As the United States and several key Latin American countries continue to harshen their migration policies, the growing numbers of people trying to escape humanitarian crises in the region feel increasingly compelled to risk more dangerous routes.
With President-elect Donald Trump’s 20 January inauguration fast approaching, fears are rising that programmes offering safe and legal pathways will be cut, including the Safety Mobility Offices (SMOs), a platform launched by the US in June 2023 in response to the rising flow of migrants reaching its southern border with Mexico.
The purpose of the SMOs, according to the State Department’s website, is to “help individuals find support and access a wide range of services in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala”. This includes information on lawful migration pathways, and about how to safely gain entry to the United States, and – for smaller numbers – to Canada and Spain.
According to the Mixed Migration Centre, which published a report in September on the influence of SMOs in the region, the mechanism has proven to be a quick and effective way for some asylum seekers to be resettled, and could represent a model for better managing migration. But there are also concerns about the relatively small number of people able to access protection through the SMOs, and that they are being implemented as part of a broader strategy to deter migration that has degraded asylum rights at the US southern border.
The approach represented by the SMOs – triaging of asylum claims away from the borders of Global North countries – is one that European countries have increasingly observed and may consider replicating. But if they do so, the report concludes, they should learn from the experience in Latin America and avoid some of the initiative’s “pitfalls”.
The MMC report noted that SMOs have failed to make a real dent in the numbers of people travelling along dangerous routes, and that they systematically exclude those who are most at risk.
Another weakness, the report said, is that their sustainability is too dependent on the US administration in place – a point that Trump’s election is likely to underline. Ending refugee resettlement was one of one of his campaign promises, and recent patterns in the use of the SMO platform suggest the initiative may be running out of steam.
A backgrounder on the Safe Mobility Initiative (SMI) – the official name for the policy – published by the International Assistance Refugee Project (IRAP), shows that, as of 27 November, the webpage in Colombia and Ecuador was not receiving new registrations, while in Costa Rica and Guatemala the numbers have declined sharply.
“The changes appear consistent with a focus on processing already pending SMI cases up until the end of Biden’s term, rather than allowing more people to initiate the process in countries with greater demand than capacity,” the document says.
In a recent conversation with The New Humanitarian, Simon Tomasi, Latin America and the Caribbean regional manager at the Mixed Migration Centre, explained the strengths and weaknesses of SMOs, and flagged uncertainty and apprehension about their future.
“There is a big concern among humanitarian actors and refugee rights advocates in the region that SMOs might serve as a façade for implementing more aggressive and restrictive migration policies or for limiting access to asylum at US borders,” he said. “That could undermine the positive aspect of the mechanism.”
This interview has been translated and edited for length and clarity.
The New Humanitarian: Where did the idea of Safety Mobility Offices come from?
Simon Tomasi: The SMOs initiative emerged in response to the increase of migrants reaching the US southern border in the past years. In 2023, the year in which SMOs were launched, a record number of [nearly 2,500,000] encounters was recorded at the southern border. The objective of this initiative was to offer legal ways for migration from transit countries with the double purpose of reducing irregular crossing at the southern border and giving people in mobility safe and legal options to migrate to the United States.
However, I don’t have more information on the creation of SMOs, about who led the process, who participated or the details of the negotiations. And that is something worth mentioning about the birth of SMOs: there are many grey zones, much confidentiality. This makes it complicated to have truthful and verified information about it. Even now, when you ask the different actors involved – UNHCR, IOM (the UN’s refugee and migration agencies) – about SMOs, there are many reservations, many precautions. It’s a sensitive issue.
The New Humanitarian: How do you explain this confidentiality?
Tomasi: It is a very political issue in the US. Globally and regionally, migration is more and more used at the political level, and it is a very polarised issue in societies of Latin America, the US, as well as in Europe. That is the first reason.
The second is that this project was launched a bit more than a year ago and was really built on the fly. So the mechanism started working with many trials and errors and has evolved since. I think there was a reluctance to communicate openly about a mechanism that was evolving and which [the actors involved] didn’t necessarily know how far they wanted to take. There are many negotiations behind this between the US, the countries where the offices are, and the UN. It requires a complex coordination that limits open communication.
The third factor that was mentioned in the interviews we did for the report is that they didn´t want to create the effect of attracting migrants to the countries where the offices are. And despite the limited and targeted information provided, there were hundreds of thousands of applications, which completely overwhelmed the offices’ capacity.
The New Humanitarian: What is your assessment of the first year of implementation?
Tomasi: SMOs are a mechanism that should be considered as promising, inspiring at the regional level, and symbolic of an effective collaboration on migration between countries and agencies.
