According to an investigation by The Washington Post, 15 Salvadoran police officers are in the process of being resettled as refugees by the United Nations, while six others have recently been granted asylum or are awaiting asylum hearings in U.S. immigration courts.
There are no official figures, either in the U.S. or El Salvador, tracking the number of Salvadoran officers applying for asylum, so the total number may well be higher. More officers have reportedly applied for protection and humanitarian visas in other countries, including Spain and Mexico.
The Post also claimed to have seen WhatsApp groups where officers have discussed forming their own migrant caravan, which they called a caravana policial, composed entirely of police to travel to the U.S.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. has spent $48 million training police forces in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an effort to stymie the spread of Central American organized crime, much of it linked to the notorious Mara Salvatrucha—or MS-13. But authorities are still struggling to deal with the influential gangs, which employ brutal violence to establish territorial control and lucrative revenue streams.
The gang originated in the U.S., among the Salvadoran refugee community of Los Angeles, where many fled to escape the country’s brutal civil war in the late 1970s and 1980s.
source