The Homecoming: For Those Migrants Returning To Honduras, Little Has Changed

The Homecoming: For Those Migrants Returning To Honduras, Little Has Changed Honduras Emerson Colindres, 19, and his family fled Honduras and applied unsuccessfully for asylum in the United States in 2014. Since then, they had been in the immigration system, waiting to receive a date to leave the US. Then, agents detained Colindres when he showed up for a routine immigration check this month in Ohio. Colindres, who has no criminal record and just graduated from high school, spent two weeks in the Butler County jail near Cincinnati before he was deported back to Honduras, the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote. “It was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Colindres told WCPO, a local television station. If his mother and sister leave Ohio to join him, as they say they will, they will join other Honduran immigrants who are opting to self-deport from the US under a new program called Project Homecoming, according to CNN. The US government initiative pays those in the US illegally $1,000 to leave the country. A group of 38 Hondurans who opted to self-deport recently landed at Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport in northeastern Honduras. This direction of traffic is a trickle compared with the number of Hondurans who have migrated to the US in recent years. Between 2000 and 2021, the Honduran migrant community in the US grew from 240,000 to 1.1 million, an increase of 374 percent, the Pew Research Center said. There are many reasons why Colindres’ family took him from the Central American country of around 10 million, namely the poverty, the violence, and the corruption in the narco-state. Things haven’t changed in the 11 years since they left. For example, late last year, a scandal erupted in the country over meetings between senior government officials associated with President Xiomara Castro and drug traffickers who donated to her campaign and paid bribes to Castro’s husband, former President Mel Zelaya, who went into exile following a 2009 coup, and Zelaya’s brother, explained the Wilson Center. Castro’s predecessor, ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández, is now serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for trafficking in guns and drugs. The country lacks the civil society institutions, independent judiciary, and watchdog groups to combat this corruption, analysts say. In the past, American officials might have had more power to help Honduras foster democracy and law, the Christian Science Monitor noted. Now, however, as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) lamented, the US has taken a more antagonistic stance toward Castro due to her left-wing views, including her ties with China and her support for the authoritarian regimes of Nicaragua and Venezuela. As a result, the US shuns the country: “During his tour of Central America in early February 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not include Honduras on his itinerary, sending a strong message,” WOLA wrote. In November, Hondurans will elect a new president who might change the direction of the country, the Associated Press reported. Candidates from Castro’s leftist LIBRE party and Hernández’s conservative National party will likely dominate the vote, which means little will change, analysts say. As a result, the reasons people like the Colindres family left the country won’t be solved anytime soon. Still, some are hopeful. “While electoral violence is a significant threat, and democratic degradation is indeed a concerning trend in the region, these challenges are by no means insurmountable,” wrote the US Institute of Peace. “Central American neighbor Guatemala rose from its contentious 2023 elections with a citizenry hopeful of a renewed democratic spring capable of strengthening justice while delivering social dividends for its society. Hondurans still have time to make next year’s elections their watershed moment towards building a stronger, more inclusive and responsive democracy.” Share this story