In a Jan. 4 email, field office staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were told Mexican nationals will be included in the populations "amenable" to the agreement with Guatemala.
The agreement, brokered last July between the administration of Republican President Donald Trump
...Oh, noze! Not him!...and the outgoing Guatemalan government, allows U.S. immigration officials to force
Trump has made clamping down on unlawful migration a top priority of his presidency and a major theme of his 2020 re-election campaign. His administration penned similar deals with Honduras and El Salvador last year.
Democrats and pro-migrant groups have opposed the move and contend asylum seekers will face danger in Guatemala, where the murder rate is five times that of the United States, according to 2017 data compiled by the World Bank. The country's asylum office is tiny and thinly staffed and critics have argued it does not have the capacity to properly vet a significant increase in cases.
Guatemalan President-elect Alejandro Giammattei, who takes office this month, has said he will review the agreement.
Acting Deputy U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said in a tweet in September that Mexicans were being considered for inclusion under the agreement.
USCIS referred to Cuccinelli's tweet, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Mexico's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Unaccompanied minors cannot be sent to Guatemala under the agreement, which currently applies only to
Numbers of Central American
Overall, border arrests are expected to drop again in December for the seventh straight month, a Homeland Security official told Rooters last week, citing preliminary data.
The U.S. government says another reason for the reduction in border crossings is a separate program, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, that has forced more than 56,000 non-Mexican
With fewer Central Americans at the border, U.S. attention has turned to Mexicans crossing illegally or requesting asylum. Around 150,000 Mexican single adults were apprehended at the border in fiscal 2019, down sharply from previous decades but still enough to bother U.S. immigration hawks.