Guatemala's president denies new asylum deal with US
GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala President Bernardo Arévalo said Friday he has not signed an agreement with the United States to take asylum seekers from other countries, pushing back against comments from U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Noem and Arévalo met Thursday in Guatemala and the two governments publicly signed a joint security agreement that would allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to work in the capital's airport, training local agents how to screen for terrorism suspects.
But Noem said she had also been given a signed document she called a safe third country agreement. She said she reached a similar deal in Honduras and said they were important outcomes of her trip.
'Honduras and now Guatemala after today will be countries that will take those individuals and give them refugee status as well,' Noem said. 'We've never believed that the United States should be the only option, that the guarantee for a refugee is that they go somewhere to be safe and to be protected from whatever threat they face in their country. It doesn't necessarily have to be the United States.'
Asked about Noem's comments Friday during a news conference, Arévalo said that nothing new was signed related to immigration and that Guatemala was still operating under an agreement reached with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in February. That agreement stipulated that Guatemala would continue accepting the deportation of its own citizens, but also citizens of other Central American nations as a transit point on their way home.
Arévalo said that when Rubio visited, safe third country was discussed because Guatemala had signed such an agreement during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term in office. But 'we made it clear that our path was different,' Arévalo said.
He did add that Guatemala was willing to provide asylum to Nicaraguans who have been unable to return to their country because of the political situation there out of 'solidarity.'
The president's communications office said Noem had been given the ratification of the agreement reached through diplomatic notes weeks earlier.
During Trump's first term, the U.S. signed such safe third-country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They effectively allowed the U.S. to declare some asylum seekers ineligible to apply for U.S. protection and permitted the U.S. government to send them to those countries deemed 'safe.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
6 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Guatemala's president denies new asylum deal with US
GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala President Bernardo Arévalo said Friday he has not signed an agreement with the United States to take asylum seekers from other countries, pushing back against comments from U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem and Arévalo met Thursday in Guatemala and the two governments publicly signed a joint security agreement that would allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to work in the capital's airport, training local agents how to screen for terrorism suspects. But Noem said she had also been given a signed document she called a safe third country agreement. She said she reached a similar deal in Honduras and said they were important outcomes of her trip. 'Honduras and now Guatemala after today will be countries that will take those individuals and give them refugee status as well,' Noem said. 'We've never believed that the United States should be the only option, that the guarantee for a refugee is that they go somewhere to be safe and to be protected from whatever threat they face in their country. It doesn't necessarily have to be the United States.' Asked about Noem's comments Friday during a news conference, Arévalo said that nothing new was signed related to immigration and that Guatemala was still operating under an agreement reached with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in February. That agreement stipulated that Guatemala would continue accepting the deportation of its own citizens, but also citizens of other Central American nations as a transit point on their way home. Arévalo said that when Rubio visited, safe third country was discussed because Guatemala had signed such an agreement during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term in office. But 'we made it clear that our path was different,' Arévalo said. He did add that Guatemala was willing to provide asylum to Nicaraguans who have been unable to return to their country because of the political situation there out of 'solidarity.' The president's communications office said Noem had been given the ratification of the agreement reached through diplomatic notes weeks earlier. During Trump's first term, the U.S. signed such safe third-country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They effectively allowed the U.S. to declare some asylum seekers ineligible to apply for U.S. protection and permitted the U.S. government to send them to those countries deemed 'safe.'
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Are you from California?' Political advisor said he was detained at airport after confirming he's from L.A.
