A growing number of illegal migrants are smuggling themselves out of the United States to avoid the legal penalties of government deportations, according to multiple witnesses.
“I’ve been a journalist for more than 25 years, but I never thought I would see this — ‘paquetes de retorno’” said Alfredo Corchado, an American journalist in Texas and Mexico and an executive editor at the Puente News Collaborative.
On March 26 he told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations:
[Coyotes] are now offering packages where [migrant] people can go back home …. [If] you want to go home, or you want to go back to Honduras, or maybe you don’t want to go back to Honduras because it’s too dangerous. [Or] you don’t want to go to Guatemala, but maybe you want to go to Costa Rica, and so they’re offering these [smuggling] packages where you can just go back home. Not all of them are taking it, I mean, many [are].
If migrants are deported by the United States government, they are separated from their families and detained in crowded jails, sometimes for many weeks. Once legally deported, migrants cannot visit for 10 years or longer, even when their