Papers to leave behind the terror of Honduras' 'gangs'

Yeni Sánchez, 33 years old, is Honduran and has been living in Girona with her husband for three years. She has two children, a boy and a girl. In recent months, she has been living in an irregular situation after losing international protection. This week, however, she has been able to apply for the "extraordinary regulation for migrants. She has already submitted the application and, within weeks, she expects to have the provisional response to obtain residence and work permits. "It has been a horrible few months, but now I'm starting to feel calm and very hopeful," she explains.

Sánchez decided to leave Honduras because she lived in a very dangerous neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, controlled by drug trafficking "pandillas". "We had a food business, but my mother died and I wasn't well enough to open it. Every month we had to pay a certain amount of our earnings to the pandillas, but for a few months we couldn't comply and we received a threatening note saying that if we didn't pay, we could imagine what would happen to us," she recalls with a lump in her throat.

That extortion was the final step to leave the country. First, they spent a year in another town for safety and, finally, encouraged by her sister, who already lived in Girona, Sánchez boarded a plane in March 2023 with her youngest daughter, aged 7, and six months pregnant. A few months later, her husband also crossed the Atlantic.

Obtaining and losing international protection

scams looking to take advantage of people in vulnerable situationsFaced with this setback, unable to work, the family considered returning to Honduras, despite the danger this entailed. Yeni's sister, however, convinced them to stay. She welcomed them into her home, all very cramped, and helped them financially. "But it's very complicated to live when your bank accounts are frozen or canceled, when you can't make purchases with a card, or when many procedures require an ID card that you don't have," she criticizes.

Until the news of the extraordinary regularization opened a horizon of hope: as former applicants for international protection and long-term residents, they meet the vulnerability requirements.

20% of immigrants come from Honduras

Honduras is the main country of origin for immigrants in Girona: they are almost 5,000 people, 20% of the total immigrant population, and ahead of the 4,500 neighbors originally from Morocco. “I like Girona, and my children too. I am proud of my country, but there is a lack of security there and a lot of crime, they can kill you on the street. Here we can go to the park with the children, they have made friends and everything is very beautiful,” concludes Sánchez.

To be able to move forward with the process, the family has had to save and allocate some money to the help and advice of a specialized law firm. It is the same one that helped his sister and other Honduran families. "Without help or an intermediary it is almost impossible to know who you have to contact; I would not have achieved it alone," she admits, and regrets the complexity of the procedures, the technical language and also the scams that seek to take advantage of vulnerable people.

The help of a law firm

In these cases, the laws are not very intuitive. "Asylum seekers do not have the months in which they have obtained protection counted towards their period of stay. In cases like Yeni's, one must make the sacrifice of renouncing an appeal against the denial of protection in order to have six months of stay, even if they are undocumented and unemployed, prior to the application for regularization," explains Mireia Risco, a lawyer at the Lleal Tulsà consultancy, who handles Yeni's case.

Extraordinary regularization has also fueled anti-immigration discourse that invokes the myths of the pull factor or preferential treatment for foreigners. "It is very easy to use this topic during campaigns, but in reality, more than 70% of the people who will benefit have been here for two or three years. They are integrated. Many are families who at school don't even know they are going through this situation, because they are hardworking, they stick together, and they handle it with great discretion," explains lawyer Anna Vilaró, from the same firm. And she concludes: "Many of these people will start contributing to social security instead of working in the underground economy."

In fact, when he obtains his permit, Sánchez is clear about what he wants to do: “I want to work and study to be a forensic doctor”.