In terms of numbers, the main result is that it allowed a high number of resettlements of refugees from the region – higher than in previous years – and that is key. We have a total of around 25,000 refugees that were admitted in the US in fiscal year 2024. In 2023, the number of individuals from the region that were resettled was 6,000; in 2022 no more than 2,400; and in 2021 only 400.
Moreover, SMOs have allowed to resettle them in a very efficient and quick manner, whereas it is usually a long process. This made people’s lives better very rapidly.
The New Humanitarian: The report also identifies some limitations. What are the system’s shortcomings and how could it be improved?
Tomasi: When you look at other regular ways [to migrate], and that is a big weakness of the SMOs, you don’t see the same impact [as with resettlements]. As of September of this year, SMOs had received about 240,000 applications. We know that a bit more than 10% of those who registered received information on different regular ways to reach the US. But the people who did not apply for refugee resettlement could not benefit from anything but information.
It would be interesting to expand SMOs to other lawful pathways and not only to resettlements, to include more people in mobility to the process. This means including more legal work [permits] to migrate to the US but also to other countries, more support for the Humanitarian Parole programme, which is harder because it depends on sponsors from the US. But the mechanism could be broadened to include more people by revising eligibility criteria. At the moment, they are too restrictive.
To have access to SMOs, migrants must have arrived in the country where the platform is available before a specific date, which excludes 99% of the people who are currently in mobility. The process is available only for some nationalities, depending on the country where they are. That also excludes most people. In Colombia, which has the SMO that processed the highest number of resettlements, migrants had to have a regular permit to stay in the country or be in the process of obtaining it to register. That’s a huge limitation for Haitians or Venezuelans for example, because many have no passport, or it has expired, or because they entered Colombia illegally.
And those who are left out are the most vulnerable people; they are the individuals who, due to the current trend of harsher border control, visa imposition, and higher barriers for regular migration, are increasingly being pushed towards irregular, dangerous routes to migrate both north and south.
Now, I don’t want to be unfair, because SMOs are only one tool among several measures within a new paradigm of regional cooperation to respond to mixed migration. We cannot ask them to be a miraculous solution to the situation we are facing.
The New Humanitarian: It was a controversial measure, however. Some critics have said that SMOs abuse the concept of refugee and give asylum to people who don’t meet the criteria to be considered refugees. Is this a legitimate accusation?
Tomasi: It is important to highlight that SMOs don’t create new quotas to bring more migrants to the US. They use the existing quota. Globally, the US had a cap of 125,000 refugee admissions for fiscal year 2024, which has been carried over for fiscal year 2025, and SMOs use part of it. For fiscal year 2025, I think the cap for refugees from Latin America who can be admitted to the US ranges between 35,000 and 50,000.
However, the public opinion has seen SMOs as a measure created to increase the number of admissions of migrants to the US.
The New Humanitarian: How does this measure fit into a bigger regional picture of US migration policies in Latin America?
Tomasi: There are several cooperation mechanisms in the region. The most recent is the Los Angeles Declaration, but before that there was the Quito Process, the Regional Conference on Migration, the South American Conference [on Migration], which are all different cooperative efforts between governments to exchange good practices for the integration of migrants… But the implementation of the different measures they want to boost are not enough.
Additionally, governments in the region are focusing on political measures destined to control migration, to put barriers to regular migration, to militarise borders – and all that has negative effects on the population in mobility. It exposes them to more risks, turning border zones into places of high tension and risk for migrants.
There are structural factors involved in this. In addition to this tendency in the region to go towards more migration control, there is a limited capacity in terms of funding, but also of political will, to promote and strengthen integration mechanisms... The consequence is that those who have established themselves in different host countries decide to migrate for a second or third time to other countries in the region, and also up north.
The New Humanitarian: Now that Donald Trump won the presidential election, what do you expect will happen with the SMOs and for people in mobility across the region?
Tomasi: From what I know, there hasn’t been any direct statement from Trump on SMOs. However, during his campaign, he insisted on his intention to “start mass deportations” and suspend refugee resettlements, among other measures destined to reduce migration towards the United States. During his first mandate, he drastically reduced the admission of refugees by implementing restrictions on the entry of refugees from several countries, and temporarily suspending the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) on several occasions. All this leads us to think that there is a high risk for the continuity of SMOs under his administration.
If they are implemented as his declarations suggest, these restrictive policies focused on deportations and border control could... potentially leave many people in need of international protection without viable means to reach a safe place, exposing them to the risk of being returned to dangerous settings.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
