Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei says that coyotes used President Joe Biden’s comments “to tell families we’ll take the children” to the United States.
Guatemala’s president blames the Biden administration’s “confusing” messages for creating the crisis at the US border. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made similar remarks in March.
“I believe that in the first few weeks of the Biden administration, messages were confusing. They were compassionate messages that were understood by people in our country, especially the coyotes, to tell families, ‘We’ll take the children,’” President Alejandro Giammattei said Tuesday during an interview on MSNBC.
“And children can go, and once children are there, they will call their parents,” he continued.
The coyotes made good use of the messages.
Giammattei said that when unaccompanied minors begin to make the trek to the US, it creates a “matter of concern because as soon as they cross the border between Mexico and the US, they fall into the hands of cartels and prostitution networks, and so on.”
