Migrants deported to remote Guatemalan border

Hundreds of Central American migrants, many families with young children, expelled by the United States on flights deep into southern Mexico have been dropped this week at a remote jungle outpost on the Guatemalan border.

They walk into Guatemala with children in their arms and their few possessions in plastic bags, disoriented by their sudden arrival in a third country in 24 hours.

In part, that is the point.

The new US measure aims to dissuade them from trying to reach the US border again.

In El Ceibo, they find little more than roadside diners, a small, overwhelmed shelter, and suffocating 100-degree heat.

Many are not from Guatemala.

There are Hondurans and Salvadorans.

Some start walking south, hitchhiking, or looking for a bus if they have money.

"What we've seen here is the suffering of these people," said Andres Toribio, who runs the Bethlehem Migrant Shelter in El Ceibo.

Since the US started the flights, his shelter has been strained by the new arrivals on top of the usual deportations made by Mexican authorities.

He estimates he has seen 4,000 migrants expelled from Mexico here in the past eight days.

When the expelled migrants board their flights in Brownsville, Texas, they don't know where they are going.

Some think California, others back home.

Maritza Tepata arrived in El Ceibo on Wednesday with her two children, ages 3 and 8, after starting the day in Brownsville.

On Friday, she was working in a diner, washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and waiting on customers along with a Nicaraguan migrant.

In exchange, she received food for her family, but otherwise was not paid.

She had fled El Salvador because a gang threatened her for not making extortion payments.

Tepata, 26, had been trying to reach Los Angeles.

Of her flight on Wednesday, Tepata said, "I asked, and the immigration woman told me I wasn't going to El Salvador, that I was going to Mexico."

She had paid $14,000 to a smuggler to cross and now faced a debt she had little hope of repaying without reaching the US.

United Nations agencies and human rights organisations expressed concern this week over the new US measures.

Without screening migrants for what they were fleeing, the governments were potentially putting them at risk.

"I left my country because we were extorted," Tepata said.

The administration is starting the flights at 24 times a month, with hopes of ramping up, according to a US official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mexico agreed to support the effort amid strains between the administration and Central American governments and their reluctance to accept more direct deportation flights from the United States.