From [HERE] On Thursday May 4, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen announced the impending end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 57,000 citizens of Honduras now living in the United States. The timing of the statement is highly suspicious. It comes as the Trump administration has been whipping up a nationalistic frenzy over a small group of Central Americans who have traveled from their home countries through Mexico to the San Ysidro border crossing which separates Tijuana and San Diego. They are asking for humanitarian asylum in the United States. Although this group of refugees includes people from other countries, the largest number are Hondurans.

TPS has been given in the past to citizens of countries which have been hit by natural or human-made disasters who would not otherwise have a legal basis for staying in this country. Many of the Hondurans affected have been here and protected by TPS since Hurricane Mitch hit their country in 1998. In the intervening time, they have put down roots, married, and started families, which include tens of thousands of U.S. citizen children. Hondurans are now added to a growing list; the government previously announced the ending of TPS status for Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, as well as citizens of some other countries.

In her statement, Nielsen claimed that conditions in Honduras have improved sufficiently since Mitch for it to be safe for the Hondurans to return. She gave them until January 5, 2020 to either return to Honduras or find some other basis to remain here legally. Otherwise, they risk arrest and deportation.

However, Nielsen and her boss, President Trump, willfully ignore the impact on returners’ safety by the other disaster that has hit Honduras—the human-made, political one.

The “caravan” 

What Trump calls the “caravan” of thousands that he claims are planning to invade the U.S., pouring across the border and bursting into this country illegally, is actually just this year’s version of an operation that has been going on since at least 2010.

Migrants moving to the United States from Central America’s troubled “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have been set upon continually by criminal gangs, sometimes abetted by corrupt police and officials. Thousands have been killed and often buried in unmarked graves. In many cases, migrants have been kidnapped and held for ransom; others have perished after getting lost in the desert regions along the U.S.-Mexico border.

For a number of years, the U.S. has pressured Mexico into cracking down on this migration, which in many cases has had the result of migrants taking even more dangerous routes northward to evade interception. This is why organizations based in Mexico and the U.S. have helped to form the caravans. In the case of the current one, which was organized by Pueblo sin Fronteras, the goal is not to charge across the U.S. border illegally, but to present themselves at the border and request asylum here, a perfectly legal procedure guaranteed by international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.

Far from consisting of hordes of rapists, drug dealers and criminals as Trump and the anti-immigrant organizations allege, the current group includes many women and children, as well a number of transgender people who face a particularly great danger of being murdered in Honduras. [MORE]