Oscar Sosa cooks roast chicken and pork on an artisanal grill set up outside his small restaurant, Comedor Espresso, in the eastern Salvadoran city of San Francisco Gotera. Like many of the returnees, especially from the United States, he set up his own business, given the unemployment he found on his return to El Salvador. More than 10,000 people were deported to this Central American country between January and August 2022. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA, El Salvador, Jan 10 2023 (IPS)

While grilling several portions of chicken and pork, Salvadoran cook Oscar Sosa said he was proud that through his own efforts he had managed to set up a small food business after he was deported back to El Salvador from the United States.

This has allowed him to generate an income in a country where unemployment affects 6.3 percent of the economically active population.

“Little by little we grew and now we also have catering services for events,” Sosa told IPS, as he turned the chicken and pork over with tongs on a small circular grill.

The grill is located outside the premises, so that the smoke won’t bother the customers eating inside.

It’s not easy, he said, to return home and to not be able to find a job. That is why he decided to start his own business, Comedor Espresso, in the center of San Francisco Gotera, a city in the department of Morazán in eastern El Salvador.“You come back wanting to work and there aren’t any opportunities. The first thing they see in you is your age; when you’re over 35, they don’t hire you.” -- Patricia López

In this Central American country of 6.7 million people, “comedores” are small, generally precarious, neighborhood restaurants where inexpensive, homemade meals are prepared.

Sosa’s, although very small, was clean and tidy, and even had air conditioning, when IPS visited it on Dec. 19.

Skills and capacity abound, but opportunities are scarce

Sosa, 35, is one of thousands of people deported from the United States every year.

He left in 2005 and was sent back in 2014. He worked for eight years as a cook at a Mexican restaurant in the city of Pensacola, in the southeastern state of Florida.

A total of 10,399 people were deported to this country between January and August 2022, which represents an increase of 221 percent compared to the same period in 2021, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.

The flow of undocumented Salvadoran migrants, especially to the United States, intensified in the 1980s, due to the 1980-1992 civil war in El Salvador that left some 75,000 dead and around 8,000 forcibly disappeared.

At the end of the war, people continued to leave, for economic reasons and also because of the high levels of violent crime in the country.

An estimated 3.1 million Salvadorans live outside the country, 88 percent of them in the United States. And 50 percent of the Salvadorans in the U.S. are undocumented.

Despite the problem of unemployment, Sosa was not discouraged when he returned to his country.

“I feel that we are already growing, we have five employees, the business is registered in the Ministry of Finance, in the Ministry of Health, and I’m paying taxes,” he said.

Obviously, not all deportees have the support, especially financial, needed to set up their own business.

The stigma of deportation weighs heavily on them: there is a widespread perception that if they were deported it is because they were involved in some type of crime in the United States.

A government survey, conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, found that 50 percent of the deportees manage to open a business, 18 percent live off their savings, their partner’s income or support from their family, and 16 percent have part-time or full-time jobs.

In addition, seven percent live on remittances sent home to them, two percent receive income from property rentals, dividends or bank interests, and seven percent checked “other” or did not answer.

Apart from some government initiatives and non-governmental organizations that provide training and funds for start-ups, returnees have faced the specter of unemployment for decades.

Many return empty-handed and owe debts to the people smugglers who they hired to get into the United States as undocumented migrants.

In the case of Sosa, his brothers supported him to set up Comedor Espresso.

He also received a small grant of 700 dollars to purchase kitchen equipment.

The money came from a program financed with 87,000 dollars by the Salvadoran community abroad, through the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry.

The initiative, launched in 2019, aims to generate opportunities for returnees in four municipalities in eastern El Salvador, including San Francisco Gotera.

This region was chosen because most of the deportees reside here, according to Carlos Díaz, coordinator of the program on behalf of the San Francisco Gotera mayor’s office.

But the demand for support and resources exceeds supply.

“There was a database of approximately 350 returnees in Gotera, but there was only money for 55,” Díaz told IPS.

More than 200 people benefited in the four municipalities.

David Aguilar and Patricia López (right) set up their own business, El Tuco King Carwash, after they decided to return to El Salvador. Their business is located in the eastern part of the country, a region where more than 50 percent of returnees live. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Hope despite a tough situation

Out of necessity, David Aguilar and Patricia López, 52 and 42, respectively, also set up their own business, in their case a car wash, after deciding to return to El Salvador. It’s called Tuco King Carwash.

Like Sosa, they are from San Francisco Gotera. Aguilar left the country in November 2005 and López three months later, in February 2006.

They made the risky journey to try to give their young daughter – six months old at the time, and today 17 years old – a better future.

One leg of the trip was by sea, on the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico.

“I spent 12 hours at sea, in a boat carrying about 20 people, who were all undocumented like me,” Aguilar said.

He added: “The only thing they gave us as lifesavers were a few plastic containers, in case the boat capsized.”

It was in Houston, in the state of Texas, that Aguilar found work in a car paint shop. The experience has been useful to him back in El Salvador, because in addition to washing cars, he offers paint jobs and other related services.

Aguilar and López were not deported; they decided to return because her father died in 2011. They came back in 2012, without having seen many of their dreams come true.

“You come back wanting to work and there aren’t any opportunities. The first thing they see in you is your age; when you’re over 35, they don’t hire you,” López said.

Before embarking on the trip to the United States, she had finished her degree as a primary school teacher, in 2005. But she never worked as a teacher because she left the following year.

“When I returned I applied to various teaching positions, but no one ever hired me,” she said.

Today, their carwash business, set up in 2014, is doing well, albeit with difficulties, because the couple have found that there is too much competition.

But they do not lose hope that they will succeed.

Former Salvadoran guerrilla David Henríquez, deported from the United States in 2019, shows the quality of the disinfectant he has just produced in his small artisanal workshop in San Salvador. With no chance of finding formal employment after deportation, he worked hard to set up his disinfectant business to generate an income. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

An ex-guerrilla chemist

David Henríquez, a 62-year-old former guerrilla fighter, was deported in 2019.

During the civil war, Henríquez was a combatant of the then insurgent Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), but when peace came he decided to emigrate to the United States in 2003 as an undocumented immigrant.

With no hope of finding a formal sector job here, he began to make cleaning products, a skill he learned in the United States.

In the 12 years that he lived there, he worked for two years at the Sherwin Williams plant, a global manufacturer of paints and other chemicals.

“It was there that I began to discover the world of chemical compositions and aromas,” Henríquez told IPS during a visit to his small workshop in the Belén neighborhood of San Salvador, the capital.

Henríquez was producing a 14-gallon (53-liter) batch of blue disinfectant with the scent of baby powder. He also makes disinfectant smelling like cinnamon and lavender, among others. His business is called El Dave de los aromas.

His production process is still artisanal, although he would know how to produce disinfectant with high-tech machinery, if he had it, he said, “as I did at Sherwin Williams.”

He used a baby bottle to measure out the 3.5 ounces (104 milliliters) of nonylphenol, the main chemical component, used to produce 14 gallons.

Henríquez dissolved other chemicals in powder, to get the color and the aroma, and the product was ready.

He produces about 400 gallons a month, 1,514 liters, at a price of 3.50 dollars each.

“The important thing is to have discipline, work hard, to shine with your own effort,” he said.

Poultry production is giving hope for deported migrants who make up the Association of Active Women Working Together for a Better Future, in the village of Los Talpetates, Berlin municipality in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
BERLÍN, El Salvador, Feb 8 2019 (IPS)

Salvadoran farmer Lorena Mejía opens an incubator and monitors the temperature of the eggs, which will soon provide her with more birds and eggs as the chickens hatch and grow up.

Mejía is one of the beneficiaries of a project that seeks to offer productive ventures to women who, like her, have been deported from Mexico or the United States while they were attempting to achieve “the American dream.”

“I left because I worked in a factory in San Salvador, but the money wasn’t enough,” the 43-year-old woman told IPS in the yard of her home in the village of Talpetate, Berlin municipality in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután."Rural women are the motors of the economy, and at FAO we support returnees through inclusive and equitable processes." – Emilia González

In 1998, after a dangerous journey of several weeks, Mejia managed to settle in Dallas, Texas in the U.S.

She worked there in cleaning services at a school and in a hotel, but she returned to her country in 2001, with many broken dreams.

“Now I’m focused, together with my colleagues, on making this project grow,” she said.

Mejía and other local women farmers founded the Association of Active Women Working Together for a Better Future in 2010, and came up with an initiative that would offer productive opportunities to other returning migrants.

Currently, some 40 women make up this organisation, 15 of whom are involved in poultry production, who have received technical support from the state-run National Centre for Agricultural and Forestry Technology (Centa), as well as from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) office in El Salvador.

The rest grow El Salvador staple crops: corn and beans.

In spite of the importance of the support from Centa and FAO for the women’s organisation, the Salvadoran State has not yet developed a strategy aimed at the economic reinsertion of returning migrants, and in particular women.

“Sometimes what you need is a little boost,” said Mejia.

In the small rural village of Talpetate, home to some 70 families, jobs are scarce and poverty is rampant.

According to official figures published in May 2018, 32.1 percent of rural Salvadoran households are below the poverty line, compared to 27.4 percent in the cities.

The project, which was launched in November 2018, provided each participating family with 25 hens to produce eggs.

Dennis Alejo, a Salvadoran deported while trying to cross into the United States, has found in tomato production the best way to make a living and generate a handful of jobs in his native Berlin, in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

According to the participants, income from the sale of eggs is still modest. But in the future, when production has increased, they expect to earn about 200 dollars a month as a collective.

That money is reinvested in the small collective farm, in order to improve and increase production, with more incubators and infrastructure.

