“Maybe you have left your family in the US but the same god who is here in Guatemala is there in the US,” says a local church volunteer at La Aurora Air Force Base in Guatemala city.
The volunteer is leading more than 90 Guatemalans in prayer. They have just stepped off a US deportation flight and are being processed at the Centre for Returnees. Before being deported, the Guatemalans were held at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Amid a far-reaching crackdown on immigration by US president Donald Trump, La Aurora base has received more than 266 US deportation flights this year, according to witnesses at the border.
More than 24,000 Guatemalans have been deported from the US in 2025, according to data from the Guatemalan Institute for Migration. An official at the state-backed reception centre for returnees at La Aurora base says most people now being deported have spent long periods in the US and often have children with US citizenship.
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Wearing the standard grey tracksuit supplied at US detention centres, 45-year-old electrician Pablo Vélez says he had feared being detained in the months leading up to his arrest by Ice in California.
“A lot of the Guatemalan community in California are staying at home and not even leaving for work right now,” he says.
Vélez was detained while attending court to apply for asylum two months earlier.
“My father was murdered in Guatemala and both my mother and brother were granted asylum in the US,” says Vélez. He didn’t apply for asylum when they did, but later travelled with a smuggler – known locally as a “coyote” – to join his family in the US.
In California he married an American-born Mexican woman, with whom he has an 18-year-old son. Vélez says he was deported from the US in 2008 but returned in 2015 with help from another smuggler. Now separated from his wife, he’s unsure whether he’ll find work as an electrician in Guatemala. Vélez says a nephew is going to pick him up and he says he will begin to build a life in Guatemala once again.
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Under Trump’s new Detained Parents Directive, family separations are likely to increase as ICE’s obligations to facilitate reunification of parents with their children before deportation are weakened. An official at the airbase recalls one distressed woman arriving earlier this year who had been separated from her young daughter when she was deported from the US. The official says more than 800 Guatemalan minors have been deported this year and the youngest child he saw on a deportation flight was three years old.
In July the US Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated record funding to the US’s deportation system, including $45 billion for detention, $14.4 billion for deportation and $10 billion to expand Ice.
“The budget for immigration detention is now more than 62 per cent larger than the budget for the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons,” stated the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“With the vast scope and scale of these resources, the number of people removed after long periods in the US is very certain to grow.”
Some Guatemalan deportees are returning with nothing. Most, however, collect a white plastic sack containing belongings confiscated by US authorities and returned via Guatemalan authorities. Guatemala’s government has rolled out a new Return Home Plan that offers some services to deportees. But the usual network of NGOs, churches and state agencies is under strain due to USAid cuts imposed by the Trump administration. Begging has visibly increased in the centre of Guatemala City.
Marisela Tzul (35), who asks to be referred to by her middle name, was handed a small brown bag of food and a hygiene pack, and is tying her shoes with new laces – it is standard practice in US detention facilities to remove detainees’ laces to prevent self-harm.
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Marisela, originally from Totonicapán, travelled to the US with a coyote in 2023. She was working at a garment factory in Los Angeles until 50 days ago when she was detained by ICE agents. “The owner of the factory saw ICE agents entering the factory beside us and she just handed us over to them,” says Marisela. She and nine others – seven Guatemalans and two Mexicans – were arrested.
Over the next 50 days she was transferred from California to Nevada, then Arizona, Texas and finally Louisiana. Marisela says she doesn’t want to talk about conditions at the centres – “it was terrible.”
She says she was only informed that she would be deported at 3am two days earlier. “No one in my family knows I’m here,” she says. She has had no contact with them since she was detained. Guatemalan consular officials have reported challenges in accessing Guatemalan citizens in some US detention facilities.
After being processed most deportees board a large yellow bus to either temporary shelter or Guatemala City’s central bus station, where they will make their own way home.
But some families are waiting outside the airbase for their loved ones. Young men who appeared stoic moments before crumble as they meet their parents who hold them tightly as they sob.
