We’re Helping Deport Kids to Die

If other countries were forcibly returning people to their deaths, we would protest. But because we Americans worry about refugees swarming across our borders, we help pay for Mexico to intercept them along its southern border and send them — even children like Elena — back home, where they may well be raped or killed.

.. Obama spoke with the Mexican president to discuss how to address the flow, and Mexico obligingly imposed a crackdown to stop these refugees long before they could reach the United States. Mexico deports a great majority of them to their home countries, and the United States is thus complicit when they are terrorized, raped and murdered.

.. Immigration is among the knottiest of challenges, and there is a real risk that welcoming some children creates an incentive that results in other children endangering their lives by undertaking a perilous journey north.

.. historically, Central Americans had a refuge in southern Mexico, and it is unnecessary and cruel now for the U.S. to take the initiative and work so diligently to cut off that safe haven.

.. It’s not that Honduras or El Salvador are tyrannical regimes; rather, the problem is that criminal gangs are out of control. The homicide rate in El Salvador last year, more than 100 killings per 100,000 people, represents a mortality rate of roughly the same magnitude as during the country’s brutal civil war in the 1980s

.. These are not primarily economic migrants. These are refugees, deserving protection. Instead, the United States and Mexico are colluding to send people like them back to the gangs that want to kill them.

.. gang members barged into his home, held his family at gunpoint and said they would kill his two small children unless he paid protection money. So now Emilio is hiding in Mexico with his wife and two children, and getting death threats.

.. Mexico doesn’t seriously screen most people for refugee status before sending them back. In the U.S. in 2014, only 3 percent of minors detained were deported; in Mexico it was 77 percent

.. Indeed, by some accounts, the gangs keep an eye on the buses arriving in San Salvador and unloading deportees, who become sitting ducks.

.. Secretary of State John Kerry rightfully criticized Kenya’s plans to close its Daadab refugee camp and return refugees to Somalia, but the U.S. does something parallel when it works with Mexico to deport refugees to Honduras and El Salvador.