“There are about 500 migrants coming in weekly in the last number of years,” says Archbishop Michael Lenihan, the 73-year-old Limerick native who has overseen the new diocese of San Pedro Sula since 2023.
In 2024, more than 37,000 Hondurans were deported from the US. Some were deported after spending years or even decades in the US and in some cases, their deportation meant leaving behind American-born children with US citizenship.
Other Hondurans faced deportation soon after arriving in the US, some after paying smugglers thousands of dollars.
At the airport in San Pedro Sula, the deportees are met by volunteers from the Catholic church.
“They come back with nothing,” says Mr Lenihan, speaking to at his office beside San Pedro Sula Cathedral.
“I give them money to make sure they get to their homes, or if they need a place to rest, or I bring them to the bus station. There is always so much work to be done with the migrants.”
In his first 24 hours after returning to office in January, US president Donald Trump unleashed a series of executive orders to restrict both legal and unauthorised migration to the US. With an estimated 525,000 undocumented Hondurans living in the US, the impoverished Central American country is set to be a key target for Trump’s administration and may have to deal with a deluge of vulnerable deportees from the US.
The Honduran government has announced some supports for those being deported but earlier in January the country’s foreign minister, Antonio García, said Honduras doesn’t have the capacity to take so many people — “there’s very little here for deportees.”
Mr Lenihan said: “We have two shelters here in the archdiocese for migrants. Usually they come in through El Paraíso which is the other side of the country [by Nicaragua], and they come right across the country, and then they're close to the border with Guatemala.”
The shelters that Lenihan oversees provide migrants with shelter, food and somewhere to wash for one night and occasionally money if they need it to reach their next destination.
“There are a variety of migrants. Some of them are very, very poor and have nothing. Others who have fled have some money, enough to get by. But everybody needs a place to rest and good food and a place to wash themselves and then move on the next day. The volume of migrants coming in means we can't take care of everybody but we do what we can.”
Originally from Cragg, Mountcollins, Mr Lenihan was ordained a priest at the age of 28 at the Franciscan Friary in Killarney. He later applied for an overseas posting in El Salvador and arrived in 1984, as a devastating conflict raged across the country between a repressive military regime and leftist rebels forces.
Over the course of the 12-year civil war, death squads and indiscriminate bombing left 75,000 dead, the majority civilians.
Mr Lenihan recalled seeing displaced Salvadorans living in terrible conditions “in plastic houses with no running water, no food, no facilities and no toilets".
"Coming from Ireland, where we live a fairly good life and a decent life, there is a sort of culture shock when you see that situation: the poverty of the people, the misery of the people, and the suffering that's caused by the war.”
The work of the Catholic Church in Latin America was often associated by the US with the spread of communism and church members paid a heavy price for their criticism of US-backed military regimes, which dominated many countries in Central and South America during the Cold War period.
In 1980, the outspoken and influential Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero was shot dead as he celebrated mass.
During an official visit to El Salvador in 2013, President Michael D Higgins said: “Óscar Romero became dangerous for the Salvadoran establishment, because he called into question the entire system of oppression, and the process by which — in his words: ‘wealth is made a god, private property is absolutised …, [and] national security is made the highest good by the political powers who institutionalise the insecurity of the individual’”.
In 1989, six Jesuit priests who Mr Lenihan knew, as well as their housekeeper, and her daughter were murdered by a unit from the US-backed military in El Salvador.
Two of the murdered Jesuits had links with Ireland: Ignacio Ellacuría served for a short period in Rathfarnham; while Armando Lopez studied theology in the 1960s in Dublin, where Mr Lenihan says he was ordained by the controversial archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
In 2020, a Spanish court convicted a former Salvadoran colonel and former defence minister, Inocente Montano, for the massacre of the Jesuit priests.
Mr Lenihan says he has no regrets about leaving Ireland for El Salvador. “Looking back now on 40 years, I enjoyed it,” he says. “We went on horseback and we walked up mountains, and we stayed with the people. We slept in hammocks and at times, there were mice running up and down the hammocks.
"The conditions were really poor but the people were very, very generous. They took out the best tablecloth they had, and they put the best food on the table for us.”
The Irish priest was transferred to Honduras in 2000. The impoverished Central American state is a key crossing point for many migrants travelling from South America to the US.
Trafficking people and drug smuggling are lucrative businesses for criminal gangs which have strongholds across Honduras including in San Pedro Sula where parts of the city remain largely controlled by gangs.
“There was a time when people couldn't pass from one side of the parish to the other, because you had two different groups of gangs, so nobody dared to pass over from one area to the other,” Mr Lenihan says. “It’s still quite a conflicted parish, dangerous, but yet the work of the church goes on.”
At a migrant centre in San Pedro Sula run by the Commission of Mennonite Social Action (CASM), a local partner for the Irish NGO Trócaire, Ermin Enrique Lopez Aleman, 28, describes how violence from two rival gangs forced him to leave his home in southern Honduras.
“Barrio 18 and the MS-13 gangs were active where I lived,” he says. “It was terrifying to listen to shootings day and night. There was no peace whenever night fell, whenever night fell, it was chaos…I witnessed with my own eyes people being killed.”
Mr Lopez Aleman says the gangs tried to force him to join them, saying that he would make money with them — “it was terrifying to face all those threats.”
Mr Lenihan oversees the Catholic church’s pastoral outreach to the prisons in Honduras where many gang members from MS-13 and Barrio 18 have been detained.
“At times, the whole thing would flare up and a lot of people were killed,” says Mr Lenihan. “There were massacres within the prisons.”
In general, Mr Lenihan says the gangs in Honduras respect priests and do not specifically target them but there is a risk of being caught in crossfire between two feuding gangs.
After a two-year stint in neighbouring Guatemala, Mr Lenihan returned to Honduras in 2012 where he began serving as a bishop in La Ceiba on the northern coast of Honduras. He was careful about what neighbourhoods he travelled to.
"You always went accompanied with people who knew the area and you would always have the windows rolled down in the car so they would know it was a priest in the car."
While living in La Ceiba, he experienced two major hurricanes: Eta and Iota, just two weeks apart in 2020. “There was a lot of damage,” he says. “People had to leave their houses as the rivers burst their banks and a lot of towns were flooded.”
Many families lost everything during the two storms and joined caravans of migrants bound for the US.
“The poor people are the first to be affected because those who live on the verge of the river and the banks of the river have no other place to go,” he says.
“They build their little huts there, and they live there. And then, when the river overflows, they just have to leave everything behind and rush off and just bring what they can, the children, and whatever clothes they have.
"It's a difficult situation, and then you have to find shelter for those people. It could last a week or two weeks. There was a lot of suffering, certainly in La Ceiba. We divided the food among the poor every week, or every two weeks.
"It was constant because the flooding brought an awful lot of suffering, and people lost their houses. It takes a long time to get life back together again.”
With funding from the EU’s humanitarian aid office, DG ECHO, Trócaire is now working with CASM to deliver an early-warning/early-action system called “Let’s Work Together” to help Honduran communities at high risk of flooding and displacement.
Local emergency committees have been organised through the programme and provided with equipment to monitor water levels and weather events. These committees then feed into a structured preparation and response system that includes the municipality and the national government.
“We want them to feel prepared and empowered when it comes to handling issues like floods, landslides, and emergencies,” says Nelson Martínez, a project manager at CASM who is overseeing the Let’s Work Together project.
“This preparation is crucial for situations where their communities might be completely cut off.”