Many Latin American leaders have remained silent or responded cautiously to President Trump’s plans to deport large numbers of immigrants, but one small Central American nation has taken a stronger stand.
After Mr. Trump signed executive orders this week aimed at sealing the U.S. southern border, expelling migrants and slashing foreign aid, Honduran officials said such measures could push their country closer to China, even as Mr. Trump has criticized China’s advances in Latin America.
Enrique Reina, the Honduran foreign minister, said in a television interview this week that while the United States provides his country with important help, Honduras had increasingly been approaching other countries, including China.
Earlier this year, President Xiomara Castro also warned that she could expel the U.S. military from a large Honduran air base where it has operated for decades if the Trump administration carried out widespread deportations.
Honduras, like other countries in Latin America, has had to respond to Mr. Trump’s threats in the absence of concrete information, because the administration has so far shared few details about its deportation plans.
But by touting their ties to China, Honduran officials are setting themselves apart from other regional leaders, who have recently been rushing to distance themselves from Beijing in an apparent effort to reassure Mr. Trump about China’s influence in the region.
Just in the last week, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino reaffirmed that China was not controlling the Panama Canal, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed. And Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said that her government would reduce its reliance on certain Chinese products by shifting their production to Mexico.
Mr. Trump has claimed that China is “attacking” the United States with fentanyl smuggled through the cartels in Mexico and beyond. He has also railed against China’s advances in trade and infrastructure projects in Latin America.
Honduras’ deputy foreign minister, Tony García, said in an interview that Honduras had been focused on “expanding our international relations” even before Mr. Trump’s election and that Mr. Reina’s remarks this week did not reflect a shift in foreign policy. “We do not plan to distance ourselves from the United States,” he said.
It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s deportation threats are serious or are intended to send a message to deter people from trying to reach the United States.
Mr. García said that officials could not speculate on the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s statements. But, he added, the deportation threats had indeed caused “nervousness” among Hondurans in the United States and in Honduras.
Mr. García added that Honduras was willing to be more outspoken than other countries in Latin America as it tried to prevent sweeping deportations and protect Hondurans in the United States.
“We have been very vocal as a country and I’m proud of that,” he said. “Others have been super soft, while others have landed in the middle.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not respond to a request for comment.
Experts say Honduras has made moves in the past to oppose U.S. policy, such as moving to end a longstanding extradition treaty last year.
“For the next U.S. administration, Honduras will likely be a significant challenge in Central America to be solved, rather than a partner,” Ryan C. Berg, the Americas director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, wrote in a report.
Ms. Castro, the wife of a former president who was ousted in a coup, ran on an anti-corruption platform after her predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández, was convicted and extradited to the United States on drug charges.
After taking office in 2022, she cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan the following year in favor of China, aligned herself with autocratic leaders like Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and moved to end the extradition treaty with the United States.
(The treaty move came around the same time a video surfaced of her brother-in-law accepting contributions from drug traffickers during Ms. Castro’s failed campaign for president in 2013. She has said the video was part of a plot to remove her from office.)
Honduras’s turn from Taiwan to China has been interpreted by analysts as driven by a need for better infrastructure and help recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Reina, the foreign minister, said at the time that the move was meant to address the country’s foreign debt and need for investment, particularly in hydroelectric dams.
The shift toward China was about “pragmatism, not ideology,’’ Mr. Reina told local reporters.
Experts say that, so far, little has come from Honduras’s decision to ally itself with China, though Honduran officials say a trade agreement is in the works. The two countries signed an agreement worth the equivalent of about $276 million last spring to build educational infrastructure in Honduras.
Mr. García, the deputy foreign minister, said that Ms. Castro’s government did not want to jeopardize relations with the United States, which he called an important partner, and that it would keep accepting deportation flights from the United States.
Since 2015, Honduras has been receiving around 10 U.S. deportation flights a week, he said.
The Honduran government has said that about 200,000 undocumented Hondurans in the United States could face deportation. The Pew Research Center placed the number at 525,000 in 2022, making Honduras the fifth-largest country of origin for undocumented migrants to the United States, after Mexico, El Salvador, India and Guatemala.
Honduras, Mr. Garcia said, hopes to be able to discuss deportation plans with the Trump administration.
“We need to sit down and listen to their concerns, and they need to listen to ours,” Mr. García said. “Our concern is that we can’t absorb so many people at once because it would be a collapse, a social problem.”
The Honduran government said it had its first conversation this week with the U.S. embassy in Honduras to discuss how many weekly deportation flights the country could potentially receive. A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy declined to comment, referring questions to the State Department.
As for ousting the U.S. military from the Honduran air base, Mr. García said the government was keeping that possibility on the table as a “point of pressure” and a way to make the Trump administration “take us more seriously.”
Ms. Sheinbaum and Guatemala’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, have focused in their public statements on the plans they are developing for receiving thousands of deportees.
Mr. García said his country was also working on a plan in the case of large deportations and was treating the threat “with the utmost seriousness.”
Next week, Mr. Rubio, on his first trip as secretary of state, will travel to Central America, making stops in Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. The trip, a spokeswoman has said, will focus on the issue of illegal migration.
It is not unusual for a secretary of state to skip some countries in a region, even those that have relevant diplomatic issues. But Mr. Berg, the regional expert, said excluding Honduras from Mr. Rubio’s trip could be interpreted as a message to President Castro and her government.
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