Miami.
Each Honduran migrant in the United States supports an average of five people in their country, the Foundation said on Friday when calling the President Joe Biden to provide immigration protection to a community that is the economic engine of a Honduras in crisis and “isolation”.
With this information taken from the information base of Hondurans in the United States that the September 15 Foundation is running, its president, Juan Flores, highlighted the consequences that a massive return of migrants to their country would have if they were unable to continue in the north . American nation.
“From non-formal statistics, we know that there are more than a million Hondurans without one immigration statusFlores said in response to a question from Efe.
Help for a Honduras in crisis
It is for these people that this non-profit organization and also the government of Honduras have applied for a Temporary Protection Statute (TPS), independent of the statute that currently protects thousands of Hondurans, which was extended until next October by the administration. From the now former President Donald Trump.
In a statement read at the press conference, which also included the foundation’s vice president, Maybelle Castillo, and her director of migration affairs, Jack McGuirePresident Biden is asked to “process the request for a new TPS for Hondurans, sent by the Honduran authorities, through Secretary of State Lisandro Rosales, on December 4, 2020.”
Rosales was in Washington on Thursday, where he met with Roberta Jacobson, the special assistant of the President Biden, and with the National Security Adviser, Juan González.
In an interview with Efe, the Secretary of State asked to address the causes of the migrant caravans departing from Central America, which he believes have a ‘political’ goal aimed at ‘destabilizing’ his country. Mexico and including an EE.UU.
The request for a new TPS is based on the serious situation created last year by hurricanes Eta and Iota, which, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), caused approximately $ 2 billion in damage. Added to this is the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Honduras “the economy is broken and there is a humanitarian and political crisis,” Flores told Efe, highlighting the “immense relief” that migrants in EE.UU. were able to regularize their situation.
The spirit of a mass return would thus be removed, a situation that, according to the 15 de Septiembre Foundation, “could lead to the creation and mobilization of many more migratory caravans to this northern country.”
Maybelle Castillo said in this regard that the foundation defends “orderly migration” but that the Honduran government “is practically expelling the country’s population by not creating conditions for work and opportunities.
Congressional support
Flores recalled that two Latin American Democratic congressmen, Albio Sires and Norma Torres, have written to President Biden to express their commitment to work with his administration to address the root causes of migration from the so-called ‘Northern Triangle’ of Central America and the need for a new TPS.
When asked what they expect from Biden, Flores said he has not yet decided on Honduras, a country, he said, an ally and friend of the United States with whom he has “a solid bilateral relationship.”
In his opinion, currently “there is no friendly relationship” and the Establishment September 15 he sees that there is “silent isolation” internationally in Honduras, which also hurts Hondurans who have had to emigrate.
“The ally is not one person, it is not the president, but the people,” he stressed.
In the early days of January, US federal prosecutors assured in a court in New York that the President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was protecting a Honduran drug trafficker, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, in exchange for large bribes, even using the military to help their activities. to ease .
Those allegations, denied by the Honduran Government, deepen those already raised at the drug-dealing trial against the president’s brother, Juan Antonio Hernández.
The Honduras engine
He also noted that Hondurans have been most affected by the previous administration’s’ inhumane immigration policies’, led by Donald Trump, recalling that thousands of children of the same nationality who came to the border asked for ‘help’ and were ‘imprisoned and separated from their parents’.
“Now we don’t know where his parents are,” he said.
During the press conference, the foundation, which not only creates a database of Hondurans in the United States, but also unites and educates important communities in Texas, North Carolina and Louisiana, emphasized the important weight that the migrants in the Honduran economy, as well as in the vital jobs they fill in the US during the pandemic.
“We produce more than imports of coffee, than maquila, than shrimp and corporations,” he emphasized regarding remittances, which totaled $ 5,729.9 million, according to the Central Bank of Honduras, 22% of the Domestic Product Stupid. .
The members of the foundation emphasized that migrants can make a difference in the politics of Honduras vote for candidates who promote democracy and are willing to fight corruption effectively.
Despite the fact that the constitution gives them the right to vote and be elected, the authorities, according to Flores, are “perversely” denying them the ability to exercise it because they do not provide them with the new identity cards needed to vote. next November.