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Guatemala has received its first deportation flight from the United States carrying both Guatemalan citizens and immigrants from another country.
The plane arrived on Friday, bringing three people from Honduras and 56 Guatemalans, according to Guatemala’s migration agency (IGM).
The Hondurans were taken to a migration centre before being sent home. The flight is part of President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policy, which aims to speed up deportations and make other countries accept more returnees.
Guatemala’s government said it is willing to keep receiving its own citizens and also people from nearby Central American nations. President Bernardo Arevalo has promised to strengthen ties with Washington and agreed earlier this year to take more deportation flights after a visit by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Guatemalan nationals have already been deported by the US since January, but this is the first time non-Guatemalans were included.
Last month, a US judge stopped the Trump administration from deporting unaccompanied Guatemalan children who still have active immigration cases. These children remain in custody while their asylum requests are reviewed. Arevalo criticised the court ruling and said he would keep working to bring the children home through a pilot programme with Trump’s team.
White House adviser Stephen Miller condemned the judge’s decision, saying it interfered with the administration’s wider deportation campaign.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Guatemala received about 14 deportation flights a day. Reuters reported that around 66,000 Guatemalans were deported from the US in fiscal year 2024 — the highest number in recent years.
Trump has made cutting immigration a top goal in his second term. His government has also asked Central American and Caribbean nations to take in deported migrants. In December, he proposed that the Bahamas, Grenada, and the Turks and Caicos Islands accept third-country migrants, but those governments refused.
In June, the US Supreme Court allowed Trump to resume deporting people to countries other than their homeland, even if they say they could face danger there.
Source: Al Jazeera, Reuters.
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