In an exclusive interview with NBC News on Thursday, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo said his country and the United States “don’t have a timeline” on when Guatemala will begin receiving third-country nationals who are deported by the Trump administration.
Arevalo met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week as Rubio visited five countries across Latin America for his first trip since taking office. In a press conference in Guatemala City on Wednesday, the pair announced that Guatemala had not only offered to ramp up deportation flights from the U.S. by 40% but also agreed to receive third-country nationals as they make their way back to their home countries.
“It’s very important for us in terms of the migratory situation that we’re facing,” Rubio said of the agreement.
Arevalo told NBC News that the U.S. had also agreed to aid Guatemala’s effort to repatriate third-country nationals who land in Guatemala. But the Guatemalan president added that he did not expect “big numbers of people” from other countries and noted that countries like Panama have also agreed to take third-country nationals.
“In our case, there was no discussion of specific amounts of nationalities, because it is not expected to be about that,” Arevalo said. “The repatriation process is expected to be about Guatemalans and other Central Americans, and there might be other nationalities, in which case we’re going to be apply[ing] the rules that we are developing.”
A delegation of Guatemalan officials is slated to visit Washington in the next few weeks to discuss details of the agreement, he said. Arevalo insisted that the new agreement was not the same as the “Safe Third Country” agreement, a measure agreed to by the Trump administration and Guatemalan officials in 2019 that allowed third-country nationals to be deported to Guatemala and to apply for asylum there.
The agreement appears to be a win for the Trump administration, which has promised the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history and has ramped up immigration arrests around the country. In Guatemala, Rubio also announced a carveout from the Trump administration’s vast cuts to foreign aid programs that will allow U.S. aid to continue to help Guatemala combat drug trafficking.
“This is an example of foreign aid that’s in our national interest. That’s why I’ve issued a waiver for these programs,” Rubio told reporters on Wednesday.
Arevalo argued that the current agreement is not transactional.
“Our interest is fundamentally in the reception of all the Guatemalans that are returned to the country,” Arevalo said. “There will undoubtedly be Central Americans that we will also support in their journey to return to their countries, but it’s not a situation where we have charged something in exchange for that.”
Guatemala has received more than 1,400 immigrants from the U.S. since Trump started his second term in office roughly three weeks ago. For many immigrants, the sudden deportation back to Guatemala came as a shock, given that they had not been back to the country in several years.
Andres Sanchez Gomez told NBC News that he had landed in Guatemala on Thursday after he was arrested more than 10 days ago on his way to work in Miami.
“As Hispanics, we don’t deserve this,” he said, adding he’d been in the U.S. for more than eight years. “Because, honestly, we come to move forward with life, we don’t come to do things we shouldn’t be doing there.”
Arevalo said he sees potential challenges with the repatriation of people like Gomez compared to immigrants who had only recently left Guatemala.
“We are aware that we are going to be receiving now families, people that have been living 10, 15 years in the United States,” Arevalo said, “and that their return might not be as, let’s say, smooth.”
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