The hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid that Washington annually provides to several Central American countries as part of an effort to reduce the numbers of desperate migrants who flock to the U.S. southern border could be in jeopardy if a Democratic appropriator with years of experience on the issue has anything to say about it.
Rep. Norma J. Torres, D-Calif., a first-generation immigrant from Guatemala and one of the biggest proponents on Capitol Hill of targeted development assistance to the region, said at a recent House Appropriations State-Foreign Operations Subcommittee hearing that she wanted to cut off all foreign aid to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
“My budget priorities this year is to defund all three countries completely of all programs,” Torres told Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, at an April hearing about the agency’s fiscal 2024 budget request. “I don’t know how we can look at a U.S. taxpayer in the face and say … ‘what we are doing is preventing people from coming north.’”
