Title: The Other Big Reason Why So Many Hondurans Come to the U.S.
Headings: The Other Big Reason Why So Many Hondurans Come to the U.S.
The Other Big Reason Why So Many Hondurans Come to the U.S.
The Pull of Family
A History of Migration
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Maya Srikrishnan
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Content: There have been other major waves of Honduran emigration since then, like during Hurricane Mitch in the late 1990s, when Hondurans were granted temporary protected statuses in the United States. President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to revoke that status, which would send an estimated 57,000 Hondurans who have been living in the United States back to Honduras. Hondurans are in the midst of another wave of migration that’s been happening for several years. This wave, said Suyapa Portillo Villeda, assistant professor of Chicano-Latino Transnational Studies at Pitzer College, began with a military-backed coup in 2009. That led to the most violent years on record in the country, starting in 2011. “If you look at records of people being detained and making it through at the border, that is when we see a serious exodus of Hondurans and entry to the U.S.,” Portillo Villeda told me last year. “ There’s extortion, gangs, but also intrafamilial violence against women. People wanted to get their kids out by 2014.” That year, 2014, is when the U.S. saw a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America arrive at the Texas border. “People know there are no open borders here,” Cecilia Menjívar, sociology professor at the University of Kansas told me last year. “