EXCLUSIVE: Retired New York Giants safety Jack Brewer and his global ministry are on the ground in Guatemala City this week, helping officials receive migrant families deported from the U.S., providing food, support and prayer as they essentially start life anew.
Brewer and his Jack Brewer Foundation have years of experience working in impoverished areas of the world like Haiti, Malawi and Central America, which Brewer said has allowed him to work closer than most and interact with the returning families.
While it is President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan enforcing U.S. law and deporting illegal immigrants, Brewer said it is clear former President Joe Biden’s “broken” policies are truly to blame for the heartache and hardship.
“Three years ago, I started to follow the fatherlessness crisis that is happening right here in Guatemala, where a lot of men were leaving their households and coming to Joe Biden’s open borders – and just seeing it literally devastate families.”
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Brewer said Guatemala was losing much of its workforce and that a lot of those poor families trying to get to the U.S. actually did not know a “legal” immigration route existed, and they instead took the cartels and others at their word and paid thousands of dollars to be trafficked north.
“They’ve been told by coyotes and different people that you can just come [to the U.S.], and if you come here, if you bring your child, they’ll just let you in,” Brewer said.
“And so, you know, there’s a huge education gap there on the ground.”
Brewer also met with Raul Berrios from CONAMIGUA – the National Council for Attention to Migrants of Guatemala – as well as Sergio Samuel Vela-Lopez, head of the Guatemala Penitentiary Department.
Berrios, Lopez and others are trying to create an effective system for welcoming the migrants and processing those who are innocent families versus those who may have criminal records or other issues requiring government attention, according to Brewer.
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Many families returning to the capital city live hundreds of miles into the countryside and have no established way of getting there. Some buses, however, have been hired to take migrants closer to home, and Brewer visited one of them and spoke to its driver.
“It’s really a unique perspective, I think, and just some of the things that we’ve witnessed since we’ve been here,” he said, adding stories ranged from familial hardships to reports that more than a dozen people have been burnt alive by Mexican cartels for failing to pay for passage.
“It’s just pretty tough to see and witness and watch.”
When a U.S. military plane arrived carrying migrants, Brewer was on the tarmac.
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“We were able to provide them with food and, most importantly, with Bibles, and we preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Brewer said the Guatemalan Migration Authority is focusing its efforts on children ages 8 and under. Many of these children have been “lied to,” Brewer said.
“They’re told it’s their life’s mission to migrate to the U.S. illegally,” he said, recounting stories told by some returning migrants of children on the backs of cartel coyotes and others drowning in rivers.
Then-Vice President Kamala Harris made her own trip to Guatemala City in March 2024, seeking to understand the “root causes” of illegal migration.
“When you look at the root causes, we’re also looking at issues of corruption. Again, we’re looking at the issue of climate resiliency and then the concern about a lack of economic opportunity,” Harris said in 2021.
Brewer rejected that Harris’ work made any difference, saying she and her then-boss’s policies “empowered human traffickers” and that half of Guatemala still lives in extreme poverty with little education.
He said the former leadership at the State Department “misguided resources” through USAID, a practice that Trump is now aggressively cutting back on.
“We need to first put our resources into addressing the issues that are fueling a multibillion-dollar human trafficking industry. Walls, deportations and enforcement are a must, but educating indigenous populations on the truths of coyotes will deliver a devastating blow to the modern human slave trade,” Brewer said.
“Guatemala is not enforcing their migration issue in the country. Haitians and Venezuelans are warned of the dangers of migrating, but there is no enforcement at the time.”
“There needs to be arrest and enforcement, but they require resources. Guatemala prisons are already overcrowded, and they don’t have immigration beds available for enforcement,” added Brewer, who said he also visited those prisons and saw conditions for himself.
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