How Guatemala Plans to Resettle Planeloads of Deportees from U.S.

Carlos Navarro was eating takeout outside a restaurant in Virginia recently when immigration officers apprehended him and said there was an order for his removal from the country.

He had never had an encounter with the law, said Mr. Navarro, 32, adding that he worked at poultry plants.

“Absolutely nothing.”

By last week, he was back in Guatemala for the first time in 11 years, calling his wife in the United States from a reception center for deportees in the capital, Guatemala City.

Mr. Navarro’s experience may be a preview of the kind of swift deportations coming under President Donald J. Trump to communities around the United States, which is home to as many as 14 million unauthorized immigrants.

The administration, which has promised the largest deportations in American history, was said to be starting them as soon as Tuesday. In his inaugural speech on Monday, Mr. Trump promised to “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

Mr. Navarro’s situation provides a glimpse into what mass deportations could mean in Latin American countries at the other end of the deportation pipeline.

Officials there are preparing to receive significant numbers of their citizens, though many governments have said that they had not been able to meet with the incoming administration about its deportation push.

Guatemala, a small, impoverished nation scarred by a brutal civil war, has a substantial undocumented population in the United States. About 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans lived in the country in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.

That makes it one of the largest countries of origin for unauthorized immigrants in the United States, after Mexico, India and El Salvador, and a laboratory for how mass deportations also stand to change life outside the United States.

Last year, Guatemala received around seven deportation flights a week from the United States, according to migration officials, which translates to about 1,000 people. The government has told U.S. officials that it can accommodate a maximum of 20 such flights a week, or around 2,500 people, the officials said.

At the same time, Guatemala’s government has been developing a plan — which President Bernardo Arévalo has referred to as “Return Home” — to assure Guatemalans facing deportation that they can expect help from consulates in the United States — and, in the case of detention and removal — a “dignified reception.”

“We know they’re worried,” said Carlos Ramiro Martínez, the foreign minister. “They’re living with immense fear, and as the government, we can’t just say, ‘Look, we’re also scared for you.’ We have to do something.”

Guatemala’s plan, which it shared at a meeting of foreign ministers from the region in Mexico City last week, goes beyond the immediate concerns that many governments in the region share — such as how to house or feed deportees on their first night.

It also addresses how to reintegrate deported Guatemalans back into society.

The plan, which focuses on linking deportees to jobs and making use of their language and work skills, also aims to offer mental health support for people coping with the trauma of deportation.

In practical terms, it means that when deportees step off the plane, government employees will extensively interview them, to get a detailed picture of those returning to the country, the help they need and the kind of work they could do.

Experts say Guatemala’s plan appears to reflect an unspoken expectation on the part of the Trump administration that Latin American governments not only receive their deported citizens — but also work to keep them from returning to the United States.

Historically, many people sent back to their homelands have turned around and tried to go back, “even under extreme circumstances,” said Felipe González Morales, who served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, roughly 40 percent of deportations in 2020 involved people who had been deported before and re-entered the country.

The dynamic has for years been “basically a revolving door,” Mr. Martínez, Guatemala’s foreign minister, said in an interview.

Mr. Trump aims to change that.

“When the entire world watches President Trump and his administration mass deporting illegal criminals from American communities back to their home countries,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition, said in an email, “it will send a very strong message not to come to America unless you plan to do it the right away or else you will be sent home.”

Already, the number of illegal crossings at the U.S. border is down drastically, with around 46,000 people attempting to cross in November, according to the U.S. government, the lowest monthly figure during the Biden administration.

The Trump administration is expected to pressure governments in Latin America to keep supporting its crackdown on migration.

But Guatemala’s plan to reintegrate the deported is not just a way of showing Mr. Trump that Guatemala is cooperating, according to Anita Isaacs, an expert on Guatemala who created the blueprint for the plan.

Ms. Isaacs said of deportees, “if you can find a way of integrating them and of harnessing their skills, then the opportunities for Guatemala are enormous.”

Until now, she said, deportees getting off a plane in Guatemala City mostly got some basics, like new identification documents, sanitary supplies and a ride to a shelter or the main bus terminal.

Instead, she proposed, Guatemala could embrace its newly returned citizens as an economic asset, including for its tourism sector.

As an example, she pointed to the case of hundreds of Guatemalans deported after a 2008 I.C.E. raid on a meatpacking plant in Iowa who had gone on to become volcano guides.

Still, there are steep challenges to encouraging deportees to stay in their homeland.

The forces that made them leave in the first place still exist, said Alfredo Danilo Rivera, Guatemala’s migration director: grinding poverty and a lack of jobs, extreme weather made worse by climate change, the threat of gangs and organized crime.

Then there is the draw of the United States, where there are not only more jobs, but workers get paid in dollars.

“If we’re going to talk about the reasons people migrate, the causes, we also have to talk about the fact that they settle there and many manage to succeed,” Mr. Rivera said.

Deportees also feel greater pressure to get to the United States than do people migrating for the first time, said the Rev. Francisco Pellizzari, the director of Casa del Migrante, the main shelter for deportees in Guatemala City.

They frequently owe thousands of dollars to smugglers and in rural Guatemala, poor people often hand over deeds to their houses or land as collateral for loans to pay smugglers, which leaves them essentially homeless if they are deported.

“They can’t come back anymore,” Father Pellizzari said.

The tougher measures imposed by the Biden administration at the border have also led smugglers, aware of the heightened risk of deportation, to offer migrants as many as three chances to enter the United States for the price of one attempt, according to Father Pellizzari and others.

José Manuel Jochola, 18, who was deported to Guatemala last week after being apprehended for illegally crossing the border into Texas, said he had three months to use his remaining chances. “I’m going to try again,” he said, though he would wait to see what Mr. Trump did.

The desire to go back to the United States after being deported is particularly strong among those whose families are there.

Mr. Navarro, the man recently deported from Virginia, said he was undeterred by Mr. Trump’s crackdown. “I have to go back, for my son, for my wife,” he said.

A woman who was on Mr. Navarro’s deportation flight, Neida Vásquez Esquivel, 20, said it was her fourth time being deported while trying to reach her parents in New Jersey. Another attempt was not out of the question, she said.

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But some deportees say the greatest appeal of staying in Guatemala is that, for now, the alternative no longer looks as good.

After José Moreno, 26, was deported last week after a drunken-driving accident, he decided not to try to go back to Boston, where he spent a decade, because of the perils of crossing the border and the new president’s attitude toward immigrants.

Instead, he said, he would use his English to offer guided tours in Petén, an area in Guatemala with a picturesque lake and Mayan ruins, where his family has a small hotel.

“My parents are here, I have everything here,” he said. “Why would I go back?”

Jody García contributed reporting from Guatemala City, and Miriam Jordan from Los Angeles.