“Rural women are the motors of the economy, and at FAO we support returnees through inclusive and equitable processes,” Emilia González, the U.N. organisation’s assistant representative for programmes in El Salvador, told IPS.

An important component of the project is that it also supports food sustainability, because part of the egg and poultry production goes to household consumption.

“We saved the money we would use to buy a few pounds of chicken,” Marlene Mejía, 46, another of the beneficiaries, told IPS.

She also tried to reach the United States, in 2003, as an undocumented migrant. But she only managed to make it partly across Mexico, before she got stuck in a town whose name she never knew.

After several days of confinement with very little food in a house run by migrant traffickers, she decided to return to her country.

The migration of Salvadorans to the United States is a phenomenon that has marked this small Central American country of 7.3 million people.

It is estimated that at least 2.8 million Salvadorans live in the United States, part of an exodus that intensified in the 1980s, when El Salvador experienced a bloody civil war (1980-1992).

Three planes arrive weekly from the United States with deportees, as well as three buses from Mexico.

According to official statistics, more than 26,000 Salvadorans were deported in 2018, mainly from Mexico and the United States. A high figure, but 1.2 percent lower than the total for 2017, which was 26,837.

For the past four years, Marlene Mejía has also been making pupusas, the most popular dish in El Salvador: a corn tortilla filled with beans, cheese and pork rinds, among other ingredients.

“If you have a job here, why suffer over there?” she asked.

The Salvadoran government offers some support for the economic reinsertion of returnees, through the project called “El Salvador is your home”, launched in October 2017.

According to data from the Foreign Ministry, 147 people received seed money to start up a project for economic and psychosocial reintegration, while another pilot project for the productive insertion of Usulután is aimed at 208 people.

But these are derisory amounts in terms of the number of beneficiaries, given the magnitude of the deportations and the country’s economic problems, so that most returnees find no economic stability, and government assistance falls far short.

“Evidently it is insufficient; a bigger effort is needed to be able to offer options to people when they return to their hometowns,” Jaime Rivas, a migration researcher at Don Bosco University, told IPS.

Some returnees manage to set up ventures on their own, with little or no governmental or international support.

Dennis Alejo, 30, has tried to cross the U.S. border five times since 2010.

The last time, in 2015, he managed to reach the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, but the group of migrants with whom he had been crossing the desert for seven days was intercepted by the “migra”, as migrants popularly call agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But he managed to escape and hide in the bush.

“I spent the whole night hugging the scrub to hide from a helicopter with a searchlight, which was looking for me,” he told IPS.

Now, through his own efforts, and overcoming all sorts of obstacles, Alejo grows good quality tomatoes on a small plot of land he rents in Berlin, thanks to the 1,800 plants he planted three years ago.

He also employs a dozen young people as pickers, and feels he’s preventing youngsters from risking their lives crossing deserts to get to the United States.

“I don’t pay them much, just five dollars a day, but if I had more support, I could employ more people,” he said.

Because Alejo also faces the lack of financial support to set up an irrigation system to boost production.

People deported from the United States arriving at the Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport in the capital of El Salvador. Their country receives them with very few initiatives for labour and social reinsertion. Credit: Courtesy DGME

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

Julio César Cordero’s American dream didn’t last long. He was trying to reach Houston, Texas as an undocumented immigrant but was detained in Acayucán in southeastern Mexico. And like thousands of other deported Salvadorans, he doesn’t know what the future will hold.

Cordero’s head hangs low as he climbs off the bus that brought him back to the capital of El Salvador. He carries only a plastic bag with a few items of clothing – and broken dreams.

“I want to offer my son a better future, so I’ll probably try again next year,” Cordero tells IPS as he reaches the immigration office, on the east side of San Salvador, the dropping-off point for migrants detained in Mexico on their way to the United States.

An estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans live in the United States, the great majority of them without papers. Initially many went there fleeing the 1980-1992 civil war that left 80,000 dead and disappeared in their country.“The mistaken reasoning of bankers is that if they lend a deportee 10,000, tomorrow morning he’ll be in New York because he’ll use the money to pay for a new trip.” -- César Ríos

“On the other hand, it’s a relief to be back in my country again,” Cordero adds.

At least two flights from the United States and three buses from Mexico bring back around 150 deportees every day. The authorities are alarmed by the sheer numbers. In the first 11 months of 2014, a total of 47,943 deportees reached the immigration office – 43 percent more than in the same period in 2013.

The migration authorities project a total of 50,000 deportees for 2014 – a heavy burden for this impoverished Central American country of 6.2 million people, where unemployment stands at six percent and 65 percent of those who work do so in the informal sector of the economy.

The army of returning migrants does not have government support programmes to help with their reinsertion in the labour market, deportees and representatives of civil society organisations told IPS.

Many of them have put down roots in the United States, and they return to this country with no support network and with the stigma of having been deported, because the impression here is that most of those sent home are gang members or criminals.

“We just want a hand to help us find jobs, open a business or get a loan,” says Antonio, who preferred not to give his last name.

Antonio lived in San Francisco, California from 2005 to 2010, where he worked caring for the elderly, and as a cook in restaurants. But he came back because his mother fell ill. He tried to return in 2012, but was caught after crossing the Mexico-U.S. border.

“The return is hard,” he says. “I came back without a cent, and with a huge pile of debt.”

Antonio wants the government to help returning migrants gain access to bank loans. He says that when they try to start over again in El Salvador, setting up a microenterprise, they run up against the impossibility of getting credit.

“The mistaken reasoning of bankers is that if they lend a deportee 10,000, tomorrow morning he’ll be in New York because he’ll use the money to pay for a new trip,” César Ríos, the director of the Salvadoran Institute for Migrants (INSAMI), tells IPS.

INSAMI is promoting a project to provide support for deportees in their reinsertion into the productive life of the country, in terms of job opportunities as well as access to credit.

One of the biggest problems faced by the deported migrants is that they have no documents to prove the work experience they gained in the United States.

One of the measures included in the project is for the Salvadoran government to issue certificates recognising the work experience they obtained in the United States, to help them find jobs in El Salvador.

“We’re not criminals; we deserve a chance,” Antonio repeats several times.

In El Salvador there is a widespread but erroneous idea that the majority of those who are deported from the United States belonged to gangs or were involved in other kinds of criminal activities.

Because of the stigma surrounding deportation, some of them covered their faces when they got off the buses that brought them home, the day IPS visited the migration office.

The ones who are flown back from the United States actually wear handcuffs on the plane, and when they land in the Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport, they are met by a heavily armed police cordon.

“The reception they are given is not a welcome; they are treated as criminals,” Karla Salas, a researcher at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University’s (IDHUCA) Human Rights Institute, told IPS.

This procedure reinforces the stigma and the impression that they are criminals, added Salas, who in 2013 participated in an IDHUCA study carried out between January and March 2013, which is about to be published under the title “Deported Dreams”, on the social impacts of deportation on returned migrants and their families.

Preliminary data from the study show that 70 percent of those deported have never been accused of a crime.

And of the remaining 30 percent, the crimes they were accused of in the United States included assault, drunk driving and drug possession, according to the Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería (DGME), the migration office.

The migration authorities recognise that the reception given the returnees is not appropriate, and say they are working to improve it.

“The idea is to make the reception given our fellow countrymen more humane,” DGME spokesman Mauricio Silva told IPS.

Silva said the government is working to bring together public and private institutions and agencies to create programmes to help deported migrants rejoin the labour market.

For example, financing is needed to restart a pilot project that benefited 20 people with financial support for setting up microenterprises in late 2012. It was implemented with funds from the Canadian government and coordinated by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Antonio was one of the beneficiaries of that programme. He was given 1,400 dollars and opened a pizza parlor. Things were going well until his business was robbed and went under. Now he is trying to get a loan to start over again.

For now, the only thing offered by the government is training in trades for mechanics or electricians, for example, as well as legal aid for migrants. It also provides letters of recommendation, to help deportees find work.

INSAMI’s Ríos said the deportations will move ahead at the same pace, despite the Nov. 20 announcement by U.S. President Barack Obama that a priority would be put on deporting felons rather than families.

The president issued an executive action that will provide temporary residency permits and jobs to some five million undocumented immigrants, including parents of young people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, as long as the parents entered the country before January 2010.

It also covers young people who went to the United States before January 2010, as children.

But Obama clarified that deportations were not about to stop.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Banner in the village of Fidae (near Byblos) which reads: "The municipality of Al Fidae announces that there is a curfew for all foreigners inside the village every day from 8 pm to 5.30 am". Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Staring at the floor, Hassan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee from Idlib in northwestern Syria, holds a set of identification papers in his hands. He picks out a small pink piece of paper with a few words on it stating that he must obtain a work contract, otherwise his residency visa will not be renewed.

Hassan (not his real name) has been given two months to find an employer willing to cough up for a work permit, something extremely unlikely to happen. After that, his presence in Lebanon will be deemed illegal.

Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service, tells IPS that all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service … [says that] all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.

Sitting next to Hassan is 24-year-old Ahmed (not his real name) from Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, who lost his residency one month ago. Since then he has been forced to watch his movements. “I live with permanent fear of being caught by the police and deported,” he says.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war in March 2011, over 1.2 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon, where they now account for almost one-third of the Lebanese population.

Particularly since May, the Lebanese government has increasingly introduced measures to limit the influx of Syrian refugees into the country. Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Oct. 23, Information Minister Ramzi Jreij announced that the government had reached a decision “to stop welcoming displaced persons, barring exceptional cases, and to ask the U.N. refugee agency [UNHCR] to stop registering the displaced.”

Dalia Aranki, Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance Advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told IPS that Lebanon “is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention” and, as a result, “is not obliged to meet all obligations resulting from the Convention.”

