A flight carrying 131 Guatemalans arrived on Wednesday (January 6) in Guatemala City with the first group of migrants from the Central American country to be deported from the United States this year.
This was the first of six flights planned for the upcoming days, carrying Guatemalans who were taken into custody by U.S. authorities over the past two weeks.
The deportations are part of a U.S. plan to tackle a surge in arrivals of unaccompanied children and families from the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
According to the official data from the Guatemalan government, a total of 31,443 nationals were deported from the U.S. in 2015. The number of deportations increased during the last four months.
On Monday (January 4), U.S. officials announced 121 people had been taken into custody during a weekend raid which targeted families who entered the country illegally after May 2014.
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Raul Morales held a news conference on Wednesday and said the government had instructed its U.S. consulates to provide citizens affected by the measures all the necessary consular protection and advice.
“The information we received from our friends of the United States embassy, was that approximately 275 to 300 Guatemalans had final deportation order against them. These were Guatemalans who entered between 2014 and 2015 in the United States. Through this operation, they only managed to secure 26 Guatemalans. Our consulate in Del Rio, Texas, acted promptly, interviewing each of these families and reviewed their documents and realized that some people still had pending proceedings,” he said.
A statement released by the Guatemalan foreign ministry on December 30 said the government was “deeply worried” by the U.S. mass deportation plan.
Marvin Solis, one of the deported migrants, said he felt the U.S. was taking away the rights of some hard-working people.
“Like the saying goes, one does harm and another bears the blame. Some people truly deserve an opportunity over there and they are carrying out raids and with that they end up breaking people’s rights,” he said.
Still scarred by a 36-year civil war which ended in 1996, Guatemala is ill-equipped to deal with the thousands of people returning, jobless, to a shaky economy.
Congressman Marco Fernando Yax called on U.S. officials to grant the right to a “Temporary Protected Status” for Guatemalans as well.
“The common denominator here is: an American dream is cut short. I ask the responsible (U.S.) authorities, the state of Guatemala, to make an investment in our immigrants. How is it possible that El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have a TPS (Temporary Protected Status, which allows immigrants to extend their stay in the United States) and Guatemala doesn’t,” he said.
With a scarcity of decent-paying formal jobs, deportees are also easy recruits for the gangs and drug traffickers that make Guatemala one of the most violent countries in Latin America. (Reuters)
