SHOCKER: Unaccompanied Honduran children not returning home

8/20/2014

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While Congress is on recess, U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar met with Honduran Foreign Minister Mireya Aguero de Corrales to discuss solutions to the ongoing border crisis.

"It's a shock to see how many children have left Honduras unaccompanied,” de Corrales said in a McAllen press conference Tuesday.

De Corrales is trying to put an end to the migration of children fleeing her country ridden with violence.

While de Corrales explained U.S. backed initiatives have helped stem drug cartel violence in Mexico, it's only pushed the problem south into Honduras.

“This is what we call a boomerang affect. It has been tragic for Central America because while Columbia and Mexico have begun to have success, drug traffickers have begun to look for areas to work and what once was for Hondurans a geographical blessing has become a curse,” de Corrales said. “Being in the middle of the drug producers in the south and the consumers in the north we have become a fertile ground for violence."

But the small country is reforming immigration policy faster than the United States.

"We have created a new institute of migration to promote more security and we have done so very successfully the blind sites, the places in our own border we didn't know existed, where coyotes cross unaccompanied children," de Corrales said.

In fact, the Honduran government has begun to have success cleaning up the crime.

"In the past three weeks, 12 groups of coyotes have been dismantled,” de Corrales said.

The children who arrived in the U.S. with no parents are not yet returning home but thousands of adults are being deported.

"The adults are the ones being returned very quickly with 20-25 planes a week," Cuellar said.

While some reports have surfaced of recently deported children being killed after their repatriation, the government cannot confirm.

"This is a rumor, we don't know," Corrales said.

But Cuellar does confirms the numbers of unaccompanied minors crossing into the country have drastically decreased in just the past two weeks, but a long term solution must still be reached.

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