“Being registered with UNHCR in Lebanon can provide some legal protection and is important for access to services,” she wrote together with Olivia Kalis in a recent article published by Forced Migration Review. “But it does not grant refugees the right to seek asylum, have legal stay or refugee status. This leaves refugees in a challenging situation.”

Current legal restrictions affect the admission of newcomers, renewal of residency visas and the regularisation of visa applications for those who have entered the country through unofficial border crossings.

One aid worker who is providing assistance to Syrian refugees in Mount Lebanon told IPS that the majority of the Syrian beneficiaries they are working with no longer have a legal residency visa.

Aranki notes that fear of being arrested often forces those without legal residency papers to limit their movements and also their ability to access various services, to obtain a lease contract or find employment is severely limited. It could also impede birth registration for refugees -with the consequent risk of statelessness, or force family separations on the border.

Before May this year, Syrians could usually enter Lebanon as “tourists” and obtain a residency visa for six months (renewable every six months for up to three years), although this process cost 200 dollars a year, which already was financially prohibitive for many refugee families.

However, NRC has noted that under new regulations Syrians are only permitted to enter Lebanon in exceptional or humanitarian cases such as for medical reasons, or if the applicant has an onward flight booked out of the country, an appointment at an embassy, a valid work permit, or is deemed a “wealthy” tourist. Since summer 2013, restrictions for Palestinian refugees from Syria have become even more severe.

Under its new policy, the Lebanese government also intends to participate in the registration of new refugees together with the UNHCR. Khalil Gebara, an advisor to Minister of Interior Nohad Machnouk, says that the government has taken these measures for two reasons.

“First, because the government decided that it needs to have a joint sovereign decision over the issue of how to treat the Syrian crisis. (…) Previously, it was UNHCR to decide who was deemed a refugee and who was not, the Lebanese government was not involved in this process.”

Secondly “because government believes that there are a lot of Syrians registered who are abusing the system. A lot of them are economic migrants living in Lebanon and they are registered with the United Nations. The government wants to specify who really deserves to be a refugee and who does not”.

Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesperson, said that the U.N. agency has “for a long time” encouraged the Lebanese government to assume a role in the registration of new refugees and affirms that registration is going on.

“There is concern about the protection of refugees but there is also understanding on UNHCR’s part,” said Redmond. “Lebanon has legitimate security, demographic and social concerns.”

Meanwhile, accompanying the increasing fear of deportation from Lebanon, Syrian refugees have also been forced to deal with routine forms of discrimination.

Over 45 municipalities across Lebanon have imposed curfews restricting the movement of Syrians during night-time hours, measures which, according to Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Nadim Houry, contravene “international human rights law and appear to be illegal under Lebanese law.”

Attacks targeting unarmed Syrians – particularly since clashes between the Lebanese army and gunmen affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Arsal in August – have  also occurred.

Given such realities, life in Lebanon for Hassan, Ahmed and many other Syrian refugees, is becoming a new exile, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Rosa Nelly Santos arranges photos of missing Honduran migrants on a sort of shrine to ensure they are not forgotten, at the premises of the Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives in El Progreso. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
EL PROGRESO, Honduras, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

United by grief and anxiety, the grandmothers, mothers and other relatives of people who disappeared on the migration route to the United States formed a committee in this city in northern Honduras to search for their missing loved ones.
Founded in 1999, the Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos de El Progreso (COFAMIPRO – El Progreso Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives) is now one of the most highly regarded migrants’ rights organisations in Honduras.

For the past 14 years, COFAMIPRO has aired a radio programme on Sunday afternoons called “Abriendo Fronteras” (Opening Borders) on Radio Progreso, a station run by the Society of Jesus (a Catholic religious order) in Honduras.

The programme was originally called “Sin Fronteras” (Without Borders), but Rosa Nelly Santos, a member of COFAMIPRO, told IPS that as the committee expanded its activities, “we decided to call it Abriendo Fronteras, because we have indeed opened them. We are listened to by a larger audience than ever before, and not only by migrants but also by governments.”“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves.” -- Marcia Martínez

The hour-long radio programme fulfills a vital social function. It advises migrants about conditions on the routes, plays the music they request to lift their spirits, and provides a sevice by enabling them to send messages to their relatives in Honduras.

Emeteria Martínez, a founding member of COFIMAPRO, died in 2013 just months after locating one of her daughters , who had been missing for 21 years.

Finding their family members was the driving force that united them, Santos said. “The group was created out of nothing, by discovering that one woman’s grief was the same as another’s. We would meet in the home of one of the group and that’s how we built up courage to go out into the world and search for our relatives,” she said.

Twenty women started the group, and now the leadership group is composed of more than 40 members.

They are unassuming women but they are buoyed by hope, in spite of the pain of not knowing anything about their missing relatives and of facing dreadful tragedies like the Tamaulipas massacre in Mexico. Four years ago, 72 migrants, 21 of whom were Hondurans, were shot at point-blank range by Los Zetas, a Mexican criminal cartel. Their bodies were found on a ranch in the San Fernando district.

The Tamaulipas massacre brought home to Hondurans the suffering involved in migration, over and above the issue of the remittances sent back by those who make it to the United States.

“It was like a defeat for us. You hope that your son or daughter will travel safely on the migrant route and manage to cross the border, but you do not expect him or her to be massacred and shipped back to you in a box. That is really shocking,” said Santos, who together with other members of COFAMIPRO has helped and comforted victims’ relatives.

The women on the Committee are all volunteers who have overcome their fear of the unknown. For over a decade they have taken part in the mothers’ caravans , motorcades organised by the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (Mesoamerican Migrant Movement), which in September every year travel the migrant routes, looking for clues to the whereabouts of missing relatives.

The migratory route begins in Guatemala and ends at Mexico’s northern border.

“The first time I went on the caravan, three years ago, I understood the importance of my mother’s work. I learned from her grief and I decided to take a full part in the Committee,” Marcia Martínez, 44, another daughter of the Committee’s deceased founder, told IPS.

“I had no idea of the huge number of mothers and relatives who join the motorcade, nor of the epic nature of the journeys my mother undertook. They cover all the routes used by the migrants, asking about them with placards, looking for answers that sometimes never arrive, or arrive too late. When we find someone we were looking for, the joy is indescribable,” she said.

“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants on their way north] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves,” Martínez said.

COFAMIPRO’s premises are in a shopping centre in El Progreso, one of Honduras’s five largest cities, in the northern department (province) of Yoro, 242 kilometres from Tegucigalpa. Formerly they were housed in Jesuit property, but thanks to donations they were able to rent their own small locale where people can come for support to find their relatives.

In the years since it was founded it has documented more than 600 cases of disappeared persons, of whom over 150 have been found. They continue to seek the rest, although they believe that many must have died on the way or fallen in the hands of human trafficking networks.

Initially the government would not recognise the Committee, but the success of its work with the Mesoamerican caravans led to its voice being heard. It has presented cases of disappeared migrants to the foreign ministry. In June, the group finally acquired formal legal status.

Their struggle has not been easy. Honduran officials dismissed them as “crazy old women” when, years ago, they organised their own march to Tegucigalpa to demand action for their missing loved ones.

Their response was a song they chanted at the foreign office building. Santos sang it with pride: “People at the foreign office call us liars, but we are decent women and we prove it with deeds; what we are here to demand is completely within our rights.”

Their steady, silent work has yielded fruit. When IPS interviewed a group of these women, they had just saved the life of a Honduran man, a relative of a local official in El Progreso, through their Mexican contacts.

He had been kidnapped by a criminal organisation that extorted more than 3,000 dollars from his family before they approached the Committee, which secured his release through an operation by the Mexican prosecution service.

Five years ago, COFAMIPRO issued a warning about the present migration crisis, but no one listened. According to the group, migrants will continue to flee from unemployment and criminal violence.

In the baking hot city of El Progreso, cases have been known of mothers who left town when criminal gangs told them their children would be forcibly recruited into the criminal organisations when they were old enough, and that in the meantime the gangs would provide money to raise the children and pay for their education.

An estimated one million Hondurans have emigrated to the United States since the 1970s, but the exodus has intensified since 1998. As of April 2014, Washington has intensified its deportations of families with children as well as adults.

The Honduran authorities say that 56,000 people were deported back to the country in the first seven months of this year. Of these, 29,000 arrived from the United States by air and 27,000 from Mexico by land.

Honduras has a population of 8.4 million and a homicide rate of 79 per 100,000 population, according to official figures.

In 2013, migrants contributed 3.2 billion dollars to the Honduran economy in remittances, close to 15 percent of GDP, according to the Central Bank.

In COFAMIPRO’s view, the migratory crisis should spur governments to reform their public policies and refrain from stigmatising and criminalising migrants, because “they are not criminals, they are international workers,” Santos said.

She, at least, has the consolation of having found her missing nephew four years ago.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

The government of Mali and Touareg rebels representing Azawad, a territory in northern Mali which declared unilateral independence in 2012 after a Touareg rebellion drove out the Malian army, resumed peace talks in Algiers last week, intended to end decades of conflict.

The talks, being held behind closed doors, are expected to end on July 24.

Negotiations between Bamako and representatives of six northern Mali armed groups, among which the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) is the strongest, kicked off in Algiers on July 16. Diplomats from Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and other international bodies are also attending the discussions.

Moussa Ag Assarid, MNLA spokesperson. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

IPS spoke with writer and a journalist Moussa Ag Assarid, MNLA spokesperson in Europe.

You declared your independent state in April 2012 but no one has recognised it yet. Why is that?

We are not for a Touareg state but for a secular and democratic multi-ethnic model of country. We, Touaregs, may be a majority among Azawad population but there are also Arabs, Shongays and Peulas and we´re working in close coordination with them.

