In Honduras, in early 2020, the fieldwork mainly focused on the small city of Choluteca and Guasaule, its nearby border crossing with Nicaragua. It took place in a context of political tensions, as well as widespread preoccupation with the new ‘third safe country’ agreement with the US; Honduran deportees and returnees; and migrant caravans. Interviews and observations revealed that contrary to the reception situation in Costa Rica and Panama, migrants who pass through Choluteca on their way north are mainly informally hosted in private homes in the residential neighborhood around the town’s Migration Office. Visiting these homes made clear that hosting migrants is both a means to earn much-needed additional income, and an opportunity to attend to migrants in moral terms. In the process of incorporating migrants in their livelihoods, hosts differentiate migrants as well as their fellow hosts according to racialized and religious convictions. Visits with state actors, humanitarian workers and migrants themselves further revealed the Honduran state’s own ad-hoc approach to receiving and revising migrants, often permitting them to travel to the northern border with Guatemala where they face re-illegalization.
