*Cover photo by photojournalist Guillermo Martinez shows a boy in El Salvador wearing a protective mask from his home during a COVID-19 lockdown. Photo credit: Guillermo Martinez/APHOTOGRAFIA/ Getty Images
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Gender-Based Violence and Inequality Facing Children and Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras
Gender-based violence has long been one of the main drivers of migration from Central America to the United States. Widespread violence, including sexual abuse, human trafficking, and violence in the home and family, combined with a lack of access to protection and justice forces children and women to flee in search of safety. Drawing on existing research and interviews with children’s and women’s rights experts, this report lays out how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated already pervasive forms of violence against children and women in Central America, as well as the deeply entrenched gender inequality that leaves children and women even more vulnerable to violence.
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Successful implementation of the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America must start by acknowledging that gender-based violence is a primary driver of migration and includes most violence against children.
Obviously, mindless, failed enforcement and deterrence-only policies that tell women and children to “suffer and die in place” rather than flee and seek asylum are absurdly out of touch with the realities of both human migration and the real situation in the Northern Triangle. This report shows that increased flight from the Northern Triangle probably has more to do with the aggravating effects of the pandemic on the already untenable situation of many women and children in the Northern Triangle than it does on any policy pronouncements, real or imagined, on the part of the Biden Administration.
An honest policy that recognizes the reality that gender-based persecution is a major driver of forced migration in the Northern Triangle would go a long way toward addressing the largely self-created situation at our Southern Border.
As many of us keep saying, to no visible avail, asylum isn’t a “policy option” for politicos and wonks to “discuss and debate.” It’s a legal and moral requirement, domestically and internationally, that we are currently defaulting upon!
Wonder why “democracy is on the ropes” throughout the world right now? Perhaps, we need look no further than our own horrible example!
A robust overseas refugee program in the region and a uniform, consistent, timely policy of granting asylum to qualified applicants applying at ports of entry at our borders would be a vast improvement.
Sure, it would undoubtedly result in the legal immigration of more refugees and asylum seekers. That’s actually what refugee and asylum laws are all about — an important and robust component of our legal immigration system.
Although our needs are not actually part of the “legal test for asylum,” the fact is, we need more legal immigrants of all types in America right now.
It should be a win-win for the refugees and for America. So why not make it happen, rather than continuing failed policy approaches that serve nobody’s interest except nativist zealots trying to inflame xenophobia for political gain?
An additional point: On February 2, 2021, to great ballyhoo, President Biden issued Executive Order 14010. A key provision of that order required that:
(ii) within 270 days of the date of this order, promulgate joint regulations, consistent with applicable law, addressing the circumstances in which a person should be considered a member of a “particular social group,” as that term is used in 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(42)(A), as derived from the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol.
270 days have long passed. In fact, its been more than 300 days since that order. Yet, these regulations are nowhere in sight. Perhaps, that’s a good thing.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to “us old timers” who have “hands on” experience with the unsuitability of the DOJ regulation drafting process for this assignment. Indeed, this assignment is actually several decades “overdue,” having originally been handed out by the late former Attorney General Janet Reno prior to her departure from office in January 2020!
The problem remains lack of expertise. With the possible exception of Lucas Guttentag, I know of nobody at today’s DOJ who actually has the necessary experience, expertise, perspective, and historical knowledge to draft a proper regulation on the topic. Past drafts and proposals have been disastrous, actually seeking to diminish, rather than increase and regularize, protections for vulnerable women and others facing persecution on account of gender-based particular social groups.
Indeed, one proposal was even used by OIL as an avenue in attempting to “water down” the all-important, life saving “regulatory presumption of future persecution arising out of past persecution!” Talk about perversions of justice at Justice! Why? Because OIL had suffered a series of embarrassing, ego-deflating setbacks from Article III Courts calling out the frequent failure of the BIA and IJs to properly apply the basics of the presumption. Sound familiar?
At DOJ, the “normal solution to lack of expertise and competence” is to simply eliminate expertise and competence as requirements! In many ways, “good enough for government work” has replaced “who prosecutes on behalf of Lady Justice” as the DOJ’s motto!
It’s also yet another reason why the DOJ is a horribly inappropriate “home” for the U.S. Immigration Courts!
😎Due Process Forever!
PWS
12-16-21