Meanwhile, quarantine centers for deportees exceeded capacity. It’s a total nightmare.”The state funeral directors association solicited volunteers this week to help “with removals and transport” in “extremely hard hit” South Texas and said funeral homes elsewhere might become short-staffed if funeral directors have to quarantine.Legacy Chapels in Edinburg has received 72 calls to pick up bodies in the last two weeks, far ahead of its normal pace of about 500 a year. In May, Hernández Mack documented how patients with COVID-19 symptoms were arriving at hospitals that hadn’t been designated for coronavirus care, making it impossible for healthcare workers to control the spread.Soon, nearly all of the country’s limited ICU beds were taken by patients in critical condition. Many have comorbidities like diabetes that could make them more likely to become severely ill if infected.Deaths in one county here, Hidalgo (population 870,000),“So actually, the worst is yet to come as we work our way through that massive increase in people testing positive,” Gov. It’s been burning bodies 12 hours a day, seven days a week.The crematory now takes bodies by appointment only, keeping to a handwritten schedule listing time slots for when each funeral home will bring remains. U.S. deportations of migrants have exported COVID-19 to Guatemala and prompted fear, chaos, and a collapse of already fragile health services. The entire system is starting to strain.A sales representative with Dodge, a supplier of embalming chemicals and other equipment to funeral homes in the region, says his phone has been ringing for 10 days with requests for body bags. Compean has paid thousands of dollars to have his facility disinfected since March, and “you can’t walk 10 feet” in the funeral home without hitting a bottle of hand sanitizer, he said.Funeral homes have also moved many of their operations online to minimize the risk of infection and to comply with changing state and localThe industry faces unique emotional challenges, too. Soon, officials from the local health center came to check on him.

By the end of March, after Janio’s deportation, the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network (RGV-EVN), a coalition of nonprofits in South Texas, began receiving calls from other detainees at Port Isabel reporting suspected cases based on their own or cellmates’ symptoms. Like many immigrants who support family abroad, the 29-year-old could not afford to self-quarantine and continued to work in construction. When the newly imposed national curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. approached, government employees were allowed to go home, though they still didn’t know if they had been exposed to the virus. “I’ve been in the funeral business going on 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything close to this.”Kimberly Foerster, whose father died in a Mission nursing home this month, learned his body wouldn’t be cremated for about a week because the ovens “overheated” from overuse and broke down.“My dad often talked about his ‘dream’ for when he died: to be cremated, with his ashes left at the top of the Rio Grande river in Colorado so that they would flow back to his home in South Texas,” she said. She calls restrictive border policies a “classically reactive strategy that is grounded in fear, not public health.” At the same time the U.S. has rapidly expelled immigrants, it continues to detain tens of thousands of immigrants in “detention camps rife for the transmission of any virus,” Stern said.So with more cases in the U.S. than any other country, which poses the real public health threat: migrants like Janio arriving at the border, or the U.S. continuing to detain and deport migrants during the pandemic?Janio is part of an exodus of Guatemalans who leave because of high rates of unemployment, worsening farming conditions caused by climate change, and gang-related or domestic violence. Alfaro, who was deported in July, compared cells where infected detainees were isolated to coffins. He knew if he stayed in Patanatic, Guatemala, an Indigenous community of 2,000 in the hills overlooking the volcano-lined Lake Atitlán, he would barely scrape by supporting his family working construction. So he banned the entry of Canadian and U.S. citizens that same day, and suspended classes, large gatherings, and public transportation.