Krushnakeint curls up on the cold floor for another night, thousands of miles from his home in India. For four months, the 20-year old man has shared a cell in Tegucigalpa's aging Penitenciara Central with three other Hindi-speaking Indian natives. Two forlorn men from China sleep beside them. They communicate little, having no language in common. What they share is a dream of making it to the United States, yet their quest to reach that goal has come to an abrupt end in Central America.

These men from the other side of the world, along with thousands of Latin Americans from further south in the hemisphere, are being detained in Central America by local immigration officials paid by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It's a simple cost-saving move. Grabbing a migrant here–where legal guarantees are sparse and vigilance less exacting–and shipping them back to their country of origin costs the INS one-third or less of what it costs to deport the same migrant home from the U.S.

“The cost savings are enormous,” Joe Banda, an INS Special Agent at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, told Latinamerica Press. He said the average cost of capturing and deporting home an illegal migrant from Honduras runs around $3,000.

Nabbing migrants is the goal of Operation Disrupt, a five-year old INS campaign in Latin America. During occasional crackdowns, at times involving several countries at once, INS agents accompany local immigration officials to border crossings, highway checkpoints, safe houses, hotels, and airports, helping to finger suspicious travelers. The INS pays for overtime and extra equipment needed for the sweeps. It also foots the bill for food for the migrants and buys their tickets home.

Yet the money is sometimes slow in coming. When Antonio Martinez, an inspector with the Dirección General de Migración, walks into the penitentiary, he brings along specially cooked rice for the Indians, who are vegetarians, and the Chinese. He told Latinamerica Press that immigration staff purchased the food from their own pockets. “The U.S. Embassy is supposed to provide money for food for the migrants, but they're always behind on payment,” he said.

Honduras has been a focal point for attempts to interrupt the migrant flow ever since neighboring Nicaragua expanded its policy of giving visas on demand to practically everyone who enters the country and can pay the fee. So many Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans from all over can enter Nicaragua legally, then begin the overland sojourn that leads them through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico on the way to the U.S. Migrants detained here in recent months include residents of Ghana, Niger, Pakistan, Gambia, and other far away nations.

Since Nicaragua last June added Peruvians and Ecuadorians to the list of those who can get a visa for the asking, immigration workers say those two nationalities make up the bulk of migrants flowing north through Central America.

One Peruvian caught in the roundup went home in November after only two weeks in the penitentiary here. Juan Manuel Cueva said he and his wife had received a legal visa in Nicaragua, then paid a “coyote”–an alien smuggler–$50 apiece to take them by horseback across an isolated section of the border into Honduras. They boarded a bus in Choluteca that was soon searched by immigration officials. Besides not having legal permission to be in Honduras, Cueva said his accent gave him away.

Cueva said they would have died of hunger during detention in Choluteca had a Catholic nun not shown up with food. Once transferred to the penitentiary in Tegucigalpa, he ate the same meager food as other prisoners. Honduran prison authorities last year had less than two U.S. cents per prisoner per day budgeted for food, according to human rights workers here.

What worried Cueva most was being thrown in with the prison's main population. “They treat us as if we're common prisoners, though we're not thieves, drug traffickers, or killers,” he said. “We migrants all sleep togther at night, but with our eyes open.”

The INS has painted Operation Disrupt as an effort to give coyotes a hard time. Yet during the eighth Operation Disrupt sweep, a three-week period last September and October dubbed Operation Forerunner, INS agents and local officials apprehended some 3,500 migrants in Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Honduras, but netted only 38 smugglers. And one of them, Jose Leon Castillo, is protesting because he was detained in Guatemala and shipped by the INS back home to Honduras on a flight that conveniently went out of its way to land in Los Angeles, where Castillo was arrested and imprisoned.

In Honduras, according to Banda, 317 illegal migrants were detained and deported and only “five or six alien smugglers” were arrested.

Banda claimed campaigns planned for this year would focus more on capturing coyotes. In the meantime, the latest sweeps “have slowed them down,” Banda said. “Aliens are backed up in Nicaragua and the smugglers are having to work harder to get them through the region.”

According to a human rights lawyer who monitors the situation of detained migrants in Honduras, the sweeps of Operation Disrupt have little to do with coyotes. “They've been designed to stop migrants on their way north, and nothing more,” said Maureen Zamora, coordinator of the refugee and immigration program of the Centro para la Investigación y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos. Zamora said Honduran police are paying coyotes to denounce the very migrants they are transporting. “The coyotes get rich,” she said, “and the migrants go to jail.”

The sweeps in Honduras and El Salvador have forced more migrants to travel northward on boats in the Pacific, according to Jorge Estrada, director of Movilidad Humana for Caritas Nicaragua. “That's a journey fraught with danger,” Estrada said.

Zamora said the rush to grab people and ship them home has led to abuses. She cited the case of one Colombian man who last year entered Honduras from Nicaragua. Although he had no visa for Honduras, he did have a visa for Mexico, and claimed to be on his way there. Yet Zamora said the U.S. Embassy retained the man's passport, despite her protests. Embassy officials paid his way back to Colombia after three weeks, but didn't turn his passport over to Honduran officials until seven weeks after his detention.

“If people have a visa for a country close to the U.S., they take their documents away and send them back to their country of origin,” Zamora reported.

Despite the INS efforts, the migrant flow has increased in recent months, reaching numbers unseen since the late 1980s, when hyperinflation and armed conflict spurred the exodus of hundreds of thousands. Many come from South America. Visa applicants at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota can't get appointments for interviews until at least March, 2002. Immigration experts claim half a million people have left Ecuador in the last two years–roughly four percent of the population. In Central America, what was a steady stream of economic migrants became a torrent after Hurricane Mitch hit the region in 1998.

Banda says anecdotal evidence suggests migrant traffic across Honduran borders has doubled or tripled since the period before Mitch. And as long as economic conditions don't improve in Latin America, huge numbers will continue to flow north.

“We're going to get to the U.S. sooner or later,” said Cueva as he was led out of prison to be placed on a flight back to Lima. “There's no way we can go on surviving in Peru.”

- From Tegucigalpa, Paul Jeffrey