Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei says that drug cartel-backed human smugglers have exploited messaging from Biden administration officials and have ramped up their operations in sending people to the U.S.–Mexico border.
“I’m nobody to make a judgment here, but I believe in the first weeks in the Biden administration, messages were confusing,“ Giammattei said in an interview with MSNBC. ”They were compassionate messages that were understood by people in our country, especially to coyotes [border smugglers] to tell families, ‘We’ll take the children, the children can go in, and once they’re there, the children can call their parents.’”
