SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — A Central-American bishop has said the recent wave of migrants to the U.S., which has included many unaccompanied minors, has been shaped in large part by “false illusions” created by organized criminals and smugglers.

“It is unfortunate that the illusion and mirage that the U.S. is the best place for all of the children from Honduras [is being promoted], when it is a false and empty promise to say that arriving there they will have free education, health care, food and clothing,” Bishop Romulo Emiliani Sanchez told the Honduran newspaper La Tribuna.

Bishop Emiliani is an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro Sula, located in the north of Honduras near the Guatemalan border.

More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors have migrated illegally to the U.S., surrendering to Border Patrol officers. Many come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatmela in hopes of obtaining a better future and earning their U.S. residency.

“There are organized criminals who are charged with creating false illusions and mirages, saying that our children are going to be better off there than here,” Bishop Emiliani said. “They have tricked thousands of parents.”

Bishop Emiliani added, “It is undignified and sad that in this country [that] we cannot provide our children with the basic needs of education and food; it is a duty of the state and of all of us to care for the children of Honduras.”

Hugo Martínez, El Salvador's chancellor, told Spanish news agency EFE that “putting your children in the hands of delinquents is to put them in imminent danger that could end with the loss of their lives.”

Martínez said organized criminals are giving families the “great lie” by assuring them that once their underage children are on U.S. soil, they will have “resolved their immigration problem.”

The criminals and smugglers stand to gain from an increase in child migrants, charging large fees — between $5,000 and $7,000 — to transport the children to the U.S. border.

Gordon Jonathan Lewis, a representative of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund in El Salvador, explained to EFE that child smugglers tell families that they will benefit from “amnesty reform.”

The underage children are transported by organized criminals, along with other undocumented immigrants attempting to enter the U.S., on the Mexican train known as La Bestia (the Beast), where they are exposed to crime and unsafe environments.  

Jill Marie Gerschutz-Bell, a legislative affairs specialist in Catholic Relief Services’ Washington office, said the situation is a “refugee crisis” due to “violence, insecurity and displacement in Central America and Mexico.”

“The gangs which are terrorizing young people and their families here initially got their start on the streets of Los Angeles,” she said. U.S. deportation of young people to Central America in the 1990s helped the gangs “flourish” due to the lack of jobs and easy access to weapons in the receiving countries.

“Today, Honduras and El Salvador are among the most violent countries in the world, and parents are willing to do whatever it takes to bring their kids to safety,” said Gerschutz-Bell.

San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second largest city, has in recent years been called the murder capital of the world. Drug trafficking and gang violence led, in 2012, to 1,218 homicides in the city: a rate of 169 per 100,000 people.

By comparison, the same year, New Orleans, considered the most violent city in the U.S., had a murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people.

Bishop Emiliani said thousands of Honduran children “are fleeing as though we were living in a war, and it is a similar type of exodus: The people are running away from here. It is something that we hope to be able to halt, so that these children have a future in this country.”