The State Department has privately provided asylum officers with assessments portraying parts of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as safer than several major U.S. cities, despite publicly warning Americans about violent crime in some of those same countries, according to internal documents reviewed by CNN.
The assessments compare crime rates in the four countries with those in Baltimore, Houston and Memphis. In Mexico and El Salvador, the documents claim that many areas have violent-crime rates at least ten times lower than those of major U.S. cities.
