The Cost of Deportations | 30th Anniversary Capsule

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Posted on Jan 21, 2026

Over a dark blue textured background with a gold border, an orange barbed wire fence with dollar signs. Above, a white plane takes off. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)

About two million Guatemalans live in the US. But, half of those here lack legal status, and tens of thousands of Guatemalans are deported back to their country each year. Are the countries these migrants left prepared for an influx of returnees? 

This episode, originally released in 2018, is part of the Making Contact Anniversary Capsule: celebrating 30 years of social justice journalism. The miniseries takes us from protests on the streets of Seattle to an Indiana family fighting for their daughter’s gender affirming care. It explores a racial reckoning in the world of romance writers, and tells the story of border walls from Gaza to Arizona. These shows embody how Making Contact has been digging into the story beneath the story since 1994.

Music:

• “Assobio”, Z Trigueiros
• “Saez”, Z Trigueiros
• “Phased”, Z Trigueiros
• “Fater Lee”, Black Ant  (open)
• “Rise”, Meydan (credits)

Transcript

Making Contact Button: Making, making, making contact. Making contact.

Jessica Partnow: This show is part of the Making Contact anniversary capsule, celebrating 30 years of social justice journalism. 

Monica Lopez: I am Monica Lopez, and this is Making Contact. This week, the cost of deportations through the lens of one central American nation that sends migrants North: Guatemala. About 2 million Guatemalans live in the US according to the UN.

That’s more than 10% of Guatemala’s population, but half of those here lack legal status and tens of thousands of Guatemalans are being deported back to their country each year. The question arises: are the countries these refugees left prepared for an influx of returnees? On this edition of Making Contact, independent journalist Maria Martin explores that and other questions, including whether some Guatemalans are still planning to migrate north, even given the hardening of immigration policy in the United States. Here’s her report.

Maria Martin: Outside a white stucco building operated by the Guatemalan Air Force in Guatemala City, some people wait for what they call the Flight of the Deportees. Each plane will bring from 75 to 130 handcuffed Guatemalans back to their home country. By the beginning of 2018 the number of these flights had been increasing to up to three daily, says Carlos Lopez, administrator of the Guatemala City-based migrant aid organization, Casa del Migrante.

Guatemalan government statistics confirm the increase in the number of Guatemalans deported via air from the United States. There been a 64% surge in the last two years when one compares deportations in the first three months of 2018 to the same period two years ago. When they land, the day’s returned Guatemalans are ushered into a waiting area where they find a sandwich and a bottle of water. A government employee offers a few words of welcome. And directs them to windows where their data will be recorded. The deportees then exit double glass doors and find themselves once again, breathing polluted Guatemala City air. They’ll try to rebuild their lives, but for many, this won’t be easy.

Martin Velasquez (in Spanish): Mi nombre es Martin Velasquez. La funcion que hacemos aqui es apoyar a nuestros paisanos retornados. (My name is Martin Velasquez. Here, we serve the function of supporting our returning countrymen.)

Maria Martin: Martin Velasquez is a volunteer with the Association of Returning Migrants formed by people like himself to offer support to deportees. He himself was deported two years ago. After 15 years in the states. The 40-year-old still hasn’t been able to find a job.

Martin Velasquez (VO in English): It’s hard because at my age, one can’t find a job. Then they also want you to have a degree, something you didn’t need to work in the states. 

Maria Martin: Guatemala has a high rate of unemployment and underemployment. Only three out of 10 Guatemalans have a formal job. The unemployment rate is particularly high among Guatemalan youth. People under 20 make up half of the country’s population. Experts estimate that 140,000 young people enter the labor market every year, but out of every 10, only two will find work in the formal sector. That’s what drove Deportee, Juan Sebastian Mejilla, to leave his country at age 14. 

Juan Sebastian Mejilla: A lot of us go to United States because of the fact that there is hard to have to find a job here. Even if went to school and you graduated and everything, it’s very hard to find a job. So that’s the reason why we decided to go to the States and try to live the dream life, to have complete our dreams. 

Maria Martin: After 30 years in the Los Angeles area, he was deported a year ago. His wife and six children, ages 32 to seven are US citizens back in California. 

Juan Sebastian Mejilla: It’s not only hard for us, but it’s hard for them. And they[‘re] citizens, you know, they [were] born there, so they have all the right to have their parents with them to have a happy life. Es lo mas duro que uno puede vivir. Uno como padre. (It’s the hardest thing a person can go through, especially as a parent.)

Maria Martin: Mejilla has a unique perspective on the harder line immigration policy that results in an increased number of deportations. 

Juan Sebastian Mejilla: And when they send everybody back, they send them back to be at the same situation where they started. And of course, a lot of people are gonna try to go back again and some of us, because financially we’re not doing okay. We’ll stay here, but there’s nothing for us here.

