The Trump administration's failure to test all but a small percentage of detained immigrants for the novel coronavirus may be helping it spread through the United States' sprawling system of detention centers and then to Central America and elsewhere aboard regular deportation flights, migrants' advocates said Friday, reports AP.
The discovery of numerous COVID-19 cases among deportees on a flight that arrived this week prompted Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to tell Guatemalans in a national address on Friday he was suspending such flights - a step his foreign minister had mentioned earlier to reporters.
Just 400 detainees in the U.S. out of more than 32,000 have been tested so far, according to testimony that Matthew Albence, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 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.
U.S. authorities took passengers' temperatures before departure, and Guatemalan officials checked them for cough, fever and other symptoms on arrival. Those with possible COVID-19 symptoms had their mucous and saliva tested, but apparently healthy deportees underwent no testing and were allowed to head home even if they arrived on a flight with sick people.
Health experts say that was very risky because many infected people never show symptoms but are still highly contagious. Airport workers and at least one family member of a deportee have tested positive in Guatemala and are believed to have been infected by returned migrants, said Dr. Edwin Asturias, a University of Colorado epidemiologist who is from Guatemala and maintains close contact with health authorities there.
"It's clear that deportees have been coming infected and without appropriate safety measures in the same airspace with other people," Asturias said. "As we're seeing, this type of deportation is producing contagion in Guatemala."
Only on Monday did Guatemala begin testing every passenger who shared a flight with someone confirmed as positive. The same day, a plane carrying 76 people arrived on an ICE flight from Alexandria, Louisiana. A migrant who was feeling ill was tested and found to be infected, leading to tests for everyone else. Forty-three tested positive despite showing no signs of illness and are in medical quarantine, officials said.
Giammattei, who spoke while wearing a surgical mask, said a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also tested 12 of the passengers at random on Friday and all tested positive. He said flights would be suspended until the U.S. certifies passengers on such flights are free of the new virus.
"It's very worrying because these adults and children are being deported from places with high levels of contagion," said Leonel Dubon, director of Refuge for Childhood, a center for young and vulnerable deportees in Guatemala.
ICE has restricted the movement of hundreds of detainees across the United States after they were suspected of coming into contact with an infected person, according to interviews with detainees and lawyers.
