The discovery of fifty-three migrants dead in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas on June 27 is an unspeakable tragedy. While not all the victims have been identified, many came from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
More than twenty of the victims were from Guatemala, with the country’s Ministry of Foreign Relations confirming twenty-two of the victims so far. The migrants, who were seeking to find opportunities in the United States, are just the latest victims of inhumane U.S. border policies that are quickly spreading throughout the hemisphere.
“You cannot only attack a problem superficially, without going to the cause.”
Thousands of migrants have died in their quest to reach the United States in the past twenty years. In 2021 alone, there were 728 migrant deaths and disappearances reported along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the real number is likely far greater, as the records are limited.
These deaths and disappearances can be directly attributed to the Trump and Biden Administrations’ use of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 to regulate the border. The law, previously rarely used, was purportedly intended to control the coronavirus pandemic.
When the Trump Administration applied Title 42 in 2020, many analysts suggested its actual purpose was to block all asylum seekers from entering the United States, resulting in the rapid deportation of migrants either to their home countries or to Mexico. Hundreds of thousands have been expelled under these measures.
The Biden Administration belatedly attempted to retract the use of this policy, but a Texas court blocked this action in May.
This was not the only mechanism used by the Trump Administration to block legal immigration into the United States: In early 2019, it implemented the “Remain in Mexico” program, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). The policy forced all asylum seekers to stay in Mexico as they awaited their court hearings.
More than 70,000 people from Central America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere became stranded on the Mexican side of the border in overcrowded refugee camps, where they faced constant threats of violence and kidnapping by criminal groups that operate along the border with Mexico.
On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the repeal of the program, permitting the Biden Administration to officially roll back the MPP.
Regional immigration was the key focus of this year’s Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles, California, in June. At the summit, President Joe Biden announced the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, a set of regional principles that arrange expanded legal means for entering countries, assisting countries affected by migration, humane migration management, and coordinated emergency response.
But as more countries move to support migrants that are already within their borders, the new policies do little to open up borders to allow migrants to seek asylum.
According to Yael Schacher, an immigration historian and researcher and deputy director of Refugees International, there was little emphasis put on improving asylum, but rather they are “deemphasizing the access to asylum,” Schacher tells The Progressive.
The end of the controversial MPP program is not the end of the crisis, especially with Title 42 remaining in place. Now faced with the tragedy in San Antonio, the Biden Administration has chosen to focus on another aspect of the immigration crisis: human traffickers, commonly known as “coyotes,” who bring migrants through all of the security checkpoints that have been put in place to stop them.
“This incident underscores the need to go after the multibillion-dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths,” Biden said in a statement about the tragedy last week in San Antonio. “Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful . . . my Administration will continue to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers from taking advantage of people who are seeking to enter the United States between ports of entry.”
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei also responded to the tragedy by deploring the trafficking of migrants, and stating that the country would further intensify the legal penalties on coyotes. In February, the Guatemalan congress toughened the sentence for those convicted of smuggling migrants to thirty years in prison.
Following the massacre of nineteen migrants in northern Mexico in January 2021, the Guatemalan government moved to prosecute the group of coyotes. Ten coyotes were arrested and convicted in February for organizing the voyage. Yet, the residents of Comitancillo, San Marcos, where fifteen of the migrants were from, demanded the release of the coyotes, threatening protests.
Despite the legal crackdowns, the coyotes will continue.
“You cannot only attack a problem superficially, without going to the cause,” Andrea Villágran, who serves as a congressional representative and sits on the Guatemalan congress’s foreign relation committee, tells The Progressive. “Because no matter how much they put measures against, or attack, or try to sanction them, it will continue because they need to exist.”
According to many residents in the highlands of Guatemala, coyotes offer an important service to communities across Guatemala. They are celebrated by residents for guiding migrants north. At one time, their services were even advertised on local radio stations.
Yet there is a contradiction. As the United States has enacted more and more hostile anti-migration policies at the border, many coyotes have been forced to work with other elements of organized crime, including narcos.
The high prices migrants pay, sometimes more than $15,000, are the result of the challenges migrants face trying to reach the United States. This high cost often includes multiple attempts to cross the border.
The deteriorating conditions in the region are the main cause of migration, especially as the cost of living climbs ever higher. As a result, the populations have grown desperate, yet policies of the governments in the region have been to worsen the crisis, in part due to the benefit that remittances from family members in the United States bring to maintain the local and national economies.
“Go away, we need the remittances,” Mauro Verzeletti, the former director of the Catholic Church’s Migrant House in Guatemala City, told the Guatemalan daily newspaper, La Hora, describing the country’s policies.
Remittances sent home from migrants to families in Guatemala have steadily increased over the last decade. In 2021, remittances reached more than $15 billion. The current year is on course to set another record, with remittances already reaching upward of $8.7 billion as of June. The majority of the money goes toward food, education, and housing.
“The president and the government are not interested in stopping migration,” Villagrán says. “They are more interested in the remittances that are sent [by migrants] to sustain the economy.”