Maria Martin: In October of 2009, the Guatemalan government approved funding for a new agency to assist the growing number of returning Guatemalans, the Consejo Nacional de Atencion Al Migrante en Guatemala, the National Council on Immigration or Conamigua, as it’s known in Guatemala, has a mission to protect, support, and provide help and assistance to Guatemalan migrants and their families. But until recently Conamigua had been without a director for two years, weakening the agency’s effectiveness and leaving return migrants with little support.

Lisbeth Gramajo (in Spanish): No hay alguna institucion gobernamental que este brindando ese acompanamiento al nivel psicologico…

Lisbeth Gramajo (VO in English): There is no government entity to support people who are returned.

Maria Martin: Anthropologist Lisbeth Gramajo of the Rafael Landivar University studies that reintegration process for return migrants. Her research shows the government’s principal role in assisting deported Guatemalans is to provide the reception service at the airport. After that, she says there’s no follow through to help migrants.

Lisbeth Gramajo (VO in English): What we’ve observed is that those who are deported come back very affected. First because they weren’t expecting to be deported. Then they talk about the way they’re treated at the detention centers like criminals, when they think they’ve done nothing wrong except enter the country in an irregular manner. When they return to their community, they become very depressed because they weren’t able to fulfill their dream of getting to the US or for those who’ve been there, their lives have been disrupted. So yes, the mental health of the deportees is affected and we see that in their families also.

Maria Martin: And other analysts agree that migrant assistance and reintegration in Guatemala has become mired in politics. As a result, they say migrants suffer. We are in La Casa del Migrante in downtown Guatemala City. Along with the Association of Returned Guatemalans, this is one of the few organizations trying to help the increasing number of Guatemalans deported back to their country.

Father Mauro Verzeletti (in Spanish): Soy Padre Mauro Verzeletti, Misionero de San Carlos las Calabrianos, y director de la Casa del Migrante en Guatemala y El Salvador. 

Maria Martin: Catholic Priest, Mauro Verzeletti, is Casa del Migrante’s Director.

Father Verzeletti (VO in English): This is a place that receives people in transit, people in search of refuge or asylum. 

Maria Martin: In more than two decades heading Casa Migrante, Verzeletti says he’s witnessed an absence of realistic government policies to deal with migration.

Father Verzeletti (VO in English): We have to sadly say that corruption has taken over our government. They’ve been co-opted by narco traffickers in organized crime, or by people who can’t even stand to look at migrants as in the case of Donald Trump. 

Father Mauro Verzeletti (in Spanish): …como el caso de Donald Trump, no? (…like in Donald Trump’s case, no?)

Maria Martin: Verzeletti says there’s a lot of money being made, trafficking people in need. He believes organized crime benefits from migration and not only in Central America, but also in the United States. 

Father Mauro Verzeletti (in Spanish): Claro los grupos criminales de estados unidos y de centroamerica, para ellos no existen fronteras. 

Father Verzeletti (VO in English): Clearly criminal groups in the US and Central America don’t recognize borders. They know how to get in and out. They don’t need visas or passports, nor migratory controls. They have free reign. And why? Because in the United States, it’s getting to where there are also high levels of corruption. These days, corruption is transnational. 

Maria Martin: And until the situation changes drastically in Central America, this advocate says tens of thousands of young people will continue to migrate north. In fact, he says records kept by Casa Migrante indicate that 95% of the deportees say they’ll attempt to get to the US again. On a recent morning in Casa del Migrante’s dining room, three young Guatemalan men, fresh off that morning’s deportee flight, continued for a meal and a night’s rest until they could continue on their way. They take time to tell me their stories. 23-year-old Hicer Hernando of the province of Izabal, told us he had fled his community and tried to enter the United States after his father was killed in a machete attack due to religious differences with other townspeople. 

Hicer Hernando (VO in English): Because we are Catholics and they are evangelical Christians. 

Maria Martin: When we spoke with him, Hicer wasn’t sure where he’d be going next as he feared for his life returning home. Violence for religious reasons is widespread in Central America, as is drug related, political, gender, and generalized aggression. A recent report by refugees International cites a lack of protection for returning Central Americans at quote “every stage.” From the processing of an asylum application to deportation and reintegration into the country of origin, that ultimately puts life at risk.

Rodolfo Antonio Arias (in Spanish): Me siento triste de no haber pasado ahi porque tengo mucha deuda ya

Rodolfo Antonio Arias (VO in English): I feel sad not having made it over to the US. Because I have so many debts already.

