By Caitlin Dickerson and Kirk Semple
In the scramble to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the
United States, the Trump administration has been pushing forward with its aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, deporting thousands of people to their home countries, including some who are sick with the
coronavirus.
Dozens of Guatemalans flown home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since late March tested positive for the coronavirus after returning, according to Guatemalan authorities. And deportations of children and teenagers who arrived at the border without adult guardians have risen sharply following stepped-up restrictions at the border adopted during the pandemic.
President
Donald Trump used the surgeon general’s authority last month to effectively seal the southwestern border, saying the move was necessary to prevent migrants from carrying the coronavirus into the United States. But few, if any, people with the disease have crossed the border from Mexico, and Guatemalan authorities have now accused the United States, which has the most coronavirus cases in the world, of sending infected people back across its borders.
U.S. authorities said this past week that they were suspending removals to
Guatemala pending an investigation of that country’s claims about the coronavirus.
This past week, Guatemala’s health minister, Hugo Monroy, said U.S.
deportation flights were aggravating the outbreak in Guatemala by returning people already infected with the virus. Various Guatemalan officials have put the number at between 30 and 43, most of them apparently aboard two flights that arrived March 26 from Mesa, Arizona, and Monday from Brownsville, Texas.
In a televised speech late Friday, President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala weighed in, saying that technicians from the CDC had randomly tested 12 deportees who had arrived on the Monday flight and that all the tests had resulted positive Friday.
He said that a suspension of deportation flights that began Thursday would continue until the United States was able to assure Guatemalan officials that deportees were being returned “free of the coronavirus.”
Guatemalan officials reported a total of 235 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country and seven deaths as of late Friday. The official tally includes the 12 deportees who were found to test positive by the CDC on Friday and at least five people who were returned from the United States on deportation flights in recent weeks, officials said.