Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei offered assistance in resolving the ‘powder keg’ of a crisis at US-Mexican border, but President Joe Biden never picked up the phone to contact him, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales has claimed, citing a conversation he’d had with Giammattei.
“I specifically asked the president of Guatemala, ‘Hey what would it take for you to take more of these repatriation flights? These are people that do not qualify for asylum, you send them back to their country of origin?’,” Gonzales told Fox News.
“His answer was: ‘One simply thing, Tony, I just need the president of the United States to call me. He won’t even call me,” Gonzales said.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox when asked to comment on the lawmaker’s allegations.
Giammattei has repeatedly expressed disappointment with the White House over its treatment of Guatemala City in Washington's broader strategy of combating illegal immigration. Late last year, the Guatemalan president complained that he had had no direct contact with Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris since the VP's June 2021 trip to the region in her capacity as ‘border czar’.
“We had many conversations with your ambassador, but [between] my presidency and the White House, no. I spoke once to Joe Biden because I introduced myself. Then we had the visit of Vice President Harris. On matters of state and migration, we had Mr. Alejandro Mayorkas [US Secretary of Homeland Security]. Aside from that direct communication, no we have not had it,” Giammattei said in December.
Giammattei, who became Guatemala’s president in 2019, ruffled feathers in Washington after Harris’s trip to the region after alleging that President Biden and the Democrats’ “lukewarm” rhetoric on illegal immigration in the early days of the administration was partially responsible for the current crisis.
“Well, humanitarian messages were used here by the coyotes [human smugglers] in a distorted manner because what they said over there was that they will promote family reunification,” the Guatemalan president said at the time. “The vice president sent a clear message yesterday of ‘Do not come because we will not let you in’. That’s a clear message – but if you have a lukewarm message, it only creates the opportunity to misinterpret."
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador constitute the so-called ‘northern triangle’ of Central America, known for widespread poverty, gang violence and corruption owing to decades of internal conflict and US meddling. The Biden administration has focused on the region extensively in its strategy dedicated to finding out and dealing with the “root causes” of heavy migration flows from the three countries, and laid out a five-pronged approach in 2021 aimed at easing the situation by pledging to address economic insecurity and inequality, to fight corruption and to counter gang violence and human and drug trafficking networks.
A year on, the situation in the region has shown no signs of improving, and on the contrary has deteriorated thanks to soaring inflation and higher food and energy costs, which have exacerbated existing problems, with no signs of US aid in sight.
US Customs and Border Protection agents have been swamped with overwhelming numbers of people attempting to make their way into the country illegally via the border with Mexico. The agency has reported encountering at least 150,000 would-be migrants on a monthly basis since February 2021, with figures jumping to 200,000+ encounters a month every month since March.
Overall, the agency has reported over 1.7 million encounter in the current fiscal year, which will end September 30.
In June, the Center for Immigration Studies compiled figures from disclosures in litigation by the state of Texas against the federal government over the border crisis, discovering that in addition to the encounters at the border, more than one million illegal aliens have been allowed into the country since Biden took office, equivalent to about 2,100 people for each day of his administration.
Biden jettisoned his predecessor’s hardline approach to immigration immediately after stepping into office in January 2021, scrapping Donald Trump’s signature border wall and promising to replace it with an AI-assisted ‘smart border’, pledging to reform asylum laws, and hinting at the possibility of granting citizenship to the 11 million+ illegals already residing in the country. The administration moved to end Title 42 – a Trump-era order that used Covid as a pretext to deport illegals, this past April. However, a federal judge blocked the scrapping of the policy a month later. The Department of Justice has vowed to appeal the injunction.