Latin America Correspondent
Washington Post
Reporter, Washington Post
Kevin Sieff & Nick Miroff report for WashPost:
They arrive 24 hours a day in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, groups of men, women and children deported by the United States. Each time, at the edge of the international bridge, Ricardo Calderón Macias and his team get ready.
They put on masks and gloves. They prepare their thermometers and health forms. They wonder, sometimes aloud: Will anyone in this group test positive?
“We’re worried that eventually, with these deportations, we’re all going to get infected,” said Calderón, the regional director of the Tamaulipas state immigration institute.
Since the coronavirus struck the United States, immigration authorities have deported dozens of infected migrants, leaving governments and nonprofits across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean struggling to respond.
[[Public health experts: Coronavirus could overwhelm the developing world]]
When some countries resisted continued deportations, U.S. officials said they would screen migrants slated for removal. But they did not commit to administering coronavirus tests. In many instances, the screenings, which consist primarily of taking a person’s temperature, have failed to detect cases. Even though overall deportations declined this month, the United States has returned thousands of people across the Western Hemisphere in April.
President Trump said late Monday he would “suspend immigration” to the United States. Even before that announcement, officials in the region were concerned about the deportations. Guatemala’s health minister spoke this month of the worrying number of infected deportees sent from the United States — the “Wuhan of the Americas,” he said.
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Mexicans just deported from the United States walk toward a repatriation building in Matamoros. (Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)
Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, across the Rio Grande from the southern tip of Texas, is receiving roughly 100 deportees per day, officials there say. In some cases, repatriation workers have noticed that deportees are visibly sick as they arrive. Those deportations are blamed for at least one new outbreak in a Mexican migrant shelter.
On Monday, the Mexican government asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to test deportees for the virus, but DHS has not committed to doing so, according to a Mexican official with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe diplomatic talks.
In Guatemala, at least 50 deportees have tested positive, about 17 percent of the country’s total confirmed cases. Three-quarters of passengers on a deportation flight to Guatemala City last month were infected, according to the country’s Health Ministry. Guatemalan officials said last week they would suspend returns from the United States.
[[Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexico’s hospitals raise alarm, protests]]
In Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, three people sent back from the United States in early April have tested positive, officials said. The country has 62 ventilators for 11 million people. The Trump administration reportedly was planning another deportation flight to Haiti this week.
“Rather than be deported where they face serious harm if they fall ill and risk infecting thousands of others, they should be released from detention into the care of their friends and families so that they may safely quarantine,” a coalition of 164 human rights and religious organizations said in an open letter pleading for suspension of deportations.
Health workers carry supplies delivered by family members to a temporary shelter for Guatemalan citizens deported from the United States in Guatemala City. (Moises Castillo/AP)
In Mexico over the past week, two deportees tested positive for the virus. Calderón’s team spotted a deportee in Reynosa who was visibly ill, with a dry cough, red eyes and a fever. They wondered how the man, who arrived from Atlanta, had made it through U.S. health screenings.
A second man was deported to Nuevo Laredo from Houston “without knowing he was a carrier of the virus,” the Tamaulipas state government said in a statement, and was sent to a migrant shelter in the city.
That case apparently prompted an outbreak in the shelter, Casa del Migrante Nazareth; 14 others have since tested positive.
“The risk we face is bringing a massive contagion into our own country,” said Raúl Cardenas, the city manager of Nuevo Laredo. “We’re mortified that these deportations are continuing.”
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Not only are Trump’s immigration diversions racist and inappropriate, they are dangerous and threaten unnecessarily to spread the pandemic. Unwilling and unable to address the real needs of the American people during the pandemic (see, e.g., tests, aid to states, speaking truth, encouraging compliance with “best practices”) Trump diverts our resources on controversial and counterproductive measures while diminishing our national humanity and surrendering our world leadership.
This November, Vote ‘Em Out. End The Deadly ☠️ Trump/GOP Clown Show 🤡!
PWS
04-22-20