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Guatemala says it has received roughly 2,300 Mexican nationals deported from the US this year, a practice Mexico has told Washington flat out it wants no part of.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Under international practice, deportees are supposed to go straight to the country they are citizens of. Third-country removals are for cases where the home country refuses them or conditions there are unsafe, which is the justification the administration has used elsewhere. Mexico has always taken its own citizens back and has accepted third-country deportees from the US since Trump’s first term. Until this year, almost every deported Mexican went home directly by land or air. In 2024, Guatemala received only 15 Mexican nationals.

What’s going on now: First reported by CBS, the United States has deported 2,284 Mexican nationals to both Guatemala and Honduras since April, in what the administration describes as an effort to deter people from crossing back. Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo confirmed the numbers in a televised interview Wednesday night. “They are arriving in planes of Guatemalan returnees, and what we have done is process them as in transit, in coordination with the Mexican immigration authorities,” he said. The deportees stay under 24 hours, get no shelter or refugee status, and Guatemala is not acting as a safe third country which means either Mexico or the US covers all related costs to send them back home.

Official Honduran documents show 82 Mexicans arriving in San Pedro Sula on two flights Aug. 13 and 15, with another 35 scheduled Thursday, on top of 165 deported there between May and mid-July. Human Rights First has confirmed roughly 200 total. Honduras’s foreign ministry says it has no information on any of it, and its returned migrants center told Reuters it has never processed a Mexican citizen. Arturo Trejo, 56, a Mexican deportee, told Telemundo he was on one of those flights. “They didn’t tell us anything, just to get on the flight,” he said.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute confirmed the flights and said deportees are bused north to southern Mexico afterward. In a statement, the institute said the US was doing this to discourage them from attempting to enter the US illegally again.

Despite this, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said “The Mexican government has expressed its opposition to this practice to US authorities and has reiterated that every Mexican citizen has the right to enter the country.”

The State Department confirmed the deportations broadly and said, in its own statement, that implementing Trump’s immigration agenda is a top priority and that it remains committed to ending illegal immigration.