose to $80 and then $120.

They would occasionally take time off. He’d join in neighbourhood soccer matches or play FIFA video games on a friend’s TV. She’d sometimes go window shopping at the City Mall, with its sparkling floors and women’s clothing stores awash in sequins.

After about eight months, they were earning more than $60 in profits on their best days. They began talking about a larger store. They dreamed of opening a real supermarket.

That was when Mara 18 – or ‘La 18’, as they are known – started paying attention. “They have eyes and ears everywhere,” the wife said.

One day, a man came by and waited until the other customers had left. He walked with a swagger. His voice resonated with authority.

“He looked like the devil,” said the wife. Her husband quickly motioned for her to go back into the apartment.

The man didn’t give his name or mention his gang. He didn’t show a gun or make any threats. He didn’t have to.

“I will make it easy for you,” he told them. “As long as everything goes OK, we will take care of you.”

After the man had left, the handsome grocer called to his wife to come back out.

He looked defeated: “It’s time to start paying taxes.”

AP