In a sign of things to come, a San Francisco immigration judge ordered several asylum-seekers on Thursday to be removed to Honduras, a country they have never visited.
Each person who received such a ruling has 30 days to appeal it.
The rulings, immigration attorneys said, open the door for hundreds more immigrants across the Bay Area to be sent to countries like Honduras, Ecuador and Uganda, which have agreements with the United States to take asylum-seekers. They can theoretically continue applying for asylum from there, but that would be up to the host government.
One mother, who appeared beside her husband, tearfully accepted the news that Judge Patrick O’Brien had granted the Department of Homeland Security’s motion to send her family to Honduras. Technically, this is called a pretermit.
At the hearing, she stood before O’Brien with only her husband as her two teenage sons were in school. All will be sent to Honduras if they are unable to successfully appeal the motion. Judge O’Brien also ruled in favor of the government’s motions against two other families and one man.
The rulings have broad implications. Blaine Bookey, the legal director at UC Law San Francisco, said hundreds of asylum-seekers in the region have received “pretermit motions” in recent weeks to move their cases to third countries.
All could now receive similar judgments, and be at risk for deportation.
Jorge Ramirez, an asylum-seeker from South America in court on Thursday, received a 30-day reprieve, but the possibility of being sent to Honduras lingers. “This situation has taken me by surprise,” he said in Spanish. “I came here in fear of my life, escaping my country … I came with trust in this country and understanding that it respects human rights.”
In response to a flood of cases like Ramirez’s, Bay Area attorneys have been working around the clock to help asylum-seekers respond to the new motions, using pre-written templates to help expedite the mass filings.
Filing a response is critical and preserves an asylum-seeker’s right to appeal a decision in favor of removal. If an asylum-seeker fails to file the mandatory response, judges can rule solely based on the government’s motion, said Nicole Gorney, an attorney for the nonprofit VIDAS LEGAL.
“Right now, it’s about trying to preserve any option for them, because we need time,” she said. Gorney and other attorneys are hoping for an injunction that will halt these motions altogether.
Until then, detentions are likely to spike for those without lawyers. “They’re not going to have a way to defend themselves and they’ll be detained and held in detention centers with nowhere to go,” said Milli Atkinson, head of the immigration unit at the Bar Association of San Francisco.
Another asylum-seeker on Thursday’s docket sat beside her attorney, who had filed a 134-page brief on her behalf in response to another motion to send the woman to Honduras.
The lawyer opened by reminding O’Brien that Honduras was under no obligation to allow the woman to seek asylum there. A March 2020 agreement with the United States, he argued, limits the quota of asylum-seekers to 240 over two years, or about 10 people per month.
O’Brien said his hands were tied. “The Board [of Immigration Appeals] has already told me that I can’t consider that,” he said.
Honduras is an extremely dangerous country, the lawyer continued, especially for women. “Honduras has one of the highest rates of violent deaths of women in the world,” the World Bank wrote in a 2023 report. O’Brien commended the attorney’s arguments but granted the request for her removal. “I understand that Honduras is a dangerous place for women,” he told the attorney. “But I can’t find that she is likely to be tortured there, despite the country’s conditions.”
“The law is not on your side,” he said in another asylum-seekers’ case.
Each asylum-seeker now has 30 days to submit an appeal. When Ramirez left the courtroom on Thursday, he felt hopeless.
“What will I do in Honduras?” he asked. “I feel discouraged, very sad, and very worried at this moment.”