A U.N. agency funded by the U.S. State Department has sent more than 2,200 migrants back to Central America under a program called 'voluntary return' that migrant advocates say fails to advise U.S. asylum seekers of their rights.
A United Nations agency, with funding from the U.S. State Department, is transporting thousands of immigrants from the U.S.-Mexico border back to Central America in a program that has drawn the ire of migrant legal advocates. The advocates question whether migrants fully understand their rights when they accept free plane and bus tickets home.
“They face the same dangers on their way home as they do on the way north. That clearly demonstrates the need,” he said. Immigration lawyers are scrambling to better inform migrants in Mexican border cities of their rights before they board IOM buses south. Last month, 30 international advocacy groups sent a letter to the U.N. agency’s chief saying that they feared the program was returning migrants to countries they had fled “out of desperation, not choice” and that those with pending U.S. asylum cases “may not fully understand the consequences of failing to appear whenever summoned by a U.S. immigration court.
His agency set up kiosks at a stadium in the capital and reached out to migrants in shelters, busing several hundred back to Central America. In the months that followed, the agency started busing and flying migrants home from Mexicali, Monterrey and Tijuana, he said. For unaccompanied youth, the U.N. agency contacts relatives and Mexican social services to coordinate returns, always by plane, Gascon said. The agency tells adult migrants in the Remain in Mexico program that returning to Central America could jeopardize their asylum case; that if they fail to appear in U.S. court, a judge could order them deported in their absence, which could undermine their future asylum applications.
Rigol said staffers don’t advertise the U.N.'s voluntary return program with posters or brochures. “We don’t promote it. We just reach out to the directors of the shelters to make sure they inform people,” he said.The U.N. agency’s staffers in Juarez declined to allow The Times to observe them screening migrants this week, citing privacy concerns. The shelter where migrants boarded the agency’s chartered buses refused to allow migrants to be interviewed because of security concerns.
But he said the travel program hasn’t had a major impact yet. Nearly 16,000 migrants have been returned to Juarez under Remain in Mexico; an additional 5,000 were waiting to apply for asylum this week and only a fraction — about 500, according to IOM — have returned to Central America under the U.N. program.Juan Santos was among dozens of Central American migrants in Tijuana who signed up for the U.N. agency’s free flights back to Honduras this month.
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