Honduran President Xiomara Castro, in her capacity as president pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), announced Jan. 1 that she, together with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, will convene a meeting of CELAC foreign ministers to address the issue of migration, to be held sometime in January.
President Sheinbaum later confirmed that the two had spoken, proposing that the upcoming meeting build on the ideas on the same subject agreed upon at the summit hosted by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, last Oct. 22 in Palenque, Mexico. Ten heads of states from the region conferred in Palenque on a regional consensus on migration to be presented to the United States.
With President-elect Donald Trump’s team already contacting various governments in Ibero-America and the Caribbean about how many migrants they could take in, if and when President Trump begins his promised mass deportations, a regional response is now upon them.
In the case of Honduras, still one of the poorest countries in the region, Deputy Foreign Minister Tony García has reported that somewhere around a quarter-million Hondurans could be expelled from the United States in 2025, an influx that his country is not prepared to handle.