Since Mali´s independence in 1960, the people from Azawad have repeatedly stated that we don´t want to be part of that country. We do have the support of many people all around the globe but the states and the international organisations such as the United Nations prefer to tackle the issue without breaking the established order.

And this is why both the United Nations and Mali refer to “jihadism”, and not to the legitimate struggle for freedom of the Azawad people.

However, we are witnessing a reorganisation of the world order amid significant movements in northern Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe, as in the case of the Ukraine. It´s very much a clear proof of the failure of globalisation and the world´s management.“We [the people of Azawad] do have the support of many people all around the globe but the states and the international organisations such as the United Nations prefer to tackle the issue without breaking the established order” – Moussa Ag Assarid

The French intervention in the 2012 war was seemingly a key factor on your side. How do you asses the former colonial power´s role in the region?

The French have always been there, even after Mali´s independence, because they have huge strategic interests in the area as well as natural resources such as the uranium they rely on. In fact, you could say that our independence has been confiscated by both the international community and France.

The former Malian soldiers have been replaced by the U.N. ones but the Malian army keeps committing all sort of abuses against civilians, from arbitrary arrests to deportations or enforced disappearances, all of which take place without the French and the U.N. soldiers lifting a finger.

Meanwhile, Bamako calls on the French state to support them under the pretext they are fighting against Jihadism.

Another worrying issue is the media blackout imposed on us. Reporters are prevented from coming to Azawad so the information is filtered through Bamako-based reporters who talk about “Mali´s north”, who refuse to speak about our struggle and who become spokesmen and defenders of the Malian state.

So what is the real presence, if any, of the Malian state in Azawad?

Mali´s army and its administration fled in 2012 and the state is only present in the areas protected by the French army, in Gao and Tombouktou. Paris has around 1,000 soldiers deployed in the area, the United Nations has 8,000 blue helmets in the whole country, and there are between 12,000 and 15,000 fighters in the ranks of the MNLA.

We coordinate ourselves with the Arab Movement of Azawad and the High Council for the Unity of Azawad. Alongside these two groups we hold control of 90 percent of Azawad, but we are living under extremely difficult conditions.

We obviously don´t get any support from either Mali or Algeria and we have to cope with a terrible drought. We rely on the meat and the milk of our goats, like we´ve done from time immemorial and we fight with the weapons we confiscated from the Malian Army, the Jihadists, or those we once got from Libya.

You mention Libya. Many claim that the MNLA fighters fought on the side of Gaddafi during the Libyan war in 2011. Is that right?

Many media networks insist on distorting the facts. Gaddafi did grant Libyan citizenship to the Touaregs but he later used them to fight in Palestine, Lebanon or Chad. In 1990, they went back to Azawad to fight against the Malian army and, even if we had the chance, we did not make the mistake of fighting against the Libyan people in 2011.

Gaddafi gave Touaregs weapons to fight in Benghazi but the Touareg decided to go to Kidal and set up the MNLA. It´s completely false that the MNLA is formed by Touaregs who came from Libya. Many of our fighters have never been there, neither have I.

Do Islamic extremists still pose a major concern in Azawad?

In January 2013, AQMI (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), MUJAO (Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa), a splinter group of AQMI and Ansar Dine attacked the Malian army on the border between Mali and Azawad.

Mali´s president asked for help from Paris to oust them but it´s us, the MNLA, who have been fighting the Jihadists since June 2012. The United States, the United Kingdom and France claim to fight against Al Qaeda but it´s us who do it on the ground. Ansar Dine has given no sign of life for over a year but AQMI and MUJAO are still active.

One of the most outrageous issues is that Bamako had had strong links with AQMI in the past, or even backed Ansar Dine, whose leader is a Touareg but the people under his command are just a criminal gang. Today, the Jihadists backed by Bamako have become stronger than the Malian army itself.

Are you optimistic about the ongoing talks with Bamako?

So far we have signed all sorts of agreements but none of them has ever been respected. Accordingly, we have already discarded the stage in which we would accept autonomy, or even a federal state. At this point, we have come to the conclusion that the only way to solve this conflict is to achieve our independence and live in freedom and peace in our land.

Mali has never fulfilled its word so that´s why we call on the international community, France and the United Nations.

At the conclusion of the International Conference on Migration, Childhood and Family, civil society organisations called for migrants to be seen as human beings rather than just statistics in official files. Credit: Casa Presidencial de Honduras

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 18 2014 (IPS)

The migration crisis involving thousands of Central American children detained in the United States represents the loss of a generation of young people fleeing poverty, violence and insecurity in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America where violence is rife.

Some 200 experts and officials from several countries and bodies met in Tegucigalpa to promote solutions to the humanitarian emergency July 16-17 at an International Conference on Migration, Childhood and Family, convened by the Honduran government and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The conference ended with a call to establish ways and means for the countries involved to implement a plan of action with sufficient resources for effective border control and the elimination of “blind spots” used as migrant routes.

They also called for the rapid establishment of a regional initiative to address this humanitarian crisis jointly and definitively, in recognition of the shared responsibility to bring peace, security, welfare and justice to the peoples of Central America.“It is like someone has torn open an artery in Honduras and other Central American countries. Fear, grinding poverty and no future mean we are losing our lifeblood – our young people. If this continues to happen, the hearts of our nations will stop beating” – Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras

But the declaration “Hoja de Ruta: Una Invitación a la Acción” (Roadmap: An Invitation to Action) does not go beyond generalisations and lacks specific commitments to address a crisis of unprecedented dimensions.

The U.S. government says that border patrols have caught 47,000 unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States this year. They are confined in overcrowded shelters awaiting deportation.

José Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), told the conference that in 2011 there were 4,059 unaccompanied minors who attempted to enter the United States. But this figure rose to 21,537 in 2013 and 47,017 so far in 2014.

“These huge numbers of children are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. According to the data, 29 percent of the minors detained are Hondurans, 24 percent are Guatemalans, 23 percent are Salvadorans, and 22 percent are Mexicans,” said Insulza, who called for the migrants not to be criminalised.

Images of hundreds of children, on their own or accompanied by relatives or strangers, climbing on to the Mexican freight train known as “The Beast” on their way to the U.S. border, finally aroused the concern of regional governments.

The U.S. administration’s announcement that it would begin mass deportations of children apprehended in the past few months was also a factor. Honduran minors began to be deported on July 14.

The Tegucigalpa conference brought together officials and experts from countries receiving and sending migrants. According to analyses by participants, in Guatemala migration is motivated by poverty, while in El Salvador and Honduras people are fleeing citizen insecurity and criminal violence.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández said these migrants were “displaced by war” and that an emergency “has now erupted among us.”

Out of every nine unaccompanied minors who cross the border into the United States, seven are Hondurans from what are known as the “hot territories” of insecurity and violence, the president said.

Ricardo Puerta, an expert on migration, told IPS that the Central American region is losing its next generation. “This is hitting hard, especially in countries like Honduras where people are fleeing violence and migrants are aged between 12 and 30.

“We are losing many new and good hands and brains, and in general they will not return. If they do come back it will be as tourists, but not permanently,” he said.

Laura García is a cleaner. She earns an average of 12 dollars for each house or office she cleans, but she can barely get by. She wants to emigrate, and does not care about the risks or what she hears about the hardening of U.S. migration policies, whose officials endlessly repeat that Central American migrants are “not welcome”.

“I hear all that, but there is no work here. Some days I clean two houses, some days only one and sometimes none. And as I am over 35, no one wants to give me a job because of my age. I struggle and struggle, but I want to try up in the North, they say they pay well for looking after people,” she told IPS in a faltering voice.

She lives in the poor and conflict-ridden shanty town of San Cristóbal, in the north of Tegucigalpa, which is controlled by gangs. After 18.00, they impose their own law: no one goes in or out without permission from the crime lords.

“They say that a lot can happen on the way (migrant route), attacks, kidnappings, rapes, they say a lot of things, but with the situation as it is here, it’s the same thing to die on the way than right here at the hands of the ‘maras’ (gangs), where you can be shot dead at any time,” Garcia said.

At the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington on July 7, Honduran cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga spoke about the despair experienced in Honduras and the rest of Central America.

“It is like someone has torn open an artery in Honduras and other Central American countries. Fear, grinding poverty and no future mean we are losing our lifeblood – our young people. If this continues to happen, the hearts of our nations will stop beating,” said the cardinal in a speech that has not yet been disseminated in Honduras.

Rodríguez Maradiaga criticised the mass deportations of Honduran children who have started to arrive from Mexico and the United States. “Can you imagine starting your adult life being treated as a criminal? Where would you go from there?” he asked.

The Catholic Church in Honduras has insisted that fear and extreme poverty, together with unemployment and violence, lead parents to take the desperate measure of sending their children off on the dangerous journey of migration in order to save their lives. The Church is demanding inclusive public policies to prevent the flight of a generation.

Violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador is considered to have grown as a result of the displacement of drug trafficking cartels from Mexico and Colombia, due to the war on drugs waged by the governments of those countries.

In 2013, the homicide rate in El Salvador was 69.2 per 100,000 people, in Guatemala 30 per 100,000 and in Honduras 79.7 per 100,000, according to official figures.

At present over one million Hondurans are estimated to reside in the United States, out of a total population of 8.4 million. In 2013 remittances to Honduras from this migrant population amounted to 3.1 billion dollars, according to the Honduran Association of Banking Institutions.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Ed McKenna
ADDIS ABABA, Dec 21 2013 (IPS)

The return of 120,000 young undocumented migrant workers from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia has sparked fears that the influx will worsen the country’s high youth unemployment and put pressure on access to increasingly scarce land.

