Donald Trump had promised a mass “deportation operation”, it has already started. A total of 265 migrants deported from the United States landed in Guatemala this Friday, according to local authorities. A first flight carrying 80 Guatemalans (31 women, 48 men and a teenager) has arrived, the Guatemalan Migration Institute initially indicated on Friday. A second flight followed carrying 17 men and 63 women. A third private flight repatriated 11 women, 89 men and five minors.
The Guatemalan government has not confirmed whether the group included some of the 538 “illegal criminal migrants” arrested, or whether the Guatemalan nationals were among the “hundreds” the White House said Thursday evening it had deported. “These are post-Trump inauguration flights,” an official from the vice-presidency of Guatemala soberly told AFP.
According to the White House, four planes carrying deported migrants also left for Mexico. “These measures are in addition to unlimited deportations at the land border, the expulsion of non-Mexicans” and the reestablishment of an American program encouraging migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting a response to their asylum request, a specified White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on X.
Mexico has confirmed neither the arrival of flights nor an agreement to receive a defined number of planes, but has said it is ready to cooperate in welcoming its citizens expelled from the United States. “We will always accept the arrival of Mexicans on our territory with open arms,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
-“Mexico maintains very good relations with the United States government and we cooperate while respecting our sovereignty on a wide range of issues, including migration,” added the Mexican ministry. The president, Claudia Sheinbaum, proposed this week to provide “humanitarian assistance” then to organize the “repatriation” of foreigners targeted by the first measures of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump committed to a vast offensive against illegal migrants during his campaign and he began his second term on Monday with a series of decrees intended to stem their influx into the United States. He thus declared “a state of national emergency” on the southern border with Mexico, and announced the deployment of troops while promising the expulsion of “criminal foreigners”.
Early Friday, the White House posted a photo on X of handcuffed men entering a military plane, with the caption: “Deportation flights have begun.” While traveling, Donald Trump told the press that these flights were intended to deport “the most wicked and hardened criminals”. Under the Biden administration, some 270,000 people have been deported in 2023, an annual figure never reached during Donald Trump's first term (2017-2021).
