Migrants describe flights aboard US military planes carrying out Trump's swift deportations
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Margarita Raymundo walked down the ramp of the U.S. Air Force cargo jet and onto the tarmac of Guatemala City’s airport, barely three days after a U.S. Border Patrol agent had apprehended her, along with three other migrants.
The swift deportation Monday was disorienting for her and the 63 other migrants aboard and only possible because the Trump administration has enlisted the military to quickly scale up its deportation capacity, which usually relies on chartered flights.
In the first week of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, the Department of Homeland Security reported deporting some 7,300 people of various nationalities.
The agent who apprehended Raymundo just a five-minute walk from the highway where a vehicle awaited to take her further into the U.S. told her that her deportation would be quick and warned that if she were to be caught again she’d spend five years in prison, she said.
The presence of U.S. military planes landing in Latin America raises concerns in a region with a history of U.S. military intervention, more so when they’re carrying citizens of those countries in shackles.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to let two U.S. military planes carrying deportees land in his country over the weekend. Instead, two Colombian air force planes were sent to the U.S. to pick up the Colombians and bring them home Tuesday, but only after a Trump tariff threat and a furious bout of diplomacy.
Earlier this week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum made a point of saying that four flights that had landed at a Mexico City airport in the past few days carrying deportees were all civilian.
Guatemala has not publicly objected, and at least three U.S. military flights carrying deportees have landed there in the past week.
“We cannot refuse them and it is our obligation (to receive the migrants),” said Danilo Rivera, the director of Guatemala’s Immigration Institute.
Jorge Santos of the Human Rights Convergence, a Guatemalan coalition, said the deportations should be handled exclusively by civilians, without the use of military planes. He also criticized the practice of shackling deportees, although that occurs on civilian charter flights run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The use of shackles must not be a condition of this situation, nor chaining their feet and hands and much less that a military authority have a role in the framework of an action that must be completely civilian,” Santos said.
Lesly Ramírez, who was on the same flight as Raymundo, said that her handcuffs were tight and hurt her hands. While the migrants were provided food on the plane, she said it was difficult to eat with their cuffed hands chained to their waists. Authorities on the plane removed them only shortly before landing, she said.
Ramírez, 35, a single mother of two, had climbed the border fence and had been walking in the U.S. for two hours before the Border Patrol picked her up on Friday.
“We’re all human beings," she said. "We were going to work, we’re not criminals.”
Raymundo echoed that sentiment.
The 21-year-old was devastated by the failed attempt to enter the U.S., largely because of what it would mean for her and her parents, Indigenous Maya Chalchiteca, who had pulled together $25,000 in loans to pay her smuggler. She said she now has no hope of ever repaying the debt in Guatemala.
With a restaurant job already secured in the U.S., Raymundo remained determined. “I only have another opportunity to go, I’m going to try,” she said through tears, in reference to smugglers’ common practice of offering multiple tries.
She said she tried to get to the U.S. because her family is poor and she wanted to help her parents.
“I left Guatemala to give them a better life,” she said.
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