LexBlog (LexBlog Guatemala)

Judge blocks the deportation of Guatemalan children already waiting on the tarmac to be sent back Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons With migrant children waiting on tarmacs to be sent to their native Guatemala, a federal judge Sunday temporarily blocked the flights, siding with attorneys for the children who said the government was breaking laws...

A press release from the Consular Accountability Project: Lawsuit Filed After U.S. Embassy Presumes Innocent Man is a Gang Member and Separates Family Based on Tattoos Washington DC, April 29 Tuesday — The American Immigration Council and Consular Accountability Project filed a lawsuit today on behalf of a U.S. citizen whose husband was in the...

  The Trump administration’s deportation flights are getting attention. Those on military aircraft come at high taxpayer expense — at least one flight, from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala, “likely cost at least $4,675 per migrant,” reports Phil Stewart of Reuters. A publicly available first-class ticket was $853 at time. At least seven military flights...

Last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed an international arbitration award in a case involving a failed hydroelectric project in Guatemala. The project involved an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction agreement (EPC contract) to build a new hydroelectric power plant on the Ocbolay River in Guatemala. The owner terminated the EPC contract for convenience after...

Consumption of poorly prepared food has been identified as a factor in a fatal Guillain-Barré outbreak in Guatemala. Findings come from the results of case control studies announced by the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance (MSPAS) and the Guatemalan Institute of Social Security (IGSS). Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare disorder where the...

In a March 27 announcement (full text), the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said in part: Yoil Weingarten, Yakov Weingarten, and Shmiel Weingarten, leaders of Lev Tahor, an extremist Jewish sect based in Guatemala, have been found guilty of kidnapping a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl and transporting the 14-year-old...

Distribuidora El Paisano Import LLC, a distributor and the importer of record located in Providence, RI, is recalling 1,715 pounds of imported ready-to-eat pork rind products they were illegally imported from Guatemala. Guatemala is ineligible to export meat products to the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced...

DEKA Trading Corp., the importer of record in Miami, FL, is recalling 13,771 pounds of imported ready-to-eat pork rind products.  The products were imported from Guatemala, a country ineligible to export meat products to the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today. The following products are subject...

Public health officials in Guatemala have issued a warning as 40 people fell sick after eating dairy products. The Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance reported the food poisoning of 41 people after eating artisanal cheese in the town of Ciudad Vieja, in the department of Sacatepéquez. The first cases were detected on Aug....

More than 30 people have fallen sick and four have died in Guatemala after eating shellfish. The National Commission for the Surveillance and Control of Red Tide in Guatemala has extended an alert because of the presence of saxitoxins above the limits on the coasts of Tiquisate, Escuintla, Retalhuleu and San Marcos. Public health officials...

Today, Reps. Joaquin Castro (TX-20) and Adriano Espaillat (NY-13) led a bipartisan letter to President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the administration to expand Temporary Protected Status protections for migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Despite the ongoing humanitarian crises in...

Proskauer, with co-counsel Public Counsel and Squire Patton Boggs, has filed a complaint in Arizona Federal Court on behalf of a mother and daughter from Guatemala who were forcibly separated after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump Administration’s family separation policy. The lawsuit comes after negotiations with the Biden Administration over a potential nationwide...

On a trip to Guatemala, a friend introduced me to a unique outdoor classroom, a learning lab of sorts, for those interested in sustainable agriculture.  It’s located on the shores of Lake Atitlan, a beautiful volcanic lake in the central highlands. IMAP https://imapermaculture.org/ is short for the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute and was founded by local...

On a trip to Guatemala, a friend introduced me to a unique outdoor classroom, a learning lab of sorts, for those interested in sustainable agriculture.  It’s located on the shores of Lake Atitlan, a beautiful volcanic lake in the central highlands. IMAP https://imapermaculture.org/ is short for the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute and was founded by local...

JOSHUA SCHNEYER, MICA ROSENBERG and KRISTINA COOKE for Reuters report that “U.S. poultry plants, hungry for labor, rely on migrant workers and staffing agencies to fill jobs. With migration soaring from Central America, some minors are making their way into that pipeline. Reuters found one Guatemalan teen who, with the help of illegal brokers, landed...

