How thousands of Central American migrants face miserable train, truck and road journeys in the hope of a new life in the US
Driven by extreme poverty and political instability millions of migrants are attempting to find a new life in the United States from Central America but are being met with Donald Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy
THOUSANDS of Central American migrants risk life and limb every year on miserable truck and train journeys to the US.
Heartbreaking images show entire families from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador clinging to the roofs of trains and packed into container trucks in the hope of a new life in America.
Where are people trying to enter the USA coming from?
Popular opinion would have most illegal immigrants trying to enter the USA come from Mexico, taking their chances crossing the southern border between the two countries.
But this isn’t actually the case. Figures from the Pew Research Centre show that while 5.6million Mexicans were staying in the US illegally in 2016, there were 5.7m from other countries.
Since 2007 the number of Mexicans illegally living in the US has been dropping from a peak of 6.9m in 2007.
Illegal immigrants are increasingly coming from Central American countries – mainly Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras as well as Nicaragua.
A high number of people are also from China – 268,000 – and India with 267,000.
How are they entering the USA?
Despite the stereotype of people risking life and limb hiding in lorries or scaling fences at the border most illegal immigrants to the US come in legally on a visa and then simply disappear from the authorities when it runs out.
Recently many intending to cross the border illegally made the journey through Mexico by stowing away on trains, collectively known as La Bestia, The Beast, or Tren de la Muerte, Train of Death.
Migrants have been known to die or lose limbs getting caught between the wheels and they also are vulnerable to criminal gangs and are exposed to robbery, rape or death.
Under pressure from the US, Mexico has firmed up its borders with its Central American neighbours and been more ruthless deporting back people from those countries.
Others have used long convoys of containers and then hidden inside.
Another way of entering is to try to out fool border guards by finding ingenious ways to be smuggled in via hidden compartments in cars and lorries.
In one case in 2006 a man had been sewn into the upholstery of a van seat.
Why do they want to go to the USA?
There are a myriad of reasons.
Civil wars, political instability, and economic hardship first drove significant numbers of Central Americans northward in the 1980s, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
This was then fuelled by family unification, natural disasters and ongoing political and economic problems in the following decade.
Desperate poverty is a huge motivation for many people and the US offers the chance of a lifeline.
Approximately 30 percent of Nicaraguans live on less than $2 a day and just under 60 percent of households in rural areas are classified as living in “extreme poverty”.
The country is the second-poorest in the Americas after Haiti.
Many of these countries are also plagued by sky-high murder rates and widespread gang violence.
Since 1980, the size of immigrants in the US from Central America had increased almost tenfold from 354,000 to just over 3.3m.
What action has the US taken?
In recent years the US has increased pressure in Mexico to do more to seal up its borders in the south as well as make travelling by train for migrants.
Mexico has also toughened up checking travellers’ documents aboard buses and trains and increasing deportations.
While Barack Obama didn’t go as far as separating migrant parents from their children, people being fingerprinted, processed and officially deported to their home countries soared under Obama.
The peak was in 2013 with 435,498.
Obama did put a priority on removing migrants who had committed violence in the past, or who had only recently crossed the border.
Responding to a 2014 crisis involving thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors attempting to cross the border, the Obama administration responded by detaining thousands of immigrant families and paying the Mexican government to intercept families before they reached the US.
The Obama administration also embraced the use of privately run family detention centres.
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The Nogales, Texas facility was described by the Arizona Republic as a “juvenile prison camp.”
If Trump does follow through with a strict “zero tolerance” policy it will be on the back of a structure that was put in place by the previous US administration.
But at the minute, the focus is on the controversial decision to separate children from their families and keep them in detention centres.
While the centres certainly existed before Trump, his Republican administration has taken a hardline.
Trump wanted to see every single illegal person crossing the border, including asylum seekers, prosecuted because they had entered the country illegally.
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