SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Severe funding cuts imposed by US President Donald Trump on United Nations agencies assisting migrants and asylum seekers have had a major impact on the protection system for such people in Guatemala, Church officials said.
Since the new US policies took effect starting in 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has cut about a third of its global workforce.
The US contribution to the agency accounted for 40 percent of its total budget.
Other UN agencies, such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), have also seen their finances plummet. All of those agencies have publicly warned the international community about the humanitarian crisis the budget cuts are expected to cause.
According to Father Percy Cervera, executive secretary of the Bishops’ Conference’s Human Mobility Pastoral Ministry, the protection system for migrants and asylum seekers in Guatemala is now under severe threat.
“That protection network is made up of several nongovernmental organizations and the Church, which operates nine shelters through religious congregations and dioceses to receive those people. The whole system is now at risk,” Cervera told Crux Now.
He said the administration of President Bernardo Arévalo has been expanding services for migrants, opening new offices to issue documents, for instance. But the government lacks the resources to provide them with humanitarian assistance.
“Housing, food, and medicines are basic needs that used to be covered by the protection network. UNHCR used to play a major role in that effort. But it is now closing its offices and struggling to continue operating,” Cervera said.
According to the priest, a member of the Scalabrinian congregation, that has become the reality across Central America, where the flow of migrants traveling north in an attempt to reach the US now coincides with the movement of deportees and self-deportees returning south from the US to their countries of origin.
“UNHCR has reduced its staff in Central America by 80 percent. Those countries do not have the resources to help migrants, so the situation is critical,” Cervera said.
In Guatemala, only two UNHCR offices remain, one in the capital and another on the Mexican border.
For now, the Church in Guatemala still has some government funding for a project aimed at assisting deportees, especially Guatemalans who have been sent back by the US. It also has resources from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to carry out short-term actions.
“Although the number of people passing through Guatemala is not the same as it was a couple of years ago, it is still very significant. Last year, we assisted around 16,000 people. Almost half of them were traveling south from Mexico,” Cervera said.
Over the past three months, the number of South and Central Americans traveling north has been increasing. Their intention is to remain in Mexico while waiting for a new administration in the US.
“We have assisted people from 36 different countries. They all hope to move to the US,” he said.
Scalabrinian Father Francisco Pellizzari, who directs a migrant shelter in Tecún Umán, on the border with the Mexican city of Ciudad Hidalgo, confirmed that funding has become scarce since January 2025.
“Many people who worked assisting migrants and asylum seekers had to be laid off. The impact was enormous,” he told Crux Now.
While the number of people crossing the border has declined – years ago, it reached 30,000 migrants annually, and in 2026 it will probably total about 5,000, according to his estimate – the number of deportees has been increasing.
“On the Guatemala-Mexico border, deportees from several Central American countries arrive continuously,” Pellizzari said. Many of them spent decades in the US and no longer have a home to return to, so they have to stay at the Church-run shelter, at least temporarily.
Cervera said that most people working with migrants, including UN employees, have little hope that the situation will change in the short term.
Pellizzari said that the Scalabrinians operated migrant shelters for many decades without the support of any of those agencies.
“We were not born with the support of those organizations, but with the support of the Church. We have always been rooted in dioceses and parishes. We need to update and renew our model so that we can return to that path,” he said.