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A Republican Congressman is claiming the White House has been ignoring warnings he'd received from the President of Guatemala of an impending surge of 80,000 Venezuelan migrants reportedly heading for the U.S. border.
According to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei told him he knew of at least 80,000 predominantly Venezuelan nationals who were making their way toward the United States in anticipation of the end of Title 42, a Donald Trump-era policy that allowed the United States to turn away migrants under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Warned with this information, Melugin wrote, Gonzalez went to the White House. However, he reported, nobody at the White House would take his calls.
NEW: Texas Congressman @RepTonyGonzales says the President of Guatemala told him he knows of at least 80,000 predominantly Venezuelan nationals who are making their way to the U.S. border ahead of the drop of Title 42, and that nobody at the White House would take his calls.
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) May 9, 2023
Newsweek has reached out both to Gonzalez's office and the White House via email for comment.
Whether the White House is unaware of the looming surge, however, is not known.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report detailing struggles experienced by Venezuelan migrants seeking citizenship in Columbia, forcing them to look northward toward the United States.
A Reuters story filed days earlier noted many Venezuelans seeking refuge in countries like Chile had difficulties finding residency there. Hundreds of those seeking to return home to Venezuela were ultimately denied entry back into Peru, leaving them few options.
The Guatemalan president himself, Giammattei, has a regular history of criticism against the United States' handling of the border crisis.
Elected in 2021, Giammattei was highly critical of a deal his predecessor signed with the Trump administration allowing the U.S. to deport migrants into the impoverished country against the threat of economic sanctions.
After newly-installed Vice President Kamala Harris visited the country in the first months of the Biden administration, Giammattei rushed to Fox News to blame the U.S. border crisis on Democrats' "lukewarm" rhetoric on illegal immigration, which he took as a reversal of a Biden pledge to try to reduce Central and South American migration to the United States.
Giammattei later claimed the only way to stop migration from his region into the U.S. was with "walls of prosperity," a move that prompted the U.S. to increase spending with non-governmental organizations in South America to help reduce corruption and violence that has prompted many to flee their countries.
However, some believe Guatemala is just as much to blame for the failures of Biden's border policies. While the country has struggled with corruption tied to drug cartels, Giammettei in 2021 oversaw the ouster of the country's top anti-corruption prosecutor, Juan Francisco Sandoval, prompting widespread protests in the country.
Update 5/10/23, 6:15 a.m. ET: The headline on this article was updated to attribute the claim to Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more