Central America’s Displaced Are Facing a New Era of Abandonment

A worsening humanitarian crisis is unfolding across northern Central America, yet it is happening almost entirely out of the world’s view. Funding cuts by major donors have left thousands of displaced and violence-affected people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico without lifelines they relied on for survival. The needs have not diminished. The violence hasn’t eased. The displacement has not slowed. What has evaporated is the support — and the consequences are already devastating.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of the region’s most active humanitarian organizations, is sounding the alarm. Their message is blunt: without urgent action from donors, 2026 will bring deeper suffering, greater instability, and the near-complete collapse of protection systems for some of the hemisphere’s most vulnerable people.

For years, families in northern Central America have lived through a quiet catastrophe. Entire neighbourhoods have been emptied under threat of violence. Children have been uprooted from schools. Women fleeing extortion and sexual violence have crossed borders with no safety net waiting for them. Yet even amid these realities, the plight of the displaced was often invisible in global discourse. Today, that invisibility is being cemented by a wave of unprecedented aid cuts.

Giorgio Lentini, NRC’s country director for North Central America and Mexico, warns that the international community is turning its back just as needs are reaching a breaking point. He describes how families who fled for their lives are now at risk of being erased entirely from global consciousness. The funding cuts have hit so severely that aid groups are closing operations, laying off staff, and pulling out of communities where they were often the only line of support between survival and destitution. Vulnerable people — including women, children, and survivors of violence — are already feeling the effects.

Countries in northern Central America now represent the majority of the lowest-funded humanitarian crises anywhere in the world. Honduras has become the single lowest-funded humanitarian response globally, receiving just over 10 percent of the funding required. Guatemala and El Salvador follow close behind. For several years, the United States carried most of the humanitarian funding burden for the region. Now that support has almost entirely evaporated. Other donors, including Sweden and Switzerland, are reducing or closing their programmes, accelerating the collapse.

The cuts have forced NRC into drastic measures. The organization will end all work in Guatemala by December 2025 and will close completely in El Salvador the following year. In Honduras and Mexico, programs are being dramatically scaled back. A 70 percent reduction in teams and operations means that tens of thousands of people who previously had access to legal support, protection services, and emergency education will now have nowhere to turn. In 2024, NRC supported more than 80,000 people throughout the region. Moving forward, only a fraction of that number can be reached.

The timing could not be worse. Violence continues to uproot families across El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Criminal groups, territorial conflicts, and extortion networks force people from their homes on a daily basis. Floods, storms, and other climate-driven disasters are compounding the displacement, leaving communities with no time to recover before the next shock hits. Many refugees and migrants are trapped in limbo, unable to safely move onward and unable to return home. Instead, they remain stuck in dangerous environments with shrinking access to protection.

The United Nations attempted to adjust to the funding collapse with a so-called “hyper-prioritised plan” launched in June. The result was catastrophic: 2.2 million people who were previously identified as needing support in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were removed entirely from the plan. This means millions are now left without any formal humanitarian coverage at all. And by 2026, not a single country in Central America will have a dedicated humanitarian response plan.

Mexico paints an equally grim picture. Displacement due to violence is surging. More than 248,000 households were forced from their homes in 2024 alone, and large-scale violence events have nearly doubled over the past year. The internal displacement crisis has spread to more states than at any time in nearly a decade. Mexico has also become one of the world’s busiest destinations for asylum seekers, receiving hundreds of thousands of claims annually from more than 110 nationalities. Yet even as claims grow, humanitarian resources shrink.

Despite these complexities, the people affected remain resilient. They continue seeking safety, dignity, and stability. But resilience alone cannot compensate for the hollowing-out of the humanitarian system. Without funding, legal assistance disappears. Safe shelters close. Protection networks collapse. Children lose access to school. Families fleeing violence fall through the cracks of international attention, left exposed to danger and exploitation.

NRC is urging donors — including development agencies and the private sector — to confront the reality that northern Central America is on the verge of a humanitarian freefall. The message is clear: millions of people are at risk of being abandoned overnight. Once structures collapse, rebuilding them is far more difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

This is not simply a story about funding formulas or organizational withdrawals. It is a human story about families who fled under threat of death, children who crossed borders alone, and parents forced to choose between staying in danger or starting again with nothing. Their need for protection has not diminished. Their trauma has not faded. And their future now hangs in the balance.

The world has overlooked this crisis for too long. Looking away now would not only deepen suffering — it would allow one of the Western Hemisphere’s most urgent humanitarian emergencies to vanish silently into neglect. Reversing this trajectory requires donors to step forward with renewed commitment, recognizing that lives depend on decisions made in the coming months.

For northern Central America’s displaced, abandonment is not an abstraction. It is happening now. And unless the international community acts, the consequences will define the region for years to come.