Guatemala City, Guatemala - The US sent back a record 61,680 Guatemalans in 2024, the Guatemalan Migration Institute said after the last deportation planes arrived in Guatemala City.

Four aircraft touched down at an air force base in the Guatemalan capital on Friday, arriving from Texas. AFP journalists saw around 100 people disembark from one of the planes, most of them women with small children.

The stepped-up returns happened under Democratic President Joe Biden, ahead of Donald Trump returning to the White House as president in late January 2025. Trump has vowed mass deportations.

Guatemala's government estimates there are 2.7 million Guatemalans living in the US, but that only 400,000 of them have documents to legally stay and work.

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A total of 508 planes carrying 61,680 Guatemalan deportees arrived from the US in 2024, according to officials.

In 2023, a total 55,302 Guatemalans were sent back, higher than the previous record registered in 2019 of 54,599.

Thousands of Guatemalans enter the US each year to escape violence and widespread poverty at home.

Their remittances to families back home are often a vital financial lifeline. Guatemala's central bank estimates that a record of nearly $21 billion was sent back in 2024 – equivalent to 19% of the country's GDP.

The deportations came in spite of the US' long history of intervention and destabilization in Guatemala, which contributed to the conditions driving many people to migrate in the first place.

In 1954, the US backed a coup to oust Guatemala's democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, who had instituted reforms to benefit impoverished Indigenous peasants – in opposition to US corporate interests.

In the 1960s, the CIA helped to install a brutal military dictatorship. The US trained Guatemalan military and police in torture and counterinsurgency tactics and helped prepare kidnapping squads created to target resistance groups.

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The country's Historical Clarification Commission has registered more than 250,000 deaths and disappearances, 1 million internal displacements, and 600,000 massacres during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).

Nevertheless, military assistance continued flowing to Guatemala through the 1970s and into the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan publicly promoted the Guatemalan government and provided CIA support to the country's genocidal regime.

Despite this legacy, the US has not designated Temporary Protected Status to Guatemalan nationals, while lawful permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship remain out of reach for many migrants.