Veteran Los Angeles political consultant Rick Taylor said he was pulled aside by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents while returning from a trip abroad, asked if he was from California and then separated from his family and put in a holding room with several Latino travelers for nearly an hour. 'I know how the system works and have pretty good connections and I was still freaking out,' said Taylor, 71. 'I could only imagine how I would be feeling if I didn't understand the language and I didn't know anyone.' Taylor said he was at a loss to explain why he was singled out for extra questioning, but he speculated that perhaps it was because of the Obama-Biden T-shirt packed in his suitcase. Taylor was returning from a weeklong vacation in Turks and Caicos with his wife and daughter, who were in a separate customs line, when a CBP agent asked, 'Are you from California?' He said he answered, 'Yeah, I live in Los Angeles.' The man who ran campaigns for L.A.'s last Republican mayor and for current Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla when he was a budding Los Angeles City Council candidate in the 1990s found himself escorted to a waiting room and separated from his family. There, Taylor said he waited 45 minutes without being released, alleging he was unjustly marked for detention and intimidated by CBP agents. 'I have no idea why I was targeted,' said Taylor, a consultant with the campaign to reelect L.A. City Councilwoman Traci Park. 'They don't talk to you. They don't give you a reason. You're just left confused, angry and worried.' The story was first reported by Westside Current. Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the incident brought to mind Sen. Alex Padilla, who was arrested and handcuffed June 12 while trying to ask a question during a Los Angeles press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 'My former chief of staff and political consultant, Rick Taylor, was detained at Miami International Airport by federal authorities after returning from an international vacation,' he said in an email. 'As Senator Alex Padilla said a couple of weeks ago, 'if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.' This Federal government operation is OUT OF CONTROL! Where will it end?!' A representative from the Customs and Border Protection in Florida said an inquiry made by the Los Angeles Times and received late Friday afternoon will likely be answered next week. 'If Mr. Taylor feels the need to, he is more than welcome to file a complaint online on our website and someone will reach out to him to try and get to the bottom of things,' CBP Public Affairs Specialist Alan Regalado said in an email. Taylor, a partner at Dakota Communications, a strategic communications and marketing firm, said he was more concerned about traveling and returning to the U.S. with his wife, a U.S. citizen and native of Vietnam. He said he reached out to a Trump administration member before leaving on vacation, asking if he could contact that individual in case his wife was detained. The family flew American Airlines and landed in Miami on June 20, where he planned to visit friends before returning to Los Angeles on Tuesday. In a twist, Taylor's wife and daughter, both Global Entry cardholders, breezed through security while Taylor, who does not have Global Entry, was detained, he said. He said after the agent confirmed he was a Los Angeles resident, he placed a small orange tag on his passport and was told to follow a green line. That led him to another agent and his eventual holding room. Taylor described '95% of the population' inside the room as Latino and largely Spanish-speaking. 'I was one of three white dudes in the room,' he said. 'I just kept wondering, 'What I am doing here?'' He said the lack of communication was 'very intimidating,' though he was allowed to keep his phone and did send text message updates to his family. 'I have traveled a fair amount internationally and have never been pulled aside,' he said. About 45 minutes into his holding, Taylor said an agent asked him to collect his luggage and hand it over for inspection. He said he was released shortly after. 'The agents have succeeded in making me reassess travel,' Taylor said. 'I would tell others to really think twice about traveling internationally while you have this administration in charge.'
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump's winning at the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson warns about 'troubling message'
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is on a winning streak of getting quick assistance from the Supreme Court after lower courts have put the brakes on his policies. That's prompted one of the three liberal justices to write that the court is sending a 'troubling message" that it's departing from basic legal standards for the administration. 'It is particularly startling to think that grants of relief in these circumstances might be (unintentionally) conveying not only preferential treatment for the Government but also a willingness to undercut both our lower court colleagues' well-reasoned interim judgments and the well-established constraints of law that they are in the process of enforcing,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote. Jackson was dissenting from the conservative majority's decision to give Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency complete access to the data of millions of Americans kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration. Once again, she wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "this Court dons its emergency responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them." A district judge had blocked DOGE's access to 'personally identifiable information' while assessing if that access is legal. Jackson said a majority of the court didn't require the administration to show it would be 'irreparably harmed' by not getting immediate access, one of the legal standards for intervention. "It says, in essence, that although other stay applicants must point to more than the annoyance of compliance with lower court orders they don't like," she wrote, "the Government can approach the courtroom bar with nothing more than that and obtain relief from this Court nevertheless." A clock, a mural, a petition: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's chambers tell her story In a brief and unsigned decision, the majority said it weighed the 'irreparable harm' factor along with the other required considerations of what's in the public interest and whether the courts are likely to ultimately decide that DOGE can get at the data. But the majority did not explain how they did so. Jackson raised a similar complaint when the court on May 30 said the administration can revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans living in the United States. Jackson wrote that the court "plainly botched" its assessment of whether the government or the approximately 530,000 migrants would suffer the greater harm if their legal status ends while the administration's mass termination of that status is being litigated. Jackson said the majority undervalued "the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending." The majority did not offer an explanation for its decision. In addition to those interventions, the Supreme Court recently blocked a judge's order requiring DOGE to disclose information about its operations, declined to reinstate independent agency board members fired by Trump, allowed Trump to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans and said the president can enforce his ban on transgender people serving in the military. Jackson disagreed with all of those decisions. The court's two other liberal justices – Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – disagreed with most of them. More: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can throw a punch. Literally. The court did hand Trump a setback in May when it barred the administration from quickly resuming deportations of Venezuelans under a 1798 wartime law. Two of the court's six conservative justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – dissented. Decisions are expected in the coming weeks on other Trump emergency requests, including whether the president can dismantle the Education Department and can enforce his changes to birthright citizenship. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Justice Jackson warns Supreme Court is sending a 'troubling message'
