US Deportation Of Guatemalans Leaps 26 Percent In New Year, Say Authorities

EFE reported on Tuesday that the United States deported 4,077 Guatemalan citizens in the first month of 2014, an increase of 26 percent compared to the first month of 2013, when US authorities removed some 3,225 Guatemalans from the country. The site notes that over the course of 2013, the US deported 50,221 Guatemalans, a big step up from 40,647 the previous year, according to the Guatemalan General Directorate for Migration (DGM). The DGM estimates that 1.8 million Guatemalans live in the US, 60 percent of which are undocumented.

Guatemalans and other Central Americans have in recent years made up a growing percentage of those who enter the United States without authorization, with many new migrants fleeing spiking drug-related crime back home. The northward journey many of them make through Mexico is an especially perilous one, with high percentages of them reporting extortion, rape and other crimes at the hands of drug gangs and corrupt police. La Casa del Migrante de Saltillo, a migrant shelter based in the northeastern Mexican state of Coahila, released a new report last week saying that 47 percent of the reported extortions of migrants in Mexico came at the hands of federal police – more than every drug cartel combined.

EFE also wrote last week that Aníbal Fuentes Aguilar, a Guatemalan day laborer who with the help of immigrant-advocate groups has been fighting deportation proceedings in Chicago, has won the temporary right to remain in the United States while immigration authorities review his petition to have his case dismissed under prosecutorial discretion. Aguilar, a 27-year-old father of a six-month-old US citizen baby, has lived in the United States for 10 years, he has no family support in Guatemala and fears a return to the Central American country, where he says his father was kidnapped on three different occasions.