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The influx of minor children from the Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala is a migration issue the cardinal holds close to heart. He is Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the capital of the Honduras.
Cardinal Maradiaga said he believed drug lords organized the migration to divert attention from their activities. I am convinced this was organized by the drug lords. They were paying coyotes in order to move so many children at once, in order to attract [attention] to this problem and to leave other places free for their traffic.
Desperate migration from struggling families in Central America is not new. The cardinal said migration from El Salvador into the Honduras started in the 1980s, fueled by poverty and war. He said at that point, the Honduras was a place ofrefuge.At that time we used to have more than 20,000 refugees living in concentration camps.
The cardinal said that over the last 15 years, the Catholic Church hadbeen organizing pastoral support for migrants and those the U.S. sent back to their countries. Between October 2014 and March this year,the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had ordered deportation hearings for 24,000 people from the Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
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