MEXICO CITY Mexico is voicing opposition to the Trump administration’s controversial plan to send Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States to Guatemala instead.
“It’s a decision that worries us and a decision that we cannot agree with,” the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena, said Tuesday. “This decision was not consulted with us. It is a decision they made with Guatemala.”
According to internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the Trump administration holds that Mexicans are not excluded from an agreement it reached in July for Guatemala to take asylum seekers who are not Guatemalan.
Ashley Caudill-Mirillo, deputy chief of the asylum division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote to the field offices on Saturday, saying the inclusion of Mexicans in the Guatemala agreement was “effective immediately.”
“Mexican nationals are now included in the amenable population for purposes of the Guatemalan ACA,” she wrote, using an acronym for the Guatemala deal, formally known as the Asylum Cooperative Agreement.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on whether Trump administration officials consulted Mexico before issuing the directive regarding its citizens. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, when asked about the issue at his morning news conference on Tuesday, said he had “no information” on the matter.
There also appeared to be confusion over the policy in Guatemala. Alejandra Mena, a spokeswoman with the government’s immigration institute, said that while there have been “conversations on the issue” of Mexican asylum seekers, the “agreement involves the transfer of Hondurans and Salvadorans only.”
The policy in effect blocks Mexicans and any asylum seeker arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border who is not Guatemalan from seeking protection in the United States, sending them more than 1,000 miles south instead.
The United States has yet to expel any Mexican asylum seekers to Guatemala, but the new U.S. policy could soon affect about 900 Mexican asylum seekers, the Mexican Foreign Secretariat said in a statement late Monday signaling its “disagreement.”
Mexican authorities “will work to offer better options to the Mexicans who could be affected,” the statement said, without providing details.
On Tuesday in a tent camp of thousands of asylum seekers in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, Manuela Morales fretted that she and her two sons, all Mexican citizens who’d waited for two months to claim asylum in the United States, may now be sent to Guatemala instead.
“Imagine if they send us there,” said the 37-year-old Morales, who came from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and expressed fear that gangs in Guatemala would target her for being Mexican. “We’ll be killed directly.”
The U.S. began implementing the agreement with Guatemala in November and so far has applied it only to people from Honduras and El Salvador, according to Mena, the Guatemalan official. It has flown 97 asylum seekers to Guatemala City, including 45 on Monday and Tuesday.
Of those, six initially opted to pursue asylum in Guatemala, but five have since abandoned their claims.
Similar agreements with El Salvador and Honduras are part of a broader effort by the U.S. government to essentially end asylum claims at the U.S. southern border. President Donald Trump and his top aides view most asylum seekers arriving at the border as economic migrants intent on abusing immigration laws to gain entry to the United States.
Migrant advocates, academics and officials in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala, meanwhile, have denounced the policy. By law, migrants arriving at the border have a right to claim asylum in the United States.
