By Emily Green, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Many family members of unaccompanied Guatemalan migrant children who are part of a group the Trump administration attempted to deport over the weekend did not want their children returned to Guatemala, according to an internal Guatemalan government report that contradicts assertions made by U.S. officials.
The report, produced by a Guatemalan attorney general’s office and reviewed by Reuters, said Guatemalan authorities had contacted the families of 115 minors who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or guardian. Of those, 59 families expressed anger about the possibility of their children being returned to Guatemala, with some even describing it as intimidation, the document said.
Contents of the report have not been previously reported and offer the most comprehensive insight so far into the resistance of many family members to the children being deported. Some of those concerns were backed up by court filings published on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump’s effort to deport unaccompanied migrant children aged 10-17 over the weekend triggered an immediate legal challenge. In an emergency court hearing on Sunday, a Justice Department attorney said the parents wanted their children to be deported, but a lawyer for the children rejected that assertion.
Guatemala initially agreed with U.S. authorities that it would receive migrants nearing the age of 18 whose parents were generally not in the United States and who would be transferred to adult detention, according to the report.
On July 11, the U.S. provided Guatemala with a list of minors in Health and Human Services custody who were about to turn 18, in accordance with the original plan to facilitate their return to Guatemala before their birthdays. But some time after that, the U.S. sent Guatemala a much broader list of 609 children ages 14-17.
One person with knowledge of Guatemalan authorities’ thinking said the government was taken aback by how quickly the Trump administration had broadened the scope of the plan. The person said that it seemed to go overnight from returning 17-year-olds to deporting children as young as 10.
In response to a Reuters request for comment, a Trump administration official said that the Guatemalan government in August assured the administration that any unaccompanied children sent back would be processed in a safe and orderly manner for possible reunification.
The Guatemalan government did not respond to a request for comment.
IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN
Trump has kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown since taking office, including a campaign to detain and deport unaccompanied children. As part of his deterrent effort, his administration has deported Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and sent non-African migrants to distant African nations.
Stephen Miller, a top White House official overseeing immigration issues, said in a post on X on Sunday that the children were being reunited with their parents. But the internal Guatemalan government report and court filings on Wednesday show many families did not want their children sent back to the country.
Parents of one girl told Guatemalan authorities “that if their daughter returned, they would do everything possible for her to leave the country again, as she is under a death threat,” the report said.
The Guatemalan report said that Guatemalan authorities had only been able to contact 115 families of the 609 children on the list. It said that more than half of them had rejected any efforts to have their children returned, while others agreed to receive their children but did not welcome the situation.
“The families were surprised when contacted, some even annoyed, since several stated that they knew their children were in a process that seeks to protect them and regularize their immigration status in the United States, and therefore do not expect their children to return to Guatemala,” the document said.
About half the families interviewed said their children had migrated for economic reasons, according to the report.
BLINDSIDED BY DEPORTATIONS
A Washington-based federal judge on Sunday blocked the deportations until September 14 after lawyers for the children filed an emergency motion. The case has since been transferred to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, and plaintiffs are seeking a longer-term halt.
In court filings on Wednesday, some of the minors and their parents said they opposed the attempt to deport them and were seeking to remain in the U.S. The children also described a frenzied, middle-of-the-night effort that left them terrified and panicked, according to the declarations.
The minors, whose names were redacted from the court filings, were being held at more than a dozen children’s shelters, mostly in south Texas.
One 17-year old held at a shelter in Los Fresnos said they were woken up around 2 a.m. early on Sunday morning.
“I woke up very scared, and felt like I lost my breath for a second because they had never woken us up in the middle of the night before,” said the teenager.
A 16-year-old at a shelter in San Antonio said that on Saturday night around 11 p.m. they and other children were brought to the lobby of the shelter to be taken to the airport. The teen, who said their sister was murdered last year in Guatemala, called their mother to tell her of the impending deportation.
“My mom started crying,” the 16-year-old said. “She had no idea the government had a plan to return me.”
(Reporting by Emily Green in Mexico City, Ted Hesson in Washington, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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