As a result, a growing number of young Ethiopians are choosing to migrate to Sudan to circumvent an indefinite travel ban slapped by the Ethiopian government last month on Ethiopian workers traveling to Middle Eastern countries."I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell." -- A 23-year-old woman who just returned from Riyadh

Esther Negash, 28, is from a family of nine that lives on a four-hectare farm dedicated to growing maize in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. She has been out of work since leaving school 10 years ago.

Negash’s family recently decided to use their savings to fund her migration to Khartoum in search of employment.

“In the last two months, there have been many people returning from Saudi Arabia. This makes things worse for people like me who cannot find work,” she told IPS.

“The rains were short this year and we did not have a good harvest. My family is large, if we don’t get a good harvest then it is very difficult. We heard about work opportunities in Sudan and thought this was our only solution.”

A large number of Ethiopians migrate every year in search of brighter economic prospects, with the Middle East being the dominant destination.

Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on undocumented foreign workers began after a seven-month amnesty period expired on Nov. 3. Since then, 120,000 Ethiopian migrants have been repatriated to Ethiopia after being corralled in a deportation camp for two months, where conditions are reportedly abject.

Many Ethiopians have reported human rights violations at the hands of their employers as well as while under the control of security forces inside the camps.

IPS spoke to a 23-year-old woman who had just arrived in Ethiopia after working as a domestic in Riyadh for two years. Her account is similar to many other experiences narrated by returnees.

“My employer would sexually abuse me and beat me. I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell,” she said.

“They did not pay me for one year even though I worked also for their relatives. I am so tired and so sad. [But] I am so happy to be back in Ethiopia,” she told IPS.

Despite the many terrible experiences recounted by Ethiopian returnees, poverty and limited economic prospects will continue to force Ethiopian workers to migrate to countries like Sudan and overseas, says the International Labour Organisation, which is working to make regular migration methods more attractive for Ethiopians instead of using unaccountable and illegal brokers to facilitate their migration.

“After the ban, people will try any means possible to work abroad due to a lack of employment opportunities in their home country,” George Okutho, director of the ILO Country Office for Ethiopia and Somalia, told IPS.

“These returnees travelled to Saudi Arabia looking for economic opportunities with a greener pasture mindset in the hope that they could send their family remittances to raise living standards at home. However, most of the time migrant workers are acting on misinformation about the prospects and country of destination,” he said.

A lack of education and skills make Ethiopian migrants especially vulnerable to working in dangerous and exploitative working conditions, both at home and abroad, said Okutho.

“The problem is many of Ethiopia’s migrant workers are uneducated and ill-eqipped even for the domestic work they seek outside the country,” he said. “The result is that even if they go to the Middle East or Sudan, they can earn a little more than when at home, but because they are untrained they end up working in very extreme and difficult circumstances without knowing their rights. “

The Ethiopian government’s planning and logistical capacity has been overwhelmed by the rapidly rising number of returnees. An initial expectation of 23,000 returnees jumped to 120,000 in one month.

“We are engaged with the Saudi government and we are working hard to return Ethiopians stranded in Saudi Arabia,” Dina Mufti, foreign affairs spokesperson, told IPS.

“The number of Ethiopians working illegally is much higher than we anticipated. The Ethiopian government recognises that these people will need employment and so we are trying to create opportunities to assist these people, many of them young, and rehabilitate them back into their communities,” she said.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. In the mountainous region of Tigray, the average land availability per household is 3.5 ha.

As life expectancy increases, the potential for subdividing farm plots reduces, leaving many of Ethiopia’s youth food insecure and unemployed.

In the last year, a large number of young people have joined regular protests staged in the country’s main cities to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with high unemployment and inflation.

The inundation of over 120,000 people has the potential to further disenfranchise youth in Ethiopia, where the majority of the population of 91 million earn less than two dollars a day.

Hewete Haile, 18, lives outside Sero Tabia, a small town where youth unemployment is spiraling. Out of 2,200 households, 560 young people between 17 and 35 are unemployed, without access to land or income.

Outside the Sudanese embassy in Addis Ababa, Haile is queuing with several hundred other young girls, mostly from remote rural villages, in hopes of obtaining a visa to allow her to look for work in Khartoum.

Hewete’s friends say a domestic in Khartoum is paid eight dollars a day compared to four dollars in Addis Ababa.

“I would not be leaving my country if there was a way for me to work and make a good income here in my country,” she told IPS.

“If Sudan does not work out then I will travel from there to the Middle East. I know what happened in Saudi Arabia. I would not be leaving Ethiopia if I could get work here, but it is getting more difficult all the time,” she said.

At the bustling border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Credit: Dan Boarder/cc by 2.0

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 27 2013 (IPS)

Outraged at a court ruling that would potentially render stateless thousands of Dominican people of Haitian descent, the Caribbean Community on Tuesday suspended the Dominican Republic’s bid to join the 15-member regional grouping.

Dominican President Danilo Medina had reportedly promised that his government would not actually deport any of the persons affected by the Sep. 23 ruling.“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse." -- Prof. Norman Girvan

However, Michel Martelly, Haiti’s president, said that soon after returning from Venezuela last weekend where he held talks with Dominican officials to resolve the issue, the authorities in Santo Domingo deported 300 people “who do not know the country, who do not have family in Haiti and who do not even speak the language.”

Martelly is threatening to stay away from future talks – the next round is scheduled for next week – if the Dominican Republic does not show some form of goodwill.

“We don’t have to keep meeting without them showing some action,” he told IPS, adding that the deportees included children, some “as old as one day”.

Trinidadian Prime Minister and CARICOM chair Kamla Persad-Bissessar vowed to raise the matter with the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is also visiting the Dominican Republic early next month.

“It is especially repugnant that the ruling ignores the 2005 recommendations made by the IACHR that the Dominican Republic adapts its immigration laws and practices in accordance with the provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights,” she said. “The ruling also violates the Dominican Republic’s international human rights obligations.”

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who had written two letters to President Medina on the issue, said he was also prepared to push for the suspension of the Dominican Republic from the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM).

He told IPS that “quiet diplomacy” has led nowhere and “clearly we have to up the ante for the government and the relevant authority to act”.

At the heart of the controversy is the stripping of citizenship from children of Haitian migrants. The decision applies to those born after 1929 — a category that overwhelmingly includes descendants of Haitians brought in to work on farms.

CARICOM had come under increasing pressure from civil society groups in the region to respond strongly. Caribbean organisations that met in Colombia last week condemned the ruling as “immoral, unjust and totally unacceptable”.

“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse based on the colour of their skin and/or the sound of their names,” former ACS secretary general Professor Norman Girvan told IPS.

Caricom has an opportunity to “prevent a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

But efforts to pressure the Dominican Republic to soften the ruling – only the latest salvo in decades of cultural and economic tensions between the two nations – will likely prove an uphill task.

Earlier this month, Anibal De Castro, the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the United Sates, responding to an article published in a Trinidad and Tobago newspaper, made it clear that his country “does not grant citizenship to all those born within its jurisdiction.”

“In fact, the United States is one of the few nations that maintain this practice. In most countries, it is the norm that citizenship be obtained by origin or conferred under certain conditions. Since 1929, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic has established that the children of people in transit, a temporary legal status, are not eligible for Dominican citizenship,” he wrote.

On Nov. 6, hundreds of people rallied in Santo Domingo in support of the ruling, even suggesting the erection of a wall to ensure the division of Hispaniola that is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Emilo Santana of the group Night Watch of San Juan claimed that many Dominicans were unable to receive health services because the resources were being used to assist Haitians and urged President Medina to prevent a “silent and massive Haitian take-over of the territory.”

“I feel humiliated and angry, but not by my president, I feel humiliated by those NGOs that negotiate with the poverty of Haitians and it is they who are destroying our country,” Santana said at the rally.

Another speaker, jurist Juan Manuel Castillo Pantaleon, said the Constitutional Court “has aroused all Dominicans to defend as one man our national sovereignty”.

He described the ruling as a landmark “because it clearly defines who we Dominicans are and reaffirms the laws and institutions, as provided in the Constitution.

“The hypocritical international community which offered aid to Haiti never kept their promises and in some cases committed robbery, and intends that we Dominicans should assume responsibility for a failed state,” said Castillo Pantaleon.

A United Nations-supported study released this year estimated that there were around 210,000 Dominican-born people of Haitian descent and another 34,000 born to parents of other nationalities.

The government of the Dominican Republic estimates that around 500,000 people born in Haiti live in the Dominican Republic.

In a statement, CARICOM said it was calling on the global community to pressure the Dominican Republic to “adopt urgent measures to ensure that the jaundiced decision of the Constitutional Court does not stand”.

“The government must show good faith by immediate credible steps as part of an overall plan to resolve the nationality and attendant issues in the shortest possible time.”

Human rights groups have circulated evidence in the last few days indicating that Greece, Italy and Egypt illegally detain and push back Syrian refugees.

The reports were issued by the German refugee aid organisation Pro Asyl, Medici per i Diritti Umani – MEDU (Doctors for Human Rights – Italy), the Italian human rights lawyers Association for Legal Studies on Migration (ASGI), and Human Rights Watch

The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, has also expressed worries about serious indications of violations of the non-refoulement principle in international law – which means that nobody should be sent to a country where he or she will be at risk of persecution – in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Greece.

On Nov.19, the European Commission publicly warned Greece and Bulgaria that turning Syrian refugees back at the border is illegal.

Pro Asyl circulated a detailed report on Nov. 7 based on interviews with 90 people who claimed to have been pushed back by the Greek security services since October 2012. The interviews were carried out between October 2012 and September 2013 in Germany, Greece and Turkey.

