Migrants left stranded abroad by new US policy

Migrants flown back to southern Mexico from the United States say they were never told they were being deported.

Leiva, 32, from Yoro, north-central Honduras, arrived at the shelter in El Ceibo, Guatemala, on the border with Mexico on Wednesday.

She and her daughter had started that day 1,000 miles to the north in Brownsville, Texas, where they were put on a plane by the U.S. government with dozens of other mothers and children without knowing where it was going.

The rumor running among the migrants was that they were being sent to California. Eventually, while in the air, they were told the plane would land in Villahermosa, in southern Mexico's Tabasco state.

There, Mexican authorities hustled them onto buses that drove them the three-plus hours to the Guatemalan border.

"We didn't sign any deportation," she said. The bracelets are the only evidence they were ever briefly in the U.S.

Leiva and her daughter were swept up in the latest U.S. government effort to deter migrants and asylum-seekers from arriving at its southern border.

While still delivering some migrants on flights directly to their Central American nations, the U.S. government has started supplementing with flights to southern Mexican cities like Villahermosa and Tapachula, where Mexican authorities carry them the rest of the way to Guatemala's border, even if they're not Guatemalan.

At the Mexico-Guatemala border, they were told to walk into Guatemala and look for the shelter.

Leiva said she was not asked by U.S. or Mexican authorities if she feared returning to her country.

"I would have told them everything I told you," Leiva said recounting her run-in with gang members back home.

"They threatened me saying that if I didn't (give them money) they would enroll my young children in the gangs. And that's why I emigrated from my country."

Responding to reporters' questions on Thursday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made his department's first public acknowledgement that it is expelling Central Americans on the flights to southern Mexico.

The Mexican government has been publicly silent.

The move comes after President Joe Biden jettisoned many of his predecessor's hardline immigration policies, describing them as cruel or unwise, including one that made asylum-seekers wait in Mexican border cities for hearings in U.S. immigration court.

Leiva had left Yoro on July 27 with her daughter and three older sons.

Twelve days later, she and her daughter crossed the Rio Grande on a raft into Texas with a smuggler and were quickly apprehended.

Her sons were supposed to have followed but didn't manage to cross.

The orange-painted hilltop shelter here has been filling this week as more migrants are dropped at the border daily.

There's little else in this remote border outpost surrounded by jungle.

Leiva's only choice, she said, was to try making her way north again.

Her two sons and older daughter were waiting in northern Mexico.