Exclusive: State Department warns Americans about Latin America. Privately, it tells asylum officers a different story

By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

(CNN) — The State Department is publicly warning Americans about violent crime in parts of Latin America, but privately, it has given asylum officers new assessments arguing that conditions in some of those same countries are no more dangerous than in some US cities, according to internal documents reviewed by CNN.

The documents, which have not been previously reported, focus on Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Rather than emphasizing human rights issues and the prevalence of kidnapping and extortion often highlighted in State Department assessments, they instead compare violent-crime rates in those countries favorably with US cities such as Baltimore, Houston and Memphis.

The new assessments are part of a broader Trump administration effort to overhaul the way claims from migrants are assessed by asylum officers — and limit who’s eligible to remain in the United States.

Asylum applicants must prove they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of a “well-founded fear” of persecution. By lowering the perceived threats in those countries, the new assessments will likely bear directly on those claims, including determinations of whether migrants can safely relocate inside their own country rather than seeking to stay in the US.

“There’s been an oversimplification of real dangers in these countries during other administrations, but this seems to be going too far in the other direction,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan thinktank.

The State Department says the assessments were prepared by personnel with regional expertise and circulated for review, including to US missions overseas. They are “intended to provide background for adjudicators as they evaluate protection claims,” one document states.

The Department of Homeland Security, which manages asylum claims, referred CNN’s questions about the country reports to the State Department.

In a written statement to CNN, a State Department spokesman said the department “may provide information about conditions in foreign countries to (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) and immigration courts. Such information is intended to provide useful background for USCIS personnel and immigration judges.”

A new yardstick for asylum claims

The new documents were distributed to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency inside DHS that processes immigration benefits, and state that violent crime in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador is lower than in some major US cities. In Mexico and El Salvador, for example, the documents claim that many areas “have violent crime rates at least one order of magnitude lower than those of major US cities.”

Asylum officers generally rely on the State Department’s annual human rights report to assess conditions in an applicant’s home country. That report, which covers the prior year and is usually released in March or April, has been delayed this year. The new assessments therefore give officers more recent country conditions to consider when reviewing claims.

Asylum denials are already high. In June, for example, 94% of asylum cases were denied, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That’s a dramatic increase from two years ago when the asylum denial rate hovered around 50%.

The documents show how the Trump administration is using comparisons with the US to evaluate two questions that can determine an asylum claim: whether a home government can provide protection and whether an applicant could safely relocate within the country.

“When you see a government report differ so much from previous reports, it raises red flags, especially if conditions on the ground haven’t changed in a noticeable way that would warrant that,” Selee said. “Some change is OK. You can correct the emphasis in prior reports, but this seems like a wholesale shift in conditions on the ground.”

The State Department warns against travel to Honduras, citing violent crime and terrorism, according to an alert on its website. It specifically cites Gracias a Dios Department, a region in Honduras, for its crime.

The State Department’s public travel warning cites crime in the region. The internal documents, however, say violent-crime rates there and in other Honduran cities “compare favorably with rates of violent crime in parts of the United States,” including Baltimore, Houston and Memphis.

“Of course, these figures do not represent the entirety of the United States,” the document states in one part. “Rather, they demonstrate that, even in developed countries, conditions vary. Further, they demonstrate why a general judgement cannot be made concerning a country’s conditions based on conditions in certain areas.”

Can asylum seekers safely relocate?

The documents also assert that police in Honduras are “willing to and able to respond to requests for assistance from residents, with the main constraints being vehicle storages, response-time challenges, and uneven rural access.” That, too, it states can happen in the United States.

But the realities on the ground are more complicated, Selee said.

“That clearly understates the degree to which police forces are in collusion with organized crime groups,” Selee said. “The difference with the United States is that often people face violence but no trustworthy institutions that can protect them.”

The new documents state that people can move freely in each of the countries. That includes victims of abuse and extortion. While experts say that may be the case, they note that some organized crime groups can pose a threat across the country, meaning that even by relocating, people remain in potential danger.

“The reality is that there are some people who fall afoul of criminal groups and cannot be safe anywhere in the country,” Selee said.

Former USCIS officials said that determining whether someone can relocate in country has been part of the regular line of questioning by asylum officers.

“The question of whether you can relocate in your own country has always been something an officer can and should consider,” a former USCIS official told CNN.

Trump officials have repeatedly said that travel warnings, which are separate from the State Department’s human rights reports, are intended for US citizens and not nationals of that country.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper in June, defended the administration’s policies when asked about the safety of Haiti, which also has a travel warning.

“We have ‘Do not travel’ in places in Mexico or advisory warnings. In fact, if you go through our website in the State Department, you’ll see there’s advisories to a lot of places that are vacation destinations that we have advisories on because of the real risk to Americans,” said Mullin.

“That doesn’t mean it’s a risk to people who live there,” he added.

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