Respectfully, the notion that routing asylum-seekers (especially those who are LGBT or political dissidents) to “any” Latin-American country is harmless overlooks both geography and evidence. Under the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico,” Title 42 expulsions, and the Asylum-Cooperative Agreement with Guatemala, people were removed not to Argentina or Uruguay but overwhelmingly to northern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (countries with some of the highest homicide and kidnapping rates in the world). Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and even the U.S. DHS Inspector General documented hundreds of rapes, assaults, disappearances and murders of migrants forced to wait or seek refuge there. International law calls this potential “refoulement”; it is precisely why UNHCR and multiple U.S. courts said the policies placed lives at risk.

Citing marriage equality in Brazil or Chile does nothing to change the reality in the Northern Triangle, where same-sex marriage is illegal, hate-crime enforcement is weak, and impunity for anti-LGBT violence hovers around 80–90 percent. Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009; Guatemala’s congress tried in 2022 to criminalize sex education and explicitly ban gay marriage; El Salvador’s LGBT activists report routine police harassment and gang “social cleansing.” Saying “many parts of the U.S. are worse” ignores that federal law now protects LGBT workers nationwide and that homicide rates for LGBT people are a fraction of those in the receiving countries. In short, legal progress in parts of Latin America is real, but deporting vulnerable people to Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico is demonstrably dangerous and, for many, a potential death sentence.

Respectfully, those statistics are outdated. El Salvador was once one of the most dangerous nations in the world, now it is one of the safest. Guatemala and Honduras haven't transformed quite so much, but their homicide rates have also decreased tremendously since 2009, when admittedly they were very dangerous with thousands of murders per year. So when you say "Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009", I would respond that you should seek updated information, and compare it against overall crime rates before concluding it is targetted at LGBT people.

You're also concerned about rapes and other crimes against deportees. I would remind you of the hundreds of thousands of rapes committed against migrants trying to come to the USA. Removing the temptation that draws so many to endure such risks is the best thing we can do to reduce the crimes you mentioned.

The drop in El Salvador’s official homicide rate is real, but it is the exception, not the rule—and it says little about the countries the U.S. has actually been off-loading asylum-seekers to. The Trump “safe-third-country” flights went almost entirely to Guatemala and Honduras, where the 2023 homicide rates (≈17 and 31 per 100,000, UNODC) remain among the highest in the hemisphere and where LGBT killings continue at a pace far above population share (Honduras’ observatory logged 40 LGBT murders in 2022 alone—roughly one every nine days). Even El Salvador’s new “safety” comes at the cost of mass arbitrary detentions, torture allegations, and documented abuse of LGBT detainees (Amnesty, HRW 2024). So the risk is not simply “outdated statistics”; it is the current, documented inability or unwillingness of these states to protect targeted minorities—a textbook refoulement problem.

Comparing forced removal to voluntary north-bound migration also misses the legal and moral point. People who choose to set out on a dangerous route retain agency; deportees have none. International law bars the U.S. from pushing anyone—especially those who are LGBT or otherwise vulnerable—into countries where the state cannot keep them safe, regardless of how perilous the journey to America may have been. Ending that legal protection would not “remove temptation”; it would simply trap people in danger and outsource responsibility for whatever happens next.

> Guatemala and Honduras, where the 2023 homicide rates (≈17 and 31 per 100,000, UNODC) remain among the highest in the hemisphere and where LGBT killings continue at a pace far above population share (Honduras’ observatory logged 40 LGBT murders in 2022 alone)

Assuming your stats are accurate, the population of Honduras is 11 million, so 31 per 100k equals 3410 murders. 40 LGBT murders is only 1% of that, significantly below the population share for a likely number of LGBT people (around 8%).

Please check your stats more carefully so I don't have to, thanks.

Edit: However you try to obfuscate it, the plain fact is, 40 murders among 11 million people is an LGBT homicide rate of 0.4 per 100k. That's extraordinarily low, and you're trying to misrepresent it as a death trap.

I didn't "cherry-pick" that statistic. You chose it. Now you don't like the obvious conclusion it leads to, so you're changing to a different argument about solving crimes. I don't think you're even interested in discussing this honestly.

Two quick clarifications show why those “only 1 %” calculations are misleading.

First, the 40 deaths are not an “LGBT share” of the national homicide database; they are cases that activists could confirm were LGBT. In Honduras the police almost never record a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity, families often conceal it, and many deaths of queer people are classified simply as “motive unknown.” Cattrachas (the local observatory you quoted) and Human Rights Watch both emphasize that their numbers are a floor, not a census. When the underlying variable is systematically under-reported, dividing it into the total homicide count will always understate the risk.

Second, vulnerability isn’t measured only by raw percentages but by the pattern of violence and the state’s response. Honduras’s Public Ministry reports a 90 % impunity rate for LGBT killings versus ~70 % for homicides overall. In other words, queer victims are far less likely to see a perpetrator arrested or tried, which is exactly what international law calls a “failure of state protection.” Add daily threats, police harassment, corrective rape, and forced displacement—none of which appear in the homicide tally—and you have a risk profile that far exceeds the simple population-share math you’re using.

So the point stands: Guatemala and Honduras remain dangerous places for LGBT asylum-seekers, and the U.S. cannot lawfully or morally treat them as safe havens by cherry-picking incomplete statistics.

Response to your edit: When you divide 40 LGBT murders by Honduras’ entire population (11 million) you’re using the wrong denominator. Risk has to be measured against the group that is actually at risk—i.e., LGBT people themselves. If we take the conservative estimate that 5 % of Hondurans are LGBT (≈550 000 people), 40 murders translate to roughly 7.3 killings per 100 000 LGBT residents. For comparison, the United States recorded about 30 anti-LGBT hate-motivated homicides in 2022; against an LGBT population of ~18 million that is ~0.17 per 100 000—over 40 times lower than Honduras. And that Honduran figure is almost certainly an undercount, because police reports rarely note a victim’s sexual orientation and families often conceal it; Cattrachas and Human Rights Watch call their tally “the floor, not the ceiling.”

Homicide numbers also capture only the tip of the danger. LGBT Hondurans face routine death threats, “corrective” rape, forced displacement, and police harassment, with a documented impunity rate of about 90 %. That systemic failure of protection—not just the body count—is exactly what international law treats as grounds for asylum and what makes forced returns unsafe. So the data, properly read, confirm the opposite of what you claim: Honduras remains one of the riskiest places in the hemisphere for LGBT people, and treating it as a “safe” destination for deportees ignores both math and reality.