SAN SALVADOR, Feb 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Salvadoran transgender woman who sought asylum in the United States was killed weeks after she was deported, a rights group said, underscoring the dangers of the Trump administration’s hardening policy on asylum seekers.
El Salvador’s ASPIDH Rainbow Trans Association said Camila Diaz Cordova, a 29-year-old sex worker, applied for asylum in the United States in August 2017 to escape death threats and extortion by multi-national gang Barrio 18.
The gang is one of two criminal organizations that control large urban swathes of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
U.S. immigration authorities have confirmed they deported Diaz Cordova in November 2017. After her return, she went back into sex work in the capital San Salvador, where she was eventually kidnapped and beaten, according to her close friend Virginia Flores. She died in hospital on Feb 3.
Thousands of Central Americans each year cross Mexico to reach the United States, fleeing violence and poverty, despite high rejection rates in U.S. courts and more recent measures by the Trump administration designed to stop them.
“(U.S. authorities) forced her to sign (her deportation letter) and she signed, but she did not know what she signed because it was in English,” Flores said.
Members of the LGBTQ community have been fleeing high rates of persecution in their home countries.
Three transgender women have been murdered in El Salvador this year, according to rights groups. In 2018, they reported a total of 19 homicides.
In neighbouring Honduras, 97 trans women have been killed since 2009, and 303 people murdered for their sexual orientation since 2009, according to Cattrachas, a Honduran-based LGBTQ-rights organisation.
Those statistics, rights workers and researchers say, likely undercount the number who are murdered or injured as targets of hate crimes in Central America.
Along with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have among the highest national homicide rates in the Americas. — NNN-AGENCIES
