Afro-Indigenous Activist & Refugee Fears Deportation Back to Honduras

The Latin American immigrant community is currently facing a lot of uncertainty with new immigration policies being passed at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Biden administration. Earlier this month, President Biden signed an executive order to stop processing asylum claims when unauthorized crossings exceed an average of 2,500 migrants for seven consecutive days, meaning that the U.S.-Mexico border will be effectively shut down for all asylum seekers, with few exceptions. While he has since passed a law that would provide legal protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, many asylum seekers continue to live in uncertainty in the U.S. One such immigrant is Erlin Centeno, an Afro-Indigenous activist who was forced to flee Honduras with his wife and children in 2022 after four family members were killed and he received death threats for his work as a land rights defender. Four months ago, he was detained during a routine check with ICE officers in New York City and has since been held in a Pennsylvania detention center and separated from his family. If he is denied asylum by the U.S. government, it is likely that he will be sent back to Honduras, where he and his family claim his life will again be at risk, according to NBC News.

“The United States has always just been framed as a land of opportunity and safety, and they didn’t feel safe in any other places nearby in Central America and they don’t really have family anywhere else,” Deisy Flores, a staff attorney at Make The Road New York, who is involved in Centeno’s immigration case, told NBC News.

As a member of the Garifuna people, Centeno is a descendant of African people, as well as displaced Arawak and Caribbean Indigenous tribes, who were forcibly taken to Honduras to work as slaves. Today, they are spread out across Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, and Honduras and have faced decades of violence, racism, and poverty. Since 2020, Centeno has dedicated his life to combatting systematic oppression and defending the territorial rights of his community through his membership at the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras. Unfortunately, it has come at a heavy cost due to local developers and gangs who have been fighting over the ownership of the Garifuna’s ancestral homeland. As a result, many members of the nonprofit have been the target of harassment, beatings, kidnappings, and murders. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) reported multiple cases of the murders of land defenders in Honduras just last. year.

However, Centeno’s case is complicated due to a previous deportation order 15 years prior, where he was found without documents. He was allowed to return and stay in the country under the condition that he attend routine check-ins with ICE every month in between working construction. On Feb.14, he and his family went in for their usual check-in however after hours he was taken into custody and she has not seen him since. ICE did not provide NBC News with a comment as to why he was detained and his wife, Trini Merced Palacios, nor his legal team know why he sent to the detention center. During a reasonable fear interview a couple of weeks later, his testimony was found to not be credible by the immigration judge. The interview is common practice for those who have been deported in the past, NBC News reported.

For now, Centeno’s attorneys have filed an appeal to fight his previous deportation order but it could be some time before it goes to court. His family is also placing pressure on ICE to allow Centeno to wait for his trial at home.