Issued on: Modified:
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said on Friday a number of migrants on a deportation flight from the US were infected with the coronavirus amid fears the contagion in the sprawling US migrant detention system run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spreading to Central America.
Advertising
Read more
Giammattei said 12 randomly selected migrants who arrived in Guatemala on the deportation flight tested positive for coronavirus when examined by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
He suggested more on the flight had tested positive as well.
"A large part of it was infected," the president said in a televised address, referring to a flight carrying 73 Guatemalans that left the US for Guatemala City earlier this week.
The Trump administration has pressured Guatemala to keep receiving deported migrants despite growing concern in the poor Central American nation that returnees are bringing the virus with them and could infect remote communities.
The flight, which took off Monday, has been at the centre of a political storm since Guatemalan Health Minister Hugo Monroy said up to 75 percent of passengers on a deportation flight were infected with the virus. The Associated Press later cited a Guatemalan official saying 44 people on the Monday flight were infected.
Low testing levels at US migrant centres
Only 400 detainees in the US out of more than 32,000 have been tested so far, according to testimony that Matthew Albence, the acting director of ICE, gave Friday to a congressional committee.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform said that Albence “also confirmed that ICE does not routinely test detainees before deporting them”.
More than 1,600 people deported from the United States to Guatemala over the last month were allowed to go home and into voluntary, unenforced quarantine.
Fears are rising that it may have seeded the Central American nation with an untold number of undetected cases, increasing its vulnerability to the pandemic.
The US said on Thursday it had sent a CDC mission to assess the situation and test the migrants, who remain in quarantine in a hospital.
Adults, children deported from high contagion areas
It is not clear when the deportees became infected. There have been 30 confirmed cases of Covid-19 among ICE employees working in the agency's dRead More – Source
[contf] [contfnew] 
france24
[contfnewc] [contfnewc]