Most of the victims are refugees from Syria, but the interviewees also included people from Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, who are likely to be persons in need of international protection.

The violations of international law and denial of refugee rights appear to be organised and systematic and to take place in undercover operations. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses, Pro Asyl estimates that up to 2,000 refugees might have been turned back in the space of a year without being given the opportunity to request international protection or to challenge their illegal removal.

In many cases, the victims described how members of the security forces – sometimes wearing masks – pushed them back at gunpoint, seizing their belongings and often mistreating them.

The organisation claims that in the case of nine Syrian males turned back from the island of Farmakonisi, the refugees were held incommunicado and were beaten to an extent that could amount to torture.

“Until now there has been no response from the Greek government to the accusations,” Karl Kopp, Pro Asyl’s director of European affairs, told IPS. “The EU, Frontex [the EU border agency], and the governments of Germany and other countries also don’t acknowledge their complicity in this human rights scandal.

“The EU demanded and financed measures to deter refugees in the Evros and Aegean regions [in Greece]. Frontex operates in basically all areas where push-backs take place,” Kopp said.

On Nov. 12, the UNHCR requested clarification from the Greek government regarding strong evidence suggesting it had organised a massive push-back of 150 Syrians that day, including many families with children.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva that “UNHCR received information from villagers of the group being detained and transported in police vehicles to an unknown location, although they have not been transferred to a reception centre. Their current whereabouts is unknown to us.” The agency asked the Greek authorities to investigate their fate.

The refugees crossed into Greece across the northeast border of Evros in the early hours of the morning that day, before they were apprehended by police. A UNHCR team visited the site that evening.

On Nov. 13, MEDU and ASGI published their own report denouncing push-backs of Syrians to Greece from Italian ports. From April to September this year, interviews were carried out with 66 young people who were turned back after their attempt to reach Italy, and 102 illegal returns were registered this way by MEDU.

Loredana Leo, a lawyer who belongs to ASGI, told IPS that most of the people in question were asylum-seekers.

“When they arrived to the Italian harbours after a risky journey, most of them were unable to declare their age or request international protection due to the lack of translators; some of them suffered violence at the hands of the Italian authorities and most of them were not identified.”

In the next few days, ASGI is preparing to take Italy and Greece to the European Court of Human Rights, according to Leo, “for violations of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

Human Rights Watch also warned this month about the policy of detention and coercive returns of refugees that the Egyptian government appears to have put in place.

Up to 1,500 refugees from Syria, including at least 400 Palestinians and 250 children as young as two months old, have been locked up for weeks and sometimes months in Egypt. HRW said the refugees are held indefinitely until they are deported.

The U.S.-based rights watchdog also deplored that authorities advise refugees to leave the country, telling them that their only way to avoid detention is to return to Lebanon or Syria.

According to the organisation “more than 1,200 of the detained refugees, including about 200 Palestinians, have been coerced to depart, including dozens who have returned to Syria.”

The UNHCR is calling for a global moratorium on any return of Syrians to neighbouring countries.

Egyptian authorities estimate 300,000 Syrians are in Egypt, with 125,000 of them registered with the UNHCR. And there are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria currently in Egypt, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA).

“Egypt is leaving hundreds of Palestinians from Syria with no protection from Syria’s killing fields except indefinite detention in miserable conditions,” said Joe Stork, HRW deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Egypt should immediately release those being held and allow UNHCR to give them the protection they are due under international law.”

The reports on the unlawful detention and deportation of Syrian refugees have appeared at a time of dramatically deteriorating conditions for displaced people in Syria and neighbouring countries.

According to recent reports, some refugees from Syria are selling their kidneys to human organ trafficking networks or selling teenage daughters or sisters, out of desperation.

Gossip and rumour based on secret intelligence sources may be all that is needed to deport a foreign national from Canada on national security grounds, legal experts say.

Secret evidence has been used “in a whole range of immigration procedures,” such as applications for permanent residence or citizenship in Canada, “which do not involve actual hearings but are simply administrative procedures,” says Sharryn Aiken, a Queen’s University law professor and immigration and refugee expert."It is next to impossible for the person concerned to mount a response to the allegations against them." -- law professor Sharryn Aiken

“What we are seeing is a stunning intensification of the use of secret evidence in a range of procedures,” she told IPS. “What we have seen, frankly even before 9/11, [but] a trend that has intensified in the aftermath of 9/11, is the increasing tendency of the federal government to criminalise and securitise non-citizens.

“And by that I mean to basically subject non-citizens – and in particular Muslim and Arab men, as well as other racialised non-citizens from certain parts of the world – to a disproportionate degree of suspicion and scrutiny.”

Toronto immigration lawyer Barb Jackman agrees, reporting that she has found 100 examples of Federal Court of Canada immigration and refugee cases where secret evidence has been applied against immigrants already in Canada or other foreign nationals outside the country who are arriving and sponsored by families or employers.

“The [Federal] Court has not generally questioned the secret evidence. It seems very comfortable with deciding cases on secret evidence without the assistance of counsel to challenge or question that evidence,” Jackman said.

One difficulty for the accused is that there is “a different threshold in terms of burden of proof required for the immigration proceeding” in Canada, says Mike Larsen, a criminologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.

Immigration officers and adjudicators consider “an objective reasonable suspicion or balanced probability standard, as opposed to a criminal proceeding [in Canada] where you have [beyond] reasonable doubt,” Larsen told IPS.

Jackman says her own client, Douglas Gray Freeman, faced “gossip” from U.S. intelligence files before the Federal Court.

Freeman is an African-American and U.S. citizen who fled to Canada in 1969 after shooting and wounding a police office in Chicago in what he described as an act of self-defence during a period of racial tension in the U.S.

Freeman (not his original name) married a Canadian woman, fathered children and worked quietly and illegally at the main reference library in Toronto. His presence was eventually discovered and he was extradited back to the U.S. where in 2008 he pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated battery, for which he served a 30-day jail sentence. Freeman also donated 250,000 dollars to a charity and was given two years probation.

His subsequent effort to immigrate legally to Canada and reunite with his family has been met with tough opposition from Canadian authorities. After a hearing before the Federal Court of Canada, Justice Anne Mactavish ruled in October that Freeman was denied “procedural fairness.” Despite the lack of evidence, the government had claimed that he had “terrorist” links with the Black Panther party.

Jackman says other federal court cases have popped up involving intelligence mistakenly released from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and based on unnamed informants.

“There may be cases where [the government authorities] have ‘hard’ evidence but in most I think it is soft intelligence, which is based on talking to people and constructing an image of the person from rumour and gossip,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Canadian courts have been wrestling with the constitutionality of the security certificate provision in the immigration and refugee protection act, which also allows for secret evidence.

It was not introduced by the current right-wing Conservative government but by the previous centrist Liberals in 2001, when the latter were in power and “overhauling” Canadian immigrant law, says Aiken.

Since 1991, Canada has issued security certificates against several foreign nationals on its territory on the basis that they are national security risks who should be deported back to their home country.

The security certificates allow authorities to indefinitely detain those who resist the removal process with a court challenge. One of them involves a successful refugee claimant from Egypt, Mohammad Mahjoub, who has been imprisoned without trial for 13 years while fighting deportation.

But Canadian authorities are running into resistance from the courts, which have ruled that foreign nationals cannot be sent back to countries known to practice torture in their criminal justice systems to elicit confessions for alleged crimes.

The Supreme Court of Canada in 2011 also ordered the cancelling of a security certificate against the Moroccan-born Adil Charkaoui and the amending of the security certificate system because it was unconstitutional in its then current form. The Canadian government followed through with new security advocate provisions in the legislation.

But Aikin calls the new provisions problematic because the accused person has limited access to the security advocate, who cannot disclose the secret intelligence information gathered on him or her.

“The general pattern of withholding contact after the special advocate has had access to the evidence means it is next to impossible for the person concerned to mount a response to the allegations against them,” she says.

Secret evidence is still being introduced in other immigration and refugee situations, not related to security certificates, where judges and adjudicators routinely deny people access to security advocates, says Janet Dench, the executive director of the Montreal based Canadian Council for Refugees.

Here, people are “worse off” because they often face the secret evidence against them without a lawyer present, Dench told IPS.

“What we are concerned is that …if the government stopped using security certificates because it may not be productive for them, they were not getting the results they wanted. So, [they] will just use the secret evidence in the other procedures,” Dench says.

Meanwhile, Melissa Anderson, a communications spokesperson for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, says an increasing number of refugee cases involving national security are being transferred from the IRB to the Federal Court.

In those circumstances, the Minister of Public Safety and the Canada Border Services Agency then become engaged in what turns into an admissibility hearing and a more “adversarial process,” to boot, Anderson told IPS.

“My understanding and I don’t have any statistics on it is that the Minister of [Public Safety] is participating in more refugee protection claims than ever before.”

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio used chain gangs and a "tent city" in his crusade against undocumented immigrants in the state. He has been sued more than 2,000 times and is now is overseen by a federal monitor. Credit:Valeria Fernandez/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

Saul Merlos is an undocumented migrant from El Salvador. About two years ago, he was living and working in the southern U.S. city of New Orleans.

“One day, our employers told us we were going to get paid, but instead they sent immigration,” he told IPS. “I was a witness to the raid, where they got 55 of us.”"People are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school." -- Jennifer Rosenbaum of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

Merlos said the raid was violent. “I was a witness that there was a pregnant woman with her daughter, but they didn’t care,” he said. “They yelled at her, and at all of us, that this was their country and asked us what we were doing in their country. They hit some of us, and didn’t even allow me to use the restroom.”

