GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Forty-four Guatemalans deported on one flight from the United States this week have tested positive for COVID-19, a Guatemala government official with knowledge of the situation said Thursday.
The flight arrived in Guatemala’s capital Monday from Brownsville, Texas carrying 76 Guatemalans. Three deportees displaying coronavirus symptoms — cough and fever — were immediately taken for testing. When one of those tests came back positive more who had been quarantined at the airport were tested and 43 more resulted positive, said the official who had not been authorized to share the information publicly and requested anonymity.
Presidential spokesman Carlos Sandoval said the official total number of infected deportees remained at five.
“We’re going to check with the Health Ministry,” he said. “For the moment I can only confirm the cases the (president) has said. I wouldn’t know what to say, I can’t even say no, but I also can’t confirm it.” He said he would have an official statement later.
It was the latest sign that the president’s office and health authorities might not be on the same page.
On Tuesday, the Guatemalan government’s accounting of deportees with COVID-19 was drawn into question when Health Minister Hugo Monroy said that on a March deportation flight from the U.S., more than 50% of the deportees had later tested positive. The president’s office later confirmed that Monroy was talking about a March 26 flight from Mesa, Arizona that carried 41 passengers, but has still not adjusted the official number of infected deportees.
The plane on which 44 have tested positive was one of two flights that arrived Monday after Guatemala lifted a one-week pause on deportation flights from the U.S. That suspension had been imposed because three other deportees had earlier tested positive.
Monroy had said that the deportees were a worrisome factor driving up the country’s COVID-19 caseload. The government said Wednesday that this week it had started testing all deportees, regardless of whether they showed symptoms, when anyone on a flight tested positive.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no immediate comment to the report but has said in recent days that it screens everyone in its custody and quarantines anyone showing symptoms of COVID-19. The agency said that 100 detainees in its custody have tested positive for the virus, including 17 at a detention facility in San Diego and 12 at one in Batavia, New York.
ICE says that 25 employees at detention centers have tested positive for the virus, including 13 at a removal staging facility at the airport in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Deportees and their potential to carry the virus into Guatemala have become a sensitive topic. The U.S. government has continued deportations through the pandemic. But some Guatemalan communities are beginning to reject deportees returning home out of fear that they could carry the virus.
On Wednesday evening, President Alejandro Giammattei referenced an incident that same day in which townspeople fearing the virus had allegedly organized to burn deportees.
Videos circulated on social media showed hundreds of angry residents gathered in a community in Quetzaltenango west of the capital. They accused deportees who were staying in quarantine in a government facility of leaving. Those deportees had arrived by bus from Mexico.
Giammattei said that five community councils had organized “to try to go burn the center, because they want to burn the people.” In a televised address, he said that those 80 deportees had arrived earlier in the week and all had been tested. So far, none had come back positive. “It’s already guaranteed they don’t pose a risk to anyone,” he said.
Flor Gómez, from the human rights prosecutor’s office in Quetzaltenango, said emotions had run high in the community.
“I wouldn’t say they were going to lynch them,” she said. “Yes, they were upset, the intention was to catch them and hand them over to police.” She said there was a lot of stigmatization of deportees caused by fears of the virus.
Tekandi Paniagua, Guatemala’s consul in Del Rio, Texas, said Guatemalans who are stopped by Border Patrol agents are returned to Mexico within a half-hour without any medical exam and often without having their photos or fingerprints taken under rules that took effect March 21 to combat the virus’ spread.
“They aren’t registered or anything,” Paniagua said.
Unaccompanied children are held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and flown back to Guatemala within two or three days, Paniagua said. The flights from Brownsville to Guatemala are designed for Guatemalans who have just crossed the border in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Byron Milian, a 25-year-old, deportee who just returned to Guatemala earlier this month, said he tried to quietly come home without neighbors noticing because he was worried about their reaction amid the pandemic.
Under orders from the health ministry he has self-quarantined for two weeks. He said health officials check on him every other day to make sure he’s staying inside.
Milian had left Guatemala Feb. 20 and crossed illegally into Arizona in early March. U.S. Border Patrol intercepted him en route to Phoenix.
He and a few other migrants were taken to a U.S. government building and held for about 10 minutes, during which time they took his temperature. Then they were loaded back into a truck, driven to the border and handed over to Mexican authorities.
The Mexican authorities asked him if he wanted “to fight for papers or have them send us back to our country,” he said.
Within a week Mexico had delivered him back to Guatemala. In Guatemala, authorities took his temperature, listened to his lungs and stuck a tongue depressor in his mouth.
“On Sunday my quarantine ends,” he said. “Thank God everything is normal. They told me they will give me a document (to certify he completed quarantine).”
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AP writers Ben Fox in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.