Immigrant Child Crisis: Honduran President Blames Drug War for Immigration of Children to US
The president of Honduras blamed the migrant child crisis on a drug war in his country and wants the world to pay attention to the situation with the same intensity level of other war-torn countries, The Associated Press reported.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez said his country is not responsible for starting the drug war that has displaced Central American families and asked the United Nations Wednesday to focus aid on the issue plaguing his country.
"Today, we talk about what is happening in other regions to children, young people, families displaced by war, violence and radical extremists," he said. "But little is said about the situation of thousands of families in the northern triangle of Central America."
The U.S. saw an unprecedented surge of undocumented immigrant children cross the border from Mexico earlier this year -- whose families typically pay a "coyote" or smuggler to get them across the border.
Other methods include a system of freight trains known as "The Beast," which many climb atop of in order to get to the border.
These women and children have told media in their home countries as well as the U.S. that they are fleeing dangerous and oftentimes violent situations back home.
They have been confused into misinterpreting U.S. deportation laws that apply to border countries like Mexico and Canada and believed rumors that once the children made it across they border they would automatically be allowed to stay, AP reported.
Currently Honduras, a country not at open war, has the world's highest homicide.
The migrants fleeing to the U.S. include those who sought to avoid recruitment attempts or death threats from gangs, or those trying to reunite with family members.
Hernandez insisted that the current situation was a result of the location of the country between drug-producing nations and consumer nations, such as the U.S., according to AP.
Hernandez reiterated the same point in his visit to the U.S. with other Central American leaders earlier this year to address the crisis.
"Our territory is now one of the principle battlegrounds of a war that is not ours. A war that we didn't start, whose strategies are decided outside Honduras," he told AP.
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