Respectfully, the notion that routing asylum-seekers (especially those who are LGBT or political dissidents) to “any” Latin-American country is harmless overlooks both geography and evidence. Under the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico,” Title 42 expulsions, and the Asylum-Cooperative Agreement with Guatemala, people were removed not to Argentina or Uruguay but overwhelmingly to northern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (countries with some of the highest homicide and kidnapping rates in the world). Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and even the U.S. DHS Inspector General documented hundreds of rapes, assaults, disappearances and murders of migrants forced to wait or seek refuge there. International law calls this potential “refoulement”; it is precisely why UNHCR and multiple U.S. courts said the policies placed lives at risk.
Citing marriage equality in Brazil or Chile does nothing to change the reality in the Northern Triangle, where same-sex marriage is illegal, hate-crime enforcement is weak, and impunity for anti-LGBT violence hovers around 80–90 percent. Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009; Guatemala’s congress tried in 2022 to criminalize sex education and explicitly ban gay marriage; El Salvador’s LGBT activists report routine police harassment and gang “social cleansing.” Saying “many parts of the U.S. are worse” ignores that federal law now protects LGBT workers nationwide and that homicide rates for LGBT people are a fraction of those in the receiving countries. In short, legal progress in parts of Latin America is real, but deporting vulnerable people to Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico is demonstrably dangerous and, for many, a potential death sentence.