Maria Martin: In a country where over 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. Perhaps the largest number of Guatemalans, like 22-year-old Rodolfo Antonio Arias migrate for economic reasons. Arias’ story is not at all unusual among returned Guatemalans. He’d borrowed 80,000 quetzales, almost $11,000 going north after his family’s agricultural fields dried up in the drought, attributed to climate change now affecting large portions of Central America. His father had optimistically taken out another loan to expand the family’s planting fields, but the harvest dried up. Now Arias finds himself deported and in double debt. The only avenue he sees to get out of his and his family’s financial crisis is to try to migrate again.

Rodolfo Antonio Arias (VO in English): I don’t know what to do now except to give all my all to pay my debts and not give up until I do it.

Maria Martin: Anthropologist Gramajo says, her research shows that most deported Guatemalans say they only want to go to the United States temporarily.

Lisbeth Gramajo (VO in English): They don’t dream of staying in the United States. They talk of going maybe for five, seven or 10 years, enough time for them to work, send money home, and maybe buy a plot of land, build a house, buy a car. So when they return, they’ll have a life with dignity that this country doesn’t offer them.

Maria Martin: Guatemala’s economy like that of other Central American countries now depends greatly on the remittances sent home by migrants. Last year alone, Guatemalans working in the states, sent home $8 billion. Perhaps nowhere is the economic impact felt more than in rural indigenous communities of the Western Highlands of Guatemala.

The Q’anjob’al Maya community of San Pedro Soloma in northern Guatemala is one of these places. Here, indigenous textiles, hang side by side on clotheslines. With t-shirts bearing logos of American football teams. When we visited 78-year-old Don Julio Hernandez, he told us much has changed in the last three decades in San Pedro, but that his Mayan community has always had to migrate for many reasons.

Don Julio Hernandez (VO in English): We were very poor. Without the right to study, we lived under pressure exploited.

Maria Martin: Don Julio says the people of his community would migrate to avoid being recruited into the army during the almost four decades of civil war.

Don Julio Hernandez (VO in English): That’s why my father would take us to the coast, to the plantations to work the coffee and be slaves of the powerful.

Maria Martin: It’s been documented that the victims of the Civil War, which ended 20 years ago, were largely indigenous Maya. To flee the violence sparked by the US led overthrow of democratically elected precedent, Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, many went to Mexico and then to the United States, and thus began a tradition of migrating North. Now, some say almost half of San Pedro’s population has at some point lived in the us.

Perhaps the most dramatic change in these Mayan communities in the last decade can be seen in new construction. It’s everywhere, says business owner Don Sebastian Gaspar.

Don Sebastian Gaspar (VO in English): In the communities now, there are cement block homes. In the time of our grandfathers, it would be straw roofs. Now you can see houses with terraces and two or three stories.

Maria Martin: The community has changed in other ways says 50-year-old Don Gaspar.

Don Sebastian Gaspar (VO in English): Before there was poverty. Now you don’t see people barefoot. Now they at least wear leather shoes.

Maria Martin: It’s a busy Sunday in San Pedro’s market and in San Pedro’s largest store, la Miscelania del Centro, it’s owner, Maya businessman Don Sebastian Gaspar. 30 years ago, he was a simple fruit vendor. Now he owns a hotel, gas and radio stations, and this department store where thousands of residents come not only to shop, but to collect their remittances sent by family in the United States.

Don Gaspar says these remittances average some $3 million a month. That’s a lot for a once marginalized and forgotten Mayan community. Not so long ago, there were no banks in San Pedro. Today, all the major banks are here, along with two credit unions and five remittance exchange houses. Freddy Lopez works in the San Pedro Credit Cooperative.

Freddy Lopez (VO in English): There’s been a big change in the amount of remittances being sent before Trump became president. People saved their money over there, sending just what their family needed to consume. Now people are sending their savings as well.

Maria Martin: Lopez describes a phenomenon being witnessed throughout Central America. With the tightening of US immigration policy, people are sending more money home.

Freddy Lopez (VO in English): I think people are getting ready for deportations to increase even more. Sending their money for when they return. They won’t suffer as much economically

Maria Martin: The brothers and sisters in the United States, as those in Soloma call their migrants, have also helped to renovate an impressive Catholic church. The pride of Soloma. In short, remittances, the dollars sent home by townspeople from the United States, are the economic engine driving San Pedro Soloma and so many other rural and indigenous communities in Guatemala and throughout Central America. But what would happen if as deportations go up, remittances were to dry up?

Father Dionisio: In reality, people would die of hunger. There’s not much work here. It would be total chaos. And not just in Soloma, but generally all over. 

Maria Martin: Father Dionisio, pastor of San Pedro’s Catholic Church, and others in the village say these Mayan communities have always had to seek a living elsewhere. But ironically, he says, it seems that Trump’s immigration policy instead of decreasing migration, may contribute to social and economic conditions that may spur it even more.

