Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo said Wednesday his country will accept migrants from other countries who are being deported from the United States, the second deportation deal that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reached during a Central America trip that has been focused mainly on immigration.
Under the agreement announced by Arévalo, the deportees would be returned to their home countries at U.S. expense.
“We have agreed to increase by 40% the number of flights of deportees both of our nationality as well as deportees from other nationalities,” Arévalo said at a news conference with Rubio.
Previously, including under the Biden administration, Guatemala had been accepting on average seven to eight flights of its citizens from the U.S. per week. Under President Donald Trump it’s also been one of the countries that have had migrants returned on U.S. military planes.
El Salvador announced a similar but broader agreement on Monday. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said his country would accept U.S. deportees of any nationality, including American citizens and legal residents who are imprisoned for violent crimes.
Both Trump and Rubio acknowledged the legal uncertainty of sending Americans to another country for imprisonment.
“I’m just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “I don’t know if we do or not, we’re looking at that right now.”
Rubio called it a very generous offer but said there were “obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution.”
Immigration, a Trump administration priority, has been the major focus of Rubio’s first foreign trip as America’s top diplomat, a five-country tour spanning Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
The agreements with El Salvador and Guatemala potentially help the Trump administration address what has always been a key sticking point in immigration enforcement since not everyone in the U.S. illegally can be easily sent back home.
Venezuela, for example, has been a major source of migrants coming to the U.S. in recent years, but rarely can the U.S. deport Venezuelans back to their home country. But the U.S. already has a robust network set up to send people to several Central American countries.
Guatemala will expand its capacity to receive not just Guatemalans, but also migrants from other countries who will then be repatriated to their home countries. The details still need to be worked out.
“However, the permanent answer to immigration is to bring development so that no one has to leave the country,” Arévalo said. To that end, a high-level Guatemalan delegation, including from the private sector, will travel to Washington in the coming weeks.
Arévalo also announced the formation of a new border security force that will patrol Guatemala’s borders with Honduras and El Salvador. The force will be made up of police and soldiers and will combat transnational crime of all kinds, he said.
Rubio’s trip has been dogged by the administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, including a late Tuesday order abruptly pulling almost all agency staffers off the job.
After the news conference with Guatemala’s president, Rubio headed directly to the U.S. Embassy, where staffers and their families who were unsure of their futures gathered to hear from their new boss. (https://www.wdsu.com/article/guatemala-deportation-deal-rubio-central-america/63678550)
