Central American Refugee Crisis

More than two million people are estimated to have left El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since 2014, many fleeing poverty, violence, and other hardships.

From: Council on Foreign Relations

In North of Central America (NCA), a region comprising El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, approximately 550,000 people have sought refuge in neighboring countries and more than 315,000 have been internally displaced inside the region. 

From: The UN Refugee Agency

Nearly 130,000 migrant children entered the U.S. government's shelter system in the fiscal year 2022, an all-time high driven by record arrivals of unaccompanied minors along the southern border, according to internal federal figures obtained by CBS News.

Federal officials along the U.S.-Mexico border processed migrants over 2 million times in fiscal year 2022, the highest level recorded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Roughly a quarter of all migrant apprehensions involved repeat crossings by the same individuals, the CBP data shows.

- Camilo Montoya-Galvez for CBS

The Office of Refugee Resettlement lists the number of referrals and percentages from each country from 2012-2021. They received 122,731 in 2021. 32% were from Honduras, 47% from Guatemala, and 13% from El Salvador. 

Beginning on [March 20, 2020], both migrants seeking a better life in the United States and those wanting to apply for asylum have been turned away and “expelled” back to Mexico or their home countries. These border expulsions are carried out under a little-known provision of U.S. health law - section 265 of Title 42 - which the former Trump administration invoked to achieve its long-desired goal of shutting the border to asylum seekers. Over 1.8 million expulsions under Title 42 have been carried out since the pandemic began. However, nearly half of those expulsions were of the same people being apprehended and expelled back to Mexico multiple times. This is because Title 42 has led to a significant increase in repeat crossings at the border. Half of all single adults from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador who have been expelled to Mexico under Title 42 have been apprehended crossing the border again.

From: American Immigration Council

Unaccompanied minors have not been subject to Title 42 expulsions since Nov 2020 (Nov 2021 in the government fiscal year reports) according to CBS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As of Oct. 2022, Title 42 is still in use and expanded to Venezuela.

In Fiscal Year 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 2,378,944 enforcement encounters at the southwest U.S. border.

Since early 2017, one of every three people held in a Border Patrol facility was a minor, a far bigger share than has been reported before now, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project of previously unpublished official records. Out of almost 2 million people detained by the Border Patrol from February 2017 through June 2021, more than 650,000 were under 18, the analysis showed. More than 220,000 of those children, about one-third, were held for longer than 72 hours, the period established by federal court rulings and an anti-trafficking statute as a limit for border detention of children.

From: Politico

A refugee is a person who has fled their own country because they are at risk of serious human rights violations and persecution there. The risks to their safety and life were so great that they felt they had no choice but to leave and seek safety outside their country because their own government cannot or will not protect them from those dangers. Refugees have a right to international protection.

An asylum seeker is a person who has left their country and is seeking protection from persecution and serious human rights violations in another country, but who hasn’t yet been legally recognized as a refugee and is waiting to receive a decision on their asylum claim. 

From: Amnesty International

None with government-granted refugee status in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records from 2012-2015.

Total: 4,045

Total asylum grant recipients from the three countries 2012 - 2021:

Guatemala: 16,318

Honduras: 11,636

El Salvador: 18,102

Total asylum grant recipients from all three from 2012 - 2021:  46,056

Source: Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Although smaller numbers of educated, urban Central American immigrants had been arriving in the United States since the 1970s, the first significant waves of wartime refugees came in the mid-1980s, settling in communities across the United States where they could find jobs and faith-based or social support. By the mid-1990s, the huge demand created by American industries for cheap, exploitable labor, combined with the lingering aftermaths of war, lured increasing numbers of migrants to work in agricultural, meat processing, service, domestic, and industrial jobs across the country.

Sadly, in part because the United States had supported the brutal military regimes from which most fled, the asylum acceptance rate for refugees arriving in the United States from NTCs was close to zero, hovering around 2% during the first decade or so of migration. Nonetheless, thousands of border crossers were granted temporary work visas as they awaited their asylum hearings, giving rise to the famous asylum backlog that today exceeds a million cases. Most others, who were too poor and unskilled to qualify for legal immigration routes, lived in the in the shadows without legal documentation, many working two or three jobs to survive and send remittances back to their devastated communities. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Central American immigrant population tripled between 1980 and 1990, and nearly half of today’s 3.5 million Central American immigrants arrived before 2000. - Unidos U.S.