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Monday, Merlos added that the immigration officers did not read the workers their rights or inform them of what to expect from the detention process.

As momentum builds for U.S. immigration reform after months of political deadlock, a group of NGOs and immigration lawyers are warning that the U.S. system is currently leading to widespread violations of immigrants’ human rights.

The accusations come as the IACHR, the region’s pre-eminent rights forum, began an investigation into the issue on Monday. At that hearing, held at the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, advocates questioned the rights standards used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE).

According to the witnesses, ICE officers may have violated immigrants’ basic human rights by indefinitely separating them from their U.S. citizen children, in addition to having detained them without appropriate constitutional protections.  

Family focus

At Monday’s hearing, multiple advocacy groups alleged that ICE detention practices have failed to account for the human rights of parties involved when officers use what is known as their prosecutorial discretion. This refers to a federal agency’s authority, in immigration cases, to decide whether to begin removal proceedings against undocumented migrants.

Saul Merlos has been in the United States for 18 years, and has a 13-year old daughter who is a U.S. citizen. A favourable exercise of prosecutorial discretion would avoid him being deported Dec. 17, 2013.

“All we want is for the U.S. government to stop this because they are separating our families,” Merlos said.

The place of human rights in immigration proceedings has emerged as a key point of discussion in recent months in situations in which the children are U.S. citizens but at least one of the parents is deported because of their illegal status. Most of the time, this means that families are separated for indefinite amounts of time.

“We need to realise the serious concerns raised by the way people are being arrested and the way the U.S. government is pursuing these prosecutions.” Jennifer Rosenbaum, the legal director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The government’s failure to use its prosecutorial discretion has led to families being separated and to children being separated from their parents,” she said.

NOWCRJ and several other groups are calling on U.S. ICE officers to consider rights norms when detaining illegal immigrants or considering initiating removal proceedings against them. According to data presented before the IACHR this week, U.S. immigration agencies have largely failed to use their prosecutorial discretion, choosing instead to deport thousands of illegal immigrants with no regard to their family ties.

Yet others raise separate concerns about the possible implications of more lenient behaviour on the part of ICE.

“We should remember that the government isn’t actually separating families, as the parent is choosing to leave his or her child behind,” Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst at the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“Moreover, it probably shouldn’t be standard U.S. policy that people can’t be deported if they have children, because there’s the question of where exactly you’re going to draw the line. If the parent has engaged in criminal activity such as identity theft, or has broken serious laws, are we saying that the American victim is not going to receive any restitution just because that immigrant has a child?”

Rights advocates, on the other hand, suggest that in the majority of related cases, immigrants are stopped and detained unconstitutionally in the first place.

“In New Orleans and other communities across the country, people are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school,” NOWCRJ’s Rosenbaum said. “Their apprehensions involve the inappropriate use of force and no due process protections. What is even more worrying is that most of them are the victims of outright racial profiling.”

In 2012, as many as 150,000 U.S. citizen children saw at least one of their parents get deported, according to information presented Monday at the IACHR.

The U.S. delegation to the OAS was not able to respond to the panel’s allegations.

“Unfortunately, the federal government shutdown prevented us from properly preparing for today’s hearings, as officers were not able to collect any evidence and witnesses,” Lawrence J. Gumbiner, the deputy U.S. permanent representative at the U.S. mission to the OAS said. Gumbiner later declined to comment further on the human rights implications of the allegations.

Washington gridlock

The hearing comes at a critical time, as Congress recently resumed its work on a proposal that would massively overhaul the United States’ sprawling immigration system. As the House of Representatives looks more closely at the comprehensive Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act approved by the Senate last June, President Obama urged all in Washington to come together and fix the country’s “broken immigration system”.

House Republicans oppose comprehensive immigration reform, which they worry would force them to accept some provisions that they dislike, particularly a contentious “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Instead, House conservatives have broken apart the many issues in play in the reform push and started passing piecemeal legislation.

“One of the major concerns is that yet another comprehensive immigration bill will only bring more illegal immigration in the country,” CIS’s Feere told IPS. “Right now, many Americans simply do not trust the president to actually go through with the bill’s enforcement provisions.”

Families For Freedom protesting outside Senator Chuck Schumer's office in New York City calling for an end to deportations. Credit: Lucy Westcott/IPS

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

As the debate on immigration reform continues in the Senate and fractured talks persist about the future of 11 million undocumented migrants, one New York-based group took to the streets to ask their senator a question.

Stationed outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in midtown Manhattan Friday, Families For Freedom, an organisation fighting against the detention and deportation of immigrants, particularly parents, asked their leaders, “Obama, Schumer, would you deport your papa?”

The protest, held two days before Father’s Day, was meant to highlight the trauma deportation and detention causes by separating families when parents are held in facilities or sent home.

“We’re demanding that President Obama stop deporting fathers and that the fathers that have been deported are able to come back,” Esther Portillo-Gonzalez, spokesperson for Families for Freedom, told IPS.

“We have families from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Latin America mostly, and those are the continents that are most affected by these deportations,” she added."Everybody in this country, it doesn't matter where they come from - they're immigrants too."
-- Jeanette Martinelli

Nearly 2 million people have been deported under President Obama up to the end of last year, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2012, Obama deported 409,849 immigrants, a record high, with 55 percent of them convicted criminals, according to ICE data.

“Many of those [who were deported] are parents and fathers, breadwinners, and a lot of the kids who are here [at the protest] today…will not be with their fathers on Father’s Day,” Portillo-Gonzales said.

The number of “criminal aliens” the United States has removed has increased dramatically over the past decade, mirroring the overall number of deported persons. According to ICE, in 2002, 71,686 criminals were deported; 10 years later, the number swelled to 225,390, an increase of 214 percent.

Marco, 23, was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was nine years old. He has felt the pain of threatened family separation but was lucky enough to see an uncle fight his deportation trial and win, letting him stay in the country instead of returning to Mexico.

“I saw my cousin suffer; she’s a little girl, she was just a newborn, and hearing that they were going to be separated…kind of broke my heart,” Marco told IPS at the protest, adding that Families for Freedom is seeking humane immigration reform.

“Ever since [I arrived], I’ve adapted to American culture. But once I [went] to college, I started realising things, especially that there’s suffering in my people, and I have to help them out,” he said.

Outside Schumer’s office, sons, daughters and a grandchild of the deported spoke through the small red cone of a makeshift megaphone, telling their stories into the shuffling rush hour throng.

One of the speakers, Alyssa, 14, is still feeling the effects of her grandfather’s removal in 2010. He is now in Panama City.

“It makes me upset, depressed, sad,” Alyssa told IPS.

Her grandmother, Jeanette Martinelli, recalled her husband’s seizure by the authorities.

“He was in a store and the cops came and started searching people and just…they picked him up. When he went to court, jurors dismissed the case, but ICE took him and that’s it,” Martinelli told IPS.

All of Martinelli’s children were born in the United States, and she is also an American citizen. The depression and trauma Alyssa has felt since her grandfather’s deportation have had wider repercussions throughout the family, Martinelli said. In addition, Martinelli’s daughter has stopped attending college because her father can no longer finance it.

A report published by Human Impact Partners on the health status of documented and undocumented migrants and their families shed light on the physical and mental tolls that detention and deportation can cause.

Higher proportions of children of undocumented parents felt fear and anxiety than those with documented parents, reporting sleeping, eating and exercising less out of fear of family separation.*

The report also said that 77 percent of undocumented parents felt feelings of racial profiling, and with less access to health insurance and medical services, they will have shorter lives and decreased health.

Around 23 percent of all deportations, or 205,000 people, from Jul. 1, 2010 to Sep. 31, 2012 were of parents with children who are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines.com through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

If she could speak to ICE, Martinelli would ask officials to think not only about their own families but also the history of the United States.

“We are all human beings. They have families too. Everybody in this country, it doesn’t matter where they come from – they’re immigrants too,” she said.

The children at the protest held purple and white balloons, representing parents, including their own, who have been deported from the United States and separated from their families, before releasing them into the sky, much to their delight.

“It’s not fair that they call people illegal,” Martinelli said. “Nobody is illegal.”

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the findings of the HIP report and said that children of undocumented parents felt higher levels of fear and anxiety than those with documented parents.

Deportation is a devastating experience for a family, breaking it apart and leading to emotional and mental stress for its members. But a new report from the Centre for American Progress shows that such duress extends beyond families and into the larger community as a whole.

The report, “How Today’s Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities: A View from the Ground”, was put together by Joanna Dreby, a sociology professor at Albany University, and points to the short- and long-term effects that the deportation of illegal immigrants has on both family units and wider society.

Many in the Latino community are disappointed by U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to push through comprehensive immigration reform. Credit: Valeria Fernandez/IPS

The United States deports roughly 400,000 illegal immigrants each year. Of these, a significant portion are parents of U.S. citizens, with children who were born in the United States. In the first half of 2011 alone, more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama recently enacted legislation that would allow children who were raised in the United States to apply for legal immigration status, deporting their parents continues.

Meanwhile, more than 16.6 million people in the United States currently live in “mixed status” families, in which one or more members is an undocumented migrant. A third of immigrant’s children live in such mixed-status families.

Unseen costs

For all parties involved, the effects of deportations on these families are emotional, psychological and economic.

Seth Freed Wessler, investigative reporter for the Applied Research Centre, a racial justice think tank, believes that “kids do better when they’re with their families”. During a discussion of the report at the Centre for American Progress here on Monday, he recounted tales of the separation of families, stories he characterised as “horrific”.

“When I interviewed these women, what I found was that once you have been deported, the child service agencies act as if you have fallen off the face off this earth,” he said. “There are very slim chances of reunification of children with their families.”

