The countries of Guatemala and Honduras signed agreements with the United States to possibly offer refuge to those who would otherwise seek asylum in the U.S., Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday at the end of her Central America trip.

The agreements will allow additional flexibility for the Trump administration’s efforts to return migrants to third-party countries.

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The secretary said the agreements would give asylum-seekers other options and that she had been working on them for months with the countries.

“Honduras and now Guatemala, after today, will be countries that will take those individuals and give them refugee status as well,” Noem said. “We’ve never believed that the United States should be the only option, that the guarantee for a refugee is that they go somewhere to be safe and to be protected from whatever threat they face in their country. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the United States.”

The Guatemalan and Honduran governments denied signing safe third-country agreements. Guatemala said it would receive Central Americans sent by the U.S. as a temporary stop on the return trip to their respective countries. Honduras’s immigration director, Wilson Paz, denied that an agreement was signed.

Noem said Thursday, “Politically, this is a difficult agreement for their governments to do.” She said she was given the already-signed agreement during her Guatemala meeting and that she also signed a memorandum of understanding that establishes a Joint Security Program to put U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in the international airport of Guatemala’s capital to help train local airport security agents to look for terrorists.

The U.S. has a similar standing agreement with Canada that allows it to declare some asylum-seekers ineligible to apply for U.S. protection and permits it to send them to countries deemed “safe.” President Donald Trump signed safe third-country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala during his first term.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed deals with El Salvador and Guatemala in February to allow migrants from other nations to be sent there. The U.S. also has similar agreements with Panama and Costa Rica.

Mexico has refused to sign a safe third-country agreement, though it has accepted more than 5,000 migrants from other countries deported by the Trump administration since the start of his second term.