Responding to the GDP Covid-19 survey, the Guatemalan Ombudsman office (Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos or PDH) said that the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry has reported a notable reduction in the number of flights returning migrants to Guatemala. Guatemala has also suspended numerous deportation flights from the United States (see 19 June Guatemala update on this platform) and suspended the implementation of the ACA (Acuerdo de Cooperación y Asilo) agreement with the United States in March until further notice. Under the agreement, the United States transferred non-Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala without allowing them to lodge asylum claims in the United States. In a report by Refugees International and Human Rights Watch (listed as a source below), the organisations showed that ACA did not meet the criteria in United States’ law for a Safe Third Country Agreement that would enable Salvadorans and Hondurans to seek asylum in a safe country other than the United States. The PDH confirmed that currently, only Guatemalan nationals are being returned to Guatemala.
The PDH said that only certain returnees were being tested for Covid-19 upon their arrival and that returnees were placed in quarantine in special reception centres, prior to being allowed to return to their local communities.
However, in their response to the GDP survey, the PDH said that they were unable to provide information on whether persons in immigration detention had been released or give any information concerning measures taken to protect detainees from Covid-19. The information submitted to the GDP mostly focused on returns from the United States and did not provide specific answers as regards immigration detention in the country.
- Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, Global Detention Project Covid-19 survey, June 2020.
- HRW, “US: Abusive Transfers of Asylum Seekers to Guatemala,” 19 May 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/19/us-abusive-transfers-asylum-seekers-guatemala
- HRW and Refugees International, “Deportation with a Layover,” 19 May 2020, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/05/19/deportation-layover/failure-protection-under-us-guatemala-asylum-cooperative
- Two Asylum Seekers, One from El Salvador, One from Honduras, Wait Inside a Migrant House in Guatemala City after Being Sent to Guatemala from the United States on 3 December 2019, Under An “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” Between the Two Countries,” (Oliverde Ros, AP Photo, “US: Abusive Transfers of Asylum Seekers to Guatemala,” HRW, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/19/us-abusive-transfers-asylum-seekers-guatemala)
