Why Would Trump Make Migrants Seek Asylum in El Salvador? To Kill the Asylum System.

In 2018, El Salvador’s murder rate was roughly 10 times higher than in the United States.

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan and El Salvador's Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandra Hill sign a migration agreement on Friday in Washington, DC.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Friday morning, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted a message featuring a gif of Kermit the Frog banging away at a typewriter, accompanied by the text, ā€œDHS beat reporters are gonna be busy today.ā€ The big news is that the United States has reached a deal that could allow it to return asylum seekers stopped at the border to El Salvador, one of the worldā€™s most violent countries.

The use of a Kermit gif to preview yet another potential abandonment of Americaā€™s commitment to protecting people fleeing persecution is only slightly surprising at this point. Over the past year, the Trump administration has waged an unprecedented campaign to dismantle the US asylum system. After a long string of defeats in court, it has celebrated recent victories with the unrestrained glee of a sports fan whose team is pulling off an upset. The fact that people may die because of its wins goes unstated. 

It is still unclear if and when the United States would force people stopped at the border to seek asylum in El Salvador. At a press conference on Friday, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said that was “one potential use” of the agreement but did not offer a timeline for when that might happen. In July, the United States reached a similar deal with Guatemala. McAleenan said in late July that he expected the United States to start sending asylum seekers to Guatemala in August, but that still isn’t happening.

The goal of sending back asylum seekers who pass through El Salvador would not be to strengthen protections, but to make the idea of seeking asylum in the United States so unappealing that fewer people will even try. More than 80,000 Salavadorans, many of whom are fleeing gangs like MS-13, have been stopped at the US-Mexico border this fiscal year. The countryā€™s murder rate has declined sharply in recent years, but still remains among the worldā€™s highest. In 2018, the countryā€™s murder rate was 51 per 100,000 people, roughly 10 times higher than in the United States.

Imagine being a Nicaraguan escaping President Daniel Ortegaā€™s oppressive regime. You know the United States is far safer and offers better opportunities for a new life. So you make your way up through Central America and Mexicoā€”risking your life along the wayā€”to ask for asylum at the US-Mexico border.

Once at the border, youā€™re told youā€™ll have to wait for weeks or months in dangerous border cities thanks to the Trump administration’s practice of capping the number of people who can request protection each day. Once youā€™re done waiting, you might be sent back to Mexico while your case is pending, since the Trump administration has now forced nearly 50,000 asylum seekers to stay south of the border while awaiting adjudication. Or, under the new agreement, you could potentially be sent back to El Salvador after all those months of hardship. 

Would you try for asylum in the United States knowing all that? Probably not. That is exactly what the Trump administration is banking on. The goal is to minimize the number of people who see the United States as a viable safe haven. 

How exactly the new agreement would work is hazy. Would asylum seekers from Africa and Asia who pass through Latin American on their way to the border be returned to a country where they donā€™t speak the language? Or, like the deal reached with Guatemala in July, would only other Latin Americans be sent to El Salvador? 

What, if anything, El Salvador is getting in return is another question. The country reportedly wanted the Trump administration to reconsider its move to end temporary protected status for Salvadorans, a protection that allows nearly 200,000 Salvadorans already in the United States to remain there due to the danger back home. The administration refused to negotiate on that point. 

At the press conference, Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill did not do much to dispel the notion that asylum seekers from other nations wouldn’t be safe in her country. “We are working every single day to try to solve this issue of people who by various reasonsā€”reasons of insecurity or reasons of death threatsā€”are forced to leave our country,” she said in English before adding, “El Salvador has not been able to give our people enough security or opportunities so that they can stay and thrive in El Salvador.”

Hill moved on to a point that is rarely made by the government with which she’d just signed an agreement. “When we talk about illegal or forced migration, sometimes we lose the concept that they are human beings,” she said. “These are human beings that are suffering. Human beings that are trying to find a better future for them and their children.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate