The organization identified 138 deported Salvadorans who were killed between 2013 and 2019 and another 70 cases in this time period where “deportees were subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm, usually at the hands of gangs, or who went missing following their return.”
The group’s main finding was that there was a “clear link between the killing or harm to the deportee upon return and the reasons they had fled El Salvador in the first place.”
Alex Pena/Anadolu Agency via Getty
One case example in the report involved a woman in her 20s who tried seeking asylum in 2014 while running away from the father of her then 4-year-old daughter. She was deported that same year and told Human Rights Watch that when she returned, the man proceeded to repeatedly rape her — threatening her if she attempted to report the abuse.
“U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” Alison Leal Parker, a managing director of the Human Rights Watch’s U.S. program,toldThe Washington Post. “Therefore they should not have done it.”
Salvadoran migrants seeking asylum in 2016.
Parker told thePostthat a majority of the Salvadorans — 109 — were sent home during the Obama administration. However, she said that PresidentDonald Trump‘s immigration policies “will only worsen” the situation.
Trump campaigned on reducing both legal and illegal immigration.
“As asylum and immigration policies tighten in the United States and dire security problems continue in El Salvador, the US is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” the Human Rights Watch report states.
Between 2014 and 2018, the U.S. granted asylum to 18.2 percents of its Salvadoran applicants — the lowest rate in the region. The U.S. also deported a total of 111,000 Salvadorans in that same time period.
Of the 138 known deaths — which have been investigated through press accounts, court files and interviews with community members and relatives — a majority are said to have been killed within one year of returning from the U.S.
However, Human Rights Watch believes that the actual number of those killed is much higher.
“There is no official tally, however, and our research suggests that the number of those killed is likely greater,” they write.
El Salvador hasone of the highest rates of homicide and sexual violencein the world.
source: people.com