For years, there have been a steady stream of migrants from Guatemala, and all of Central America, to the United States.   Civil wars, violence, poverty, and more have contributed to the migration. In the first dispatch from a new series on migration in the Americas (“A hunger crisis forces Guatemalans to choose: migration or death”...

  Challenges & Opportunities in Central America’s Northern Triangle Region This UCTV production sheds some light on the realities of life in Central America: “Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (The Northern Triangle) are experiencing a historic Diaspora to the US southern border. The precipitants of this migration are an unprecedented economic contraction occurring after back-to-back...

Official White House Photo Alexandra Jaffe and Christopher Sherman for the Associated Press report on Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit this week  to Guatemala and Mexico, her first foreign trip as vice president.  During the trip, the Biden administration is expected to announce new measures to fight smuggling and trafficking, and hopes to announce additional...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it plans to release 22,000 more H-2B visas in addition to the 66,000 H-2B visas available annually, reserving 6,000 for the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. U.S. employers may bring foreign nationals to this country to fill temporary, non-agricultural jobs in H-2B...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it plans to release 22,000 more H-2B visas in addition to the 66,000 H-2B visas available annually, reserving 6,000 for the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. U.S. employers may bring foreign nationals to this country to fill temporary, non-agricultural jobs in H-2B...

JurgenRvz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Recently, nineteen migrants were found near the U.S.-Mexico border, shot dead, their bodies burned beyond recognition. As the BBC reports, many hailed from San Marcos, Guatemala, a city more than 1700 miles from where they died. One of the migrants who died was a talented player on his...

Christopher v. Harbury, Cover-Ups and Right of Access Claims In Christopher v. Harbury, 122 S. Ct. 2179 (U.S. 2002), the Supreme Court dealt with a denial of access claim brought by the plaintiff widow against federal government officials, alleging that they intentionally deceived her in concealing information about her husband’s detention and torture in Guatemala...

Professorsolo2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons BuzzFeed News has a shocking story: 33 unaccompanied minors were deported to Guatemala despite a preliminary injunction issued by federal judge Emmet Sullivan that should have prevented the flight. According to ICE, the agency did not learn of the injunction until the flight had landed in Guatemala, despite...

  Catherine Rampell for the Washington Post tells the story of Leticia and her son, who  crossed the Rio Grande seeking asylum from danger in Guatemala. Instead, they were torn apart by a policy designed to inflict trauma. Now, she is fighting for restitution for families like hers.   Rampell writes: “Leticia tells her story to...

TRAC Immigration reports that Fiscal Year 2021 began with the largest number of Immigration Court cases in its active backlog to date: in October, 1,273,885 immigration cases were pending before the courts. Most of the pending cases—918,673 or 72 percent—involved nationals from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador. Over four out of every ten immigrants...

In the rainforests of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, the fires often start when drug traffickers try to clear large swaths of land. Due to the dry bush and lack of rainfall, the flames often spread out of control, but in the end, the result is the same: oaks, palms, acacia and mahogany trees are replaced...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE U.S. Asylum Agreement with Guatemala is Source of New Human Rights Abuses, Georgetown Law’s Human Rights Institute Finds   WASHINGTON (June 10, 2020)  –  A new report released today by the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center finds that the 2019 United States Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA) with...

As Ming noted earlier this week, “thousands of migrants have been returned to their home countries, including some who are sick with the [corona]virus, spreading disease contracted in the US to places ill-equipped to manage their health care.” Guatemala, for one, is taking steps to avoid receiving more COVID-19-infected deportees. As Reuters reports, Guatemala will...

Guatemala Scene by vasse nicolas,antoine Promoters of Migrant Liberation is a Guatemalan organization providing free translation services to indigenous Guatemalan migrants in the US. Their goal, as the BBC documents, is to assist Guatemalan migrants who are fluent in one of the nation’s 25 protected indigenous languages but not Spanish nor English. There is an...

Molly O’Toole for the Los Angeles Times reports that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are highly vulnerable to the pandemic, but they are also dependent on the United States for economic and security assistance. Despite fears of the virus spreading, all three are continuing to accept deportation flights from the United States, but only for...