Father Dionisio: It’s like trying to cover up the headwaters of a stream. If you do it, everything dries up and the result will be more poverty and increase in social conflict.

Maria Martin: “Aqui y alla, somos comunidad” — here and there we are community say the MC and the red, white, and blue banners hanging from the ceiling in this cavernous building in Guatemala’s, second largest city Quetzaltenango. We are here for the first ever Cumbre de Migrantes y Retornados. A gathering of deported and returned migrants. About 2000 people all ages and ethnicities listen intently as immigrant rights activists from Guatemala and Guatemalans living in the US speak of their dreams for what could be achieved if they were greater and more strategic collaboration among transnational communities.

Marvin Otzcoy came representing the Guatemalan fraternity of Northern Nevada. 

Marvin Otzcoy: I have a dream like Martin Luther King said. (In Spanish) Mi sueno es que hayan condiciones en Guatemala… 

Maria Martin: His dream, says Otzcoy, is that in the future, conditions in Guatemala will change and people won’t have to leave to find a better life. That by working together to create opportunities, there will be work and economic prospects to prevent the need for going north… to make the dream a reality. Returned migrants spoke about efforts to create sustainable economic projects. Ventures to help small farmers and businesses in Guatemala, as well as to give young people opportunities in their home country so they won’t feel, as many now do, that migration is their only chance for a decent life.

A few blocks away is an example of one such project. Cafe Red Kat may look like one more Cafe in Quetzaltenango’s Historic Center, but it’s actually an experiment in economic sustainability and migrant self-help. 36-year-old Willie Barreno is a returned migrant and one of Cafe Red’s founders. 

Willie Barreno: These chairs, these tables have been made by migrants who work in construction in the us, right? This is not made in China. This was made in El Palmar, Guatemala. This was made in Cajola. You know, everything that we have here, it’s been made in Guatemala. So for that reason, you know. We are promoting Made in Guatemala. I was made in Guatemala too. 

Maria Martin: Made in Guatemala. Also holds true, he says for the food served at Cafe Red Kat.

Willie Barreno: We don’t sell french fries here. We sell plantain chips because that’s what a lady that it’s 82 years old, it’s producing at her home. So we are putting the plantain chips into a local hamburger and then can say, you know, we also have the right to have a hamburger. We also have the right to have a pizza. We also have a right to have a taco, but it has to be made with products that are here because, and we are consuming what? It’s ours. We’ll be preventing from people to migrate to other countries. 

Maria Martin: Most of the workers at the cafe are returned migrants. And Barreno, who worked as a chef in Santa Fe and at Whole Foods for many years, has started a chef training program for youth.

Willie Barreno: I see the benefit of people that are returning from the US because we have, uh, might not have a lot of money, but we have, you know, intellectual capital. And then for that reason we can also come and develop the country. I live in the States for 14 years and I’m not against the Us and then we also have, we can have the right to dream. We also have the right to have a decent life. And for that reason, we put that quote here on the wall that is called the right to dream. You know that 

Maria Martin: And that dream, says Berreno, should be a Guatemalan dream and not only an American dream, which until now has been the only option. For many Central Americans seeking a decent life. There’s a sad postscript to this story. 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gomez left her indigenous community in the western Highlands of Guatemala early on the morning of May 7th. Less than three weeks later, on May 23rd, she was killed by a border patrol agent while trying to cross into Texas.

The events were captured by a neighbor in the border community of Rio Bravo, where Claudia and three other immigrants were trying to cross. Like so many other bright young people, Claudia could not find work in her home country, even given the accounting degree she had obtained two years ago. So she came north to help her family. And to save money to continue her education, only to be met by a bullet in the head. 

News Audio Clip: Come on guys.

Maria Martin: Claudia’s death was mourned in her indigenous Maya community of San Juan and has resulted in international outrage. And so Claudia Patricia Gomez has become a symbol of how conditions in Guatemala and other places force many to migrate, even given the terrible risks. For Making Contact, I’m Maria Martin in Antigua, Guatemala.

Monica Lopez: You’ve been listening to The Cost of Deportations on Making Contact. This program was written and produced by Maria Martin. Funding was provided by FIJ, the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Production Assistance: Lisa Rudman and Anita Johnson. Voiceovers: Miguel Estrada, Claude Marks, Jesus Hermosillo, Joel Ulloa, Max Ferrin, Glenn Ontiveros, Ruxandra Guidi, Jonathan Lawson and Chris Stehlik. The Making Contact team is Lisa Rudman, Anita Johnson, Monica Lopez, Salima Hamirani, Sabine Blaizin, and Vera Tykusker. I’m Monica Lopez. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.

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