Honduran families deported back to a bleak future

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TOCOA, Honduras (AP) — Elsa Ramirez already had lost two
brothers to violence in this remote Caribbean region when co-workers
handling clandestine cocaine flights from South America murdered her
husband four months ago.
Then the killers came looking for her.
Ramirez
had seen Facebook messages and heard from relatives that mothers
travelling to the United States with children would be allowed to stay
if they made it across the border, so she took off for the North with
her 8-year-old, Sandra, and 5-year-old Cesar, named for his dead father.
Two
weeks and many thousands of miles later, a U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement flight brought Ramirez back to the badlands of Honduras in
Colon province, still fearing her husband’s killers and now lacking a
plan for survival.
"I didn’t want to come back," she said. "I wanted to give my children a better life and I
can’t do that here."
Overwhelmed
by unaccompanied minors and women with children crossing illegally,
U.S. authorities have stepped up deportations back to Central America.
Ramirez was one of 58 women and children who returned last week on a
U.S. flight to San Pedro Sula, considered one of the most dangerous
cities in the world.
Illegal immigration of Central American
families and unaccompanied children spiked this year as rumors
circulated that children, and women with children, would be released in
the United States. Since Oct. 1, more than 57,000 children and 55,000
people traveling as families, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, have
been arrested. The spike prompted the Obama administration to expand
detention space for families and to deport them more quickly — sending
with them a stern message that there are no free passes for migrants
coming illegally.
On the six-hour truck journey to Tocoa, an
agricultural valley dotted by mansions, Ramirez described life in a
region where drug trafficking pays like nothing else. One brother was
killed in a family feud and another when he went to collect on a debt.
Her husband worked the cocaine flights, and once earned $4,000 in just
one day. He sometimes used their modest home to store drugs.
"I was scared, because when you’re involved in that, they will do things to your family,"
Ramirez said.
Colon
province is the center of Honduras’ drug-trafficking operations, which
span the Caribbean provinces that are among the most dangerous in a
country with the world’s highest murder rate. In 2012, the DEA targeted
drug trafficking in neighboring Gracias a Dios province with Operation
Anvil, which became controversial after two pilots and four civilians
were killed. It was later suspended, and the drug flights continue.
Early
Wednesday, five people, all members of the same family, were pulled
from their beds and executed at close range in a small village about 10
miles from Tocoa. The masked assailants were dressed as police and
soldiers. The victims were members of a drug gang, said Col. German
Alfaro, the military commander in the area.
After her husband’s
death, Ramirez’s in-laws took possession of their home. The 27-year-old
widow was left with his motorbike, clothes and a few cellphone photos of
him with his ever-present pistol.
A housewife with no prospects
for work, she stayed at her mother’s home until a relative in the United
States sent money for a bus trip through Mexico and for a coyote to
smuggler her across the Rio Grande to Texas.
Ramirez left with her
sister, Yadira, and two children on June 3, and crossed the Guatemalan
border to Mexico three days later. She and the children stayed in the
town of Tapachula for two weeks while Yadira worked in the border bars,
drinking and dancing with the men for money. But Ramirez, an evangelical
Christian who had been with her husband since age 16, refused to join
her.
"I’m not accustomed to attending to men," she said.
Eventually
she left without her sister, taking the 16-hour trip to Mexico City
with the two children on her lap because she couldn’t afford more than
one seat.
She carried her identification, their birth certificates
her husband’s death certificate, and an honor badge her daughter had
won at school to the border town of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas,
where other migrants warned to lay low because of kidnappings. But she
needed to keep moving.
As she hailed a cab one afternoon, a group
of men grabbed Ramirez and her children. They held the family overnight,
demanding money. When she discovered the door was unguarded in the
morning, Ramirez and the children escaped to meet the coyote. He kept
them for five days, awaiting a $2,000 deposit from her family.
When she arrived at the U.S. border, Ramirez turned herself in to immigration officials.
"They
asked me if I had guns or explosives," she said. "I told them my
problem and they said there was nothing they could do. That I had to
talk to the judge."
She was deported before seeing a judge.
She
doesn’t remember the exact days or locations. She traveled by bus to
several immigration stations, where she slept on the floor of what the
migrants called "coolers," because the air conditioning was turned up so
high.
One night her son was playing with another child in the
bathroom, when he hit his head on the toilet and began bleeding
profusely.
Immigration guards tried to handcuff her on the
ambulance ride to the hospital, where her son’s wound was treated with
two stitches.
"I said to them, ‘How could you think that I would take off and leave my son?’ "she recalled.

The
night before she boarded the plane home, Ramirez dreamed of her dead
husband. "He didn’t say anything, but he was hugging me," she recalled.
When
the plane landed in San Pedro Sula, Honduran First Lady Ana Garcia de
Hernandez boarded to personally welcome the women and children home.
At
the migration center, Ramirez was given a bag of groceries with juice
to last a day, drinking water and the equivalent of about $25 in
lempiras.
The deported women were angry.
Karen Ferrera was
returning to El Progreso, a gang-ruled municipality outside of San Pedro
Sula, with her 8-month-old baby. The 25-year-old had been trying to get
to Wisconsin, where her mother lives.
"I told them I’m a single mother, with three girls, and no place to live in Honduras," she
recalled through her tears.
Glendis
Ramirez, 22, also made her way back to Tocoa, whereshe picked up a
horse for the final two hours of the journey to her mountain village.
Before leaving, she tossed out the tennis shoes she had worn on her
failed trip to the U.S. "I never want to see them again," she said.
When
Elsa Ramirez arrived in Tocoa, she collapsed into the arms of her
tearful mother in relief and frustration. Neither woman knew what the
future would bring. Ramirez could hide out in her mother’s home for a
time, she said, perhaps work as a cook or shop clerk.
Or with her
husband’s killers still on the loose, she could try again to make the
trek to the United States — but without her children.
This time, she said, "God didn’t want it to happen. Only He knows why He’s keeping us here."

___
Associated Press write Freddy Cuevas in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, contributed to this report.

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