Juan Parra, a former president of Central American human rights commission and activist;

“The first priority,” he says in a telephone interview, “will be to ensure the safety. Secondly, in a lot of countries, especially the ones in Central America where they are less well armed and less vulnerable than in the Caribbean, and especially in Haiti which has a lot to lose, their human traffickers will immediately turn their attention there, from where they are getting their people to the American side.”

And if the United States stops, well, that’s less of a concern, because of that military relationship. For instance, he says, there were 11,000 child migrants who came to the US from Mexico, the highest in at least a decade. “To cut that off — that would be a problem.” We’re talking about a $1.7 billion trade in children.

The more immediate concern, he says, is to stop child migrants from boarding boats on the way to US shores. Of the 6,500 children rescued from the Sea of Cortez and sent to the US so far this year, 1,600 have been picked up on boats already in the Gulf. “The rest are either picked up on smugglers’ boats and they are taken to Colombia or Jamaica, where they are handed over to Mexico.”