Jesuit groups call Trump’s border wall a distraction as migrants suffer

At the conclusion to the Jesuit Migration Network of Central America and North America conference I recently attended in Mexico City, participants held a press conference at the Ibero-American University. I had to catch a flight before the meeting, but Jan-Albert Hootsen has the rundown for America Magazine.

The “border wall” between the United States and Mexico, proposed by U.S. President Donald J. Trump, has been part of the political discourse in both countries for months. Catholic migrant rights organizations on both sides of the border, however, say that it is hardly the real issue. They warn civil society and opinion leaders that the “hypnotizing” effect of one of Mr. Trump’s most contentious policy proposals is a distraction from the far more urgent problems affecting migration in the United States, Mexico and Central America.

Speaking at a migration event at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City on Oct. 11, representatives of Catholic migrant rights organizations warned that, while poverty and escalating criminal violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are pushing hundreds of thousands of people northward, escalated deportations are tearing families apart in the United States. Mexico, meanwhile, has implemented policies against Central American migrants that are similar or worse than those of its northern neighbor, exacerbating human rights violations and undermining the credibility of its own rejection of the Trump administration’s border policies.

You can read the rest here.