The State Department is telling American tourists to stay alert for violent crime across parts of Latin America while privately handing asylum officers a very different message: that conditions in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are no more dangerous than in some U.S. cities. The gap between the public warnings and the internal paperwork is now shaping how asylum officers decide whether migrants from those four countries have anywhere safe left to go.
According to a review of internal documents reported by CNN, the assessments compare violent-crime rates in those countries favorably with U.S. cities such as Baltimore, Houston and Memphis. The documents go further, stating that many areas of Mexico and El Salvador have violent-crime rates at least one order of magnitude lower than those of major American cities. The assessments were prepared by State Department personnel with regional expertise and circulated for review, including to U.S. missions overseas, before being distributed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS agency that processes immigration benefits.
Asylum applicants must prove they are unable or unwilling to return home because of a well-founded fear of persecution, and the documents are built to inform a specific piece of that test: whether someone denied protection could simply resettle somewhere else inside their own country. The internal paperwork states plainly that people, including victims of abuse and extortion, can move freely in each of the four countries covered. An EOIR document cited in related litigation states that internal relocation was not reasonably available in at least one case, according to records posted by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, underscoring how contested that relocation question can be.
A Travel Warning That Tells a Different Story
The contradiction is sharpest in Honduras. The State Department warns Americans against traveling there at all, citing violent crime and terrorism, and specifically flags the Gracias a Dios Department as a region of concern. Yet the internal assessments say violent-crime rates in Gracias a Dios and other Honduran cities compare favorably with rates in parts of the United States, and separately assert that Honduran police are willing and able to respond to residents' requests for help, while noting constraints like vehicle storage, response time and uneven rural access.
One internal document does include a caveat: it cautions that figures comparing Honduran crime with U.S. crime do not represent the entirety of the United States and that conditions vary by area, per the same documents reviewed by CNN. Trump officials have said travel warnings are intended for U.S. citizens, not for nationals of the warned country, a distinction the administration has used to defend the dual messaging. Senator Markwayne Mullin made a similar argument in a June CNN interview with Jake Tapper defending the administration's stance on Haiti's safety, saying travel advisories cover destinations, including vacation spots, because of real risks to Americans, and that an advisory does not mean a place is risky for the people who live there.
Why The Numbers Matter For Adjudicators
Asylum officers generally rely on the State Department's annual human rights report to assess conditions in applicants' home countries, but that report, which normally covers the prior year and is usually released in March or April, has been delayed in 2026. Andrew Selee, who reviewed the new assessments, said they appear to overcorrect from a prior overemphasis on danger, swinging too far in the other direction. Selee also said major differences from earlier assessments raise red flags when conditions on the ground have not noticeably changed, and that the documents understate police collusion with organized crime and the lack of trustworthy protection for some people.
Selee added that organized crime groups can pose a threat across an entire country, leaving people who relocate internally still in potential danger, and that some individuals targeted by criminal groups cannot be safe anywhere within their home country. Former USCIS officials said whether an applicant can relocate within their country has long been a regular line of questioning in interviews, and a former USCIS official said officers have always been able, and expected, to weigh that possibility. The State Department said the information it gives USCIS and immigration courts is meant to serve as useful background for personnel and judges evaluating protection claims, and the Department of Homeland Security referred questions about the country reports back to the State Department.
Denials Climb As The Court System Is Remade
The documents are landing amid a broader overhaul. The Trump administration is reshaping how asylum officers assess migrant claims as part of a push to limit who is eligible to remain in the United States, and the numbers show the shift. The asylum denial rate was around 50% two years before June 2026; by June 2026 it had climbed to 94.1%, with the grant rate falling to just 5.5%, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Only 771 people were granted asylum that month, fewer than a quarter of the figure from three years earlier.
The same report found that 279 immigration judges were fired or resigned across fiscal years 2025 and 2026, about 38% of the 735 judges on staff at the end of fiscal year 2024. In their place, 743 judges decided asylum cases during fiscal year 2026, including 192 newly hired and 53 temporary judges, and only 322 of them had served before President Trump took office. Case completions topped 14,000 in both March and June 2026, the organization's data shows.
What The Regional Crime Data Actually Shows
Underlying homicide statistics tell a mixed story that is more complicated than a simple comparison to U.S. cities. The average homicide rate across Central America and Mexico fell 58%, from 38.2 per 100,000 people in 2015 to 16.3 in 2024, according to InSight Crime. El Salvador's decline was the most dramatic, with its rate plunging 98%, from 107 to 1.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, over the same period, while Honduras and Guatemala saw reductions of 58% and 48%, respectively.
Mexico moved in the opposite direction. Its homicide rate rose 13.5% from 2015 to 2024, a trend the outlet links to disputes over control of drug and migrant-smuggling routes. That increase complicates any blanket claim that conditions across all four countries have simply become safer, even as the internal assessments reviewed by CNN group Mexico alongside El Salvador in describing crime rates as an order of magnitude below major U.S. cities in many areas.