When parents of U.S. citizens are deported, their children are generally put into foster care. It may take years before they are able to reunite with each other. According to the report, every child that goes through the foster care system costs taxpayers 26,000 dollars.

“Every single parent I interviewed wants to stay here. They came here for a better life; they want to contribute to society, and they came here for their kids,” said Wessler, who believes that taking one’s children back across the border creates difficult adjustment issues for the children, who may not even know the native language.

Miriam Yeung, of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, recounted stories of mothers separated from their children while still breastfeeding. “In most cases, the man gets deported, leaving a single mother with her kids,” she said at the presentation. “This mother may never have worked before, and she now has to find employment right away.”

This is a vicious cycle, Yeung believes. If the mother cannot find work immediately and is herself undocumented, it may lead to self-deportation (when the family moves back to their original country) of the entire family.

While this may be relatively easy for the parents, children who are U.S. citizens may struggle to adjust. They may not know the language or find it hard to fit in culturally, which can result in emotional distress as well as poor performance in school.

Ajay Chaudry of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services interviewed 200 children, as well as officials with children’s services agencies and police and immigration officials, across seven states. He found that immigrant children lived in perpetual fear of being separated from their parents.

Of those who had been separated, there were lags in development and well-being, and often great economic repercussions. One woman he interviewed had moved eight times with her children after the deportation of her husband.

In addition, 42 percent of families with a deported member moved more than once in the first few months after the deportation.

Social and cultural implications

Dreby’s report also touched upon a fundamental problem that seems pervasive in immigrant communities. Immigrant children are often afraid of the police and view them in an extremely negative light.

They believe police officials are the same as immigrant officials, and often think that being an immigrant automatically makes you an illegal alien. They have also started thinking of the word “immigrant” as something dirty, and Dreby believes this serves to disassociate oneself from one’s own heritage.

“I interviewed a nine-year-old girl, and I asked her, what it was like being an immigrant?” Dreby said. “Her reply shocked me. She said that it was sad to be an immigrant, because she had seen a show on TV in which the police came and took the girl’s parents away, and the girl was left alone in a car.”

For Dreby, the answer is simple. The United States needs legalisation programmes that prevent parents of U.S. citizens from being deported.

Yeung also believes that public perception as to what constitutes an “American” family needs to change.

“We are a country of immigrants,” she said. “What makes an American family, really?”

As the Latino population in the United States rises, the demographic shift will affect future as well as current voting habits, and therefore election outcomes, in the United States, according to several experts.

In the highly competitive upcoming presidential elections, “a couple hundred of Latino voters can make a difference,” Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at University of Southern California, said Monday. The impact is especially significant in battleground states like Florida, which holds 29 electoral votes, and where 22.9 percent of the populace is Latino.

The Hispanic and Latino population in the United States is projected to more than double by 2050 and will account for 24 percent of the future population – more than 102 million people – according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

American denizens have long been predominantly white and of European descent. However, 2012 marked the first time that minorities – such as Latinos and blacks – have outnumbered the majority – non-Hispanic whites – in the U.S.

According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the rising Latino voting populace “solidifies this emerging electorate as an important voting bloc among U.S. voters”. Every month, an estimated 50,000 Latinos in the United States turn 18 and thus are legally allowed to vote in the country.

A record number of Latinos voted in the 2008 presidential election, where 9.7 million Latino voters cast ballots in a marked increase from the 7.6 million who voted in 2004.

Yet the voting bloc represents only a small percentage of potential voters in the Latino demographic. According to a U.S. Census Bureau finding on voting patterns, 40 percent of Latinos did not register to vote and 50 percent did not vote in 2008.

Nevertheless, the Latino population might be the deciding factor in this year’s elections. Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organisation focused on immigration reform, called the Latino influence in the election “the whisker that wags the dog”.

In 2010, three Latino candidates, all Republican, ran for and won political offices. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval became the state’s first Hispanic governor. In New Mexico, Susana Martinez became the first Latina governor in U.S. history, and in Florida, Marco Rubio won a U.S. Senate seat.

One of the most intriguing candidates in this elections cycle has been Rubio, who has been named as a potential – though unlikely – candidate for vice president on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive nominee.

“It brought light to his biggest plus, which is that he could bring some (Latinos) under his tent,” Manuel Roig-Franzia, author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio”, said of Republicans’ vetting of Rubio, at a panel discussion at the New America Foundation.

Despite the fact that all three of the winning Latino candidates for office were Republicans, Latino voters generally tend to vote for Democratic candidates. According to exit polls conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2010, 60 percent of Latino voters supported Democratic candidates in House races, while 38 percent supported Republican candidates.

In the last presidential election in 2008, Latinos supported President Barack Obama by a margin of more than two to one – 67 percent to 31 percent – over his Republican challenger John McCain, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

The elections cycle, however, has brought about a different set of circumstances that do not guarantee Latinos will vote according to past practices. With the economy and unemployment paramount in this year’s election, naturally the Latino population is far from exempt from political plays.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among Hispanics and Latinos is 11 percent, according to June statistics, which is noticeably higher than the national average of 8.2 percent.

Another prickly issue regarding the Latino population is the issue of deportation. President Obama addressed a less contentious part of the deportation issue earlier in 2012, a move that earned him a mixture of both praise for his efforts to push for along immigration reform as well as criticism for what some considered a political maneuver.

However, the Obama administration has deported more people than the Bush administration. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, the United States deported nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants in 2011 fiscal year – the highest total ever.

President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Friday that the United States would no longer deport certain young immigrants.

While the move, made by executive order, was hailed by immigration advocates as a small but positive first step, many others pointed to the political motivations in play – an issue that President Obama implicitly acknowledged on Friday.

Undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. as children and are deemed to pose no security risk will no longer be under threat of deportation. Credit: Stephen C. Webster/CC By 2.0

“As long as I’m president, I will not give up on this issue,” Obama said, “not only because it’s the right thing to do for our economy – and CEOs agree with me – not just because it’s the right thing to do for our security, but because it’s the right thing to do, period.

“And I believe that, eventually, enough Republicans in Congress will come around to that view as well.”

Reversing previous policy, undocumented immigrants who come to the United States as children and are deemed to pose no security risk will no longer be under threat of deportation. Instead, the administration ordered that the government begin to make available work permits for those who qualify.

A few other prerequisites also apply: The candidates must have come to the U.S. before they turned 16, must be in school or have graduated from high school (or have been honourably discharged from the U.S. military), and have a relatively clean criminal record.

The changes are to take effect immediately, largely skirting immigration legislation known as the DREAM Act. That bill would offer a route to citizenship for certain young immigrants, but has languished in Congress for years.

Following Friday’s announcement, the National Immigration Law Center here in Washington called the day “momentous … a hard-won victory”. The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute said that the policy reversal could have a direct impact on 1.4 million youths, while cautioning that implementation would be tricky with a programme of this size.

At Lafayette Park outside of the White House, a crowd of jubilant supporters cheered the news, holding up signs that read “Keep the DREAM alive” and “You have my vote now.”

“This is a matter of human rights,” Sebastian Roa, a student at the University of Maryland at the rally, told IPS. “I was undocumented for 13 years, and I always had to wonder what would happen to me.”

“It’s a Hispanic issue but it’s also an overarching issue for many races,” he continued.

Another at the rally, Deepak Bhargava, a community organiser, called the news a “big victory”, but cautioned that it was “not the final step”.

“The biggest challenge is to get people to vote in November,” he said. “Alienating Latinos now, is a recipe to becoming a minority party in the future.”

Political gambit

Indeed, despite the accolades, it is hard to see the timing of the issue outside of its political context.

The move comes as the 2012 presidential race heats up, with immigration receiving vastly increased attention from both of the frontrunners. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate to oppose Obama, has in the past stated that he would veto the DREAM Act if he were to become president.

Romney is also fighting the president for the Latino vote. According to the Washington Post, Romney told supporters in April, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” or they would lose the election.

President Obama, while keen to take credit for Friday’s announcement, has suffered severe criticism over the past three and a half years of his presidency for failing to push through a significant immigration overhaul, despite repeated promises.

When Obama took on health-care reform as a signature issue shortly after becoming president, many suggested that immigration would be next on the agenda.

As the health-care issue led to massive resentment from Republicans, however, the resulting ratcheted-up polarisation in Washington took away much of President Obama’s motivation – and political capital – to tackle another contentious issue so quickly.

Since then, the administration has been unable to deliver for those calling for immigration reform.

Meanwhile, the strength of the Latino vote has been growing. This is based in part on demographics, with an estimated 50,000 Latinos every month turning 18, the legal age to vote in the United States.

Some experts have suggested that whoever wins the presidency in November will need around 40 percent of the country’s 14 million Latinos to do so. A recent analysis put out by the Brooking Institution suggested that the broader minority vote would be even more important for an Obama victory this year than last time around.

In addition, however, reports suggest a higher political consciousness among Latino, particularly youths – spurred in particular by the country’s nasty immigration debate in recent years.

This week, Jeb Bush, the popular former governor of Florida and brother of former president George W. Bush, made political waves when he suggested that the Republican Party needed to change its tone on immigration.

On Friday, another Florida Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, thought to be a frontrunner to become Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate, criticised Obama’s move for its unilateral legislation.

“Today’s announcement will be welcome news for many of these kids desperate for an answer, but it is a short-term answer to a long-term problem,” Rubio said. “And by once again ignoring the Constitution and going around Congress, this short-term policy will make it harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term one.”

Another Republican member of Congress, Steve King, went even further, saying that he plans to sue the Obama administration over the new policy.

King charged President Obama with “planning to usurp the constitutional authority of the United States Congress and grant amnesty by edict to one million illegal aliens”.