Honduras has threatened to expel U.S. troops in retaliation for new President Donald Trump’s plans to mass deport refugees and asylum seekers entering the U.S. from Central America.
Trump’s plan could affect hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras, a country that is home to a major U.S. military base.
Here’s what’s at the heart of the dispute between the world’s largest superpower and its smaller neighbor, why it matters, and what it means for relations between the countries.
What did Honduras say to US troops?
In her New Year’s address, Honduras President Xiomara Castro threatened to reconsider the country’s military cooperation with the United States if President-elect Donald Trump carries out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Castro said that if these deportations occurred, U.S. military facilities in Honduras, particularly the Soto Cano Air Base, “would lose all reason to exist.” But she also used the opportunity to criticize the long-standing US military presence on Honduran soil more generally.
“Given the hostile attitude of the mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to think about changing our cooperation policy with the United States, especially in the military field, where for decades, without paying a cent, they have maintained military bases on our territory, which in this case is any would lose the right to exist in Honduras,” she said in a Spanish statement broadcast on national television.
How important are US military bases in Honduras?
While the U.S. military presence in Honduras is centered at Soto Cano Air Base, it is part of broader operations in Central America that also include smaller bases in El Salvador.
Soto Cano, which became operational in the 1980s to combat perceived communist threats in the region, is home to more than 1,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. Aside from Guantanamo, it is also one of the few places where large aircraft can land between the US and Colombia.
The base serves as a key staging point for the rapid deployment of U.S. forces to the region, including providing disaster relief and assistance management and counternarcotics operations.
Its location provides proximity to drug trafficking corridors in Central and South America and also makes it an important location for surveillance and interdiction.
However, some experts criticized the US justification for its military presence in Soto Cano after Washington supported the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was eventually extradited to the US in 2022 on drug crimes and money laundering charges.
Hernandez was twice president of Honduras and has been serving a 45-year prison sentence in New York since June 2024.
“It is a hypocrisy to say that they are using it (Soto Cano) to fight the drug trade while the US has supported, legitimized and provided millions of dollars to the President of Honduras and his corrupt police and military,” says Dana Frank, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Al Jazeera.
While the United States is not paying Honduras for the base, Soto Cano still brings benefits to the Central American country.
“The U.S. military presence in Honduras is broadly popular, makes an economic contribution, and provides Honduras with particular benefits in terms of infrastructure development, intelligence, and emergency assistance during times of extreme weather conditions that often impact Honduras,” said Eric Olson, Global Fellow at the Wilson Center.
How big is the threat – and why is Honduras doing it?
Experts say the Honduran threat marks a significant moment in Central American geopolitics.
“I think this is a really fascinating and powerful turning point in the role of the United States, which assumes that it will dominate the Western Hemisphere, that it will dominate Central America in particular,” Frank said.
Frank said the U.S. military may be particularly inclined to keep Soto Cano in competition with China, which has no military presence in Central America.
Honduras would also not want to break off relations with the USA, say analysts. The country relies on remittances from its foreign citizens: 27 percent of its gross domestic product came from remittances in 2022. And its largest diaspora is in the United States, where about 5 percent of the Honduran population — more than 500,000 people — lives, according to Pew research center estimates.
Hondurans play a key role in the U.S. economy, particularly in labor-intensive sectors. In the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in March 2024, one of the six construction workers killed was a Honduran citizen, while others were immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.
However, it is precisely this dynamic that makes it difficult for Honduras to remain silent in the face of the threat of mass deportations. The country’s deputy foreign minister, Tony Garcia, said about 250,000 Hondurans could be expelled from the United States in 2025, a number that the Central American country cannot suddenly absorb.
Without remittances from its citizens to the United States, Honduras’ economy could also suffer a severe blow.
How likely is it that Honduras will pull through?
Some analysts see the threat as more of a negotiating tactic than immediate political change and say Honduras lacks the influence to meaningfully influence U.S. policy.
“Ultimately I feel like Honduras is threatening with a very weak hand,” Olson told Al Jazeera.
Frank described the move as a “pre-emptive strike” against Trump and a significant assertion of the sovereignty of Honduras and Central America.
Trump has promised a rapid deportation of undocumented immigrants, but his team has offered no concrete plans, rattling Latin American governments as they try to prepare.
He has also pledged to impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada if they do not stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl into the United States.
How could the US react – and what does that mean for bilateral relations?
Olson told Al Jazeera that the threat could have broader implications for U.S.-Honduras relations, particularly under a Republican-led administration. The Honduran government, he said, was “playing with fire.”
“I cannot imagine President Trump taking kindly to threats against the U.S. military from an administration that Republicans are already keen to lump with Nicaragua and Venezuela,” he said, predicting that bilateral relations “ “could be on the verge of deterioration.” ” regardless of the exit around Soto Cano.
Olson said a possible severance of military ties with Honduras would likely be viewed as disappointing for the U.S. but not critical to its military operations.
Certainly Soto Cano played a key role in the US-backed Contra war against Nicaragua and supported operations in El Salvador in the 1980s.
“It has a long and bad history,” Frank noted, including its use during the 2009 military coup in Honduras, when President Manuel Zelaya’s evacuated plane was refueled there.
However, Olson suspected that Soto Cano Air Base no longer has the strategic importance it had in the 1980s and 1990s.
“The U.S. military has been considering withdrawing from Soto Cano for some time,” Olson said, adding that missions such as counternarcotics and emergency response could be conducted from other locations.
Frank also warned that Republicans, including Marco Rubio, would likely characterize President Castro’s government as allied with anti-American governments such as those of Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“This will likely feed into a broader anti-communist Cold War framework,” she said.
