El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras sign Asylum Cooperation Agreement with U.S.

The three key Central American countries that were responsible for last year’s migrant surge have signed asylum deals with the U.S., officials announced Tuesday, saying the moves could help head off a new wave of caravans.

More than 71% of the people nabbed jumping the border in 2019 were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and many lodged bogus asylum claims knowing it was a path to a foothold in the U.S. while their cases wound their way through the immigration system.

The new Asylum Cooperation Agreement (ACA) deals with those three countries mean migrants who cross through those countries en route to the U.S. and who then lodge an asylum claim here can, in some cases, be sent back to those countries.

The ACAs are now in force, Homeland Security said.

They come just weeks before the Trump administration turns over the reins to the Biden team, and the agreements give the new administration another tool to block what border experts say is likely to be a Biden surge, as migrants test the new regime.

“Without these agreements, we will likely see waves of attempted illegal entries similar to what we saw in 2019,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

Asylum is similar to refugee status, though refugees apply from outside the U.S. while asylum-seekers are already on American soil.

U.S. officials say true asylum-seekers are fleeing persecution at home, and any safe country should be an acceptable landing place.

But hundreds of thousands of Central Americans rushed north in recent years, crossing multiple other countries, to lodge asylum claims, knowing the backlogged U.S. system wouldn’t hear their cases for years. Most will lose their cases, experts said, but during the intervening years they could try to burrow into American society.

An asylum agreement is a formal recognition that those other countries are deemed safe alternatives, so migrants crossing their soil to get to the U.S. to make asylum claims can be sent back to a previous